The San Diego County Water Authority’s Mission Trails FRS II water project is now more than halfway complete.
The project will upgrade the Water Authority’s untreated water system in Mission Trails Regional Park. When finished in 2022, the upgrades will provide more reliable water delivery to treatment plants that serve the central and south sections of San Diego County.
California’s rain year officially ended Wednesday, and the data reflects what the dry landscape in much of the Bay Area already shows: It wasn’t pretty. Data shows that for many of the major regions of California, the July 2020-June 2021 rain year was one of the top 10 driest ever. Even more troubling is that the extreme dry spells are starting to stack up, especially in the Sierra Nevada watersheds that supply so much of the state’s water.
On a spring morning in 1996, then–Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt stood at Glen Canyon Dam, a concrete bulwark in Arizona that holds back the Colorado River to form Lake Powell. During a live broadcast on the Today show, a popular national TV program, Babbitt opened valves to unleash an unprecedented experimental flood into the Grand Canyon just downstream. As onlookers applauded, water gushed from gaping outlet pipes. Babbitt called the experiment, which was testing one way of restoring Grand Canyon ecosystems damaged by the dam, the start of “a new era” in environmental management.
Plants growing wild naturally arrange themselves into communities with other plant varieties based on their shared characteristics such as water and nutrient needs. This natural selection extends to interactions with each other, and with other species such as insects, birds, and other animals.
Santee Lakes Recreation Preserve has been celebrating its 60th anniversary during the month of June. The 190‐acre park surrounding seven lakes has been around since it received San Diego County Health Department approval in 1961. The site has five miles of walking and biking trails, a campground with 300 full hook-up sites, seven lakefront cabins and three floating rental cabins on Lake 7. The lake allows for fishing with a permit and there are more than 200 species of birds that have been documented at the park. The preserve also has seven playgrounds, a brand new administrative building and a revamped general store that rents out pedal boats.
DWR reviewed and found “deficiencies” in the Paso Robles Groundwater Basin and Cuyama Valley Groundwater Basin sustainability plans—declining to give final approval to either.
In separate letters about the basins, DWR identified issues ranging from a lack of discussion about impacts to shallow and domestic wells, to a lack of planning for surface waters, like creeks and rivers. Six points of deficiencies were listed in all—two for Paso and four for Cuyama.
When a wildfire tore through Briceburg nearly two years ago, the tiny community on the edge of Yosemite National Park lost the only power line connecting it to the electrical grid.
Rather than rebuilding poles and wires over increasingly dry hillsides, which could raise the risk of equipment igniting catastrophic fires, the nation’s largest utility decided to give Briceburg a self-reliant power system.
The stand-alone grid made of solar panels, batteries and a backup generator began operating this month. It’s the first of potentially hundreds of its kind as Pacific Gas & Electric works to prevent another deadly fire like the one that forced it to file for bankruptcy in 2019.
To understand a sharp-elbows squabble that’s developing behind the scenes in the state Capitol, one must first understand “pumped-storage hydro,” a way for electrical energy to be stored.
In its simplest form, water stored in a reservoir is released to generate power as it flows into a second reservoir at a lower elevation. Later, when the electrical grid’s need for power diminishes, the water is pumped back into the upper reservoir so the cycle can be repeated when demand increases.
It’s not a new technology; in fact it’s been around for more than a century although never more than a marginal factor in global power generation.
State authorities approved an audit of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California over its handling of sexual harassment complaints, following allegations that leaders at the powerful water agency tolerated bullying and abuse of women in the workforce.
The audit was adopted during a hearing Wednesday afternoon of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee and comes after a Times investigation earlier this year found a pattern of complaints from women enrolled in the district’s trades apprenticeship program.
The San Diego County Water Authority board meeting of June 24 included approval of SDCWA rates and charges for calendar year 2022 and approval of a two-year CWA budget.
Fallbrook Public Utility District General Manager Jack Bebee, Helix Water District board member Joel Scalzitti, and Rainbow Municipal Water District General Manager Tom Kennedy cast the only CWA board votes against the $1,693,496,900 budget covering fiscal years 2021-22 and 2022-23.
