To celebrate Water Awareness Month in May and highlight the value of water, the City of Oceanside has unveiled its new virtual reality video tour. The 360-degree video shows the water recycling process that prepares water for Pure Water Oceanside. The advanced water purification project will create a new local source of high-quality drinking water that is clean, safe, drought-proof and environmentally sound.
Sonoma County supervisors are expected to offer their formal support Tuesday for a plan to pump 20% less water than normal from the Russian River for the remainder of the year, preserving dwindling supplies in local reservoirs but making less water available to more than 600,000 consumers in Sonoma and northern Marin counties.
Every spring, California farmers brace themselves for signs of wriggling organisms destined to launch multigenerational attacks on their crops.
Many insect species survive the winter as eggs or larvae and then emerge in early spring as the first generation to feed and breed on millions of acres of California vineyards, orchards and row crops. Climate change will complicate farmers’ efforts to control these pests in complex and unpredictable ways.
As California enters what could be a record-breaking drought, a just-completed nine-year floodplain restoration project at the confluence of the San Joaquin and Tuolumne rivers offers an ambitious attempt at one mitigation solution.
At a 1,600-acre former dairy ranch called Dos Rios, the conservation organization River Partners removed berms that farmers had originally constructed to protect their alfalfa and wheat crops from the river. It turned fields into seasonal pools where endangered baby salmon and migratory birds can rest, and water can trickle down to refill aquifers. Last month, it planted the last of more than 350,000 native grasses, shrubs and trees — acres of towering willows, flowering elderberry and creeping wild rye chosen to thrive in flood or drought.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday expanded a drought emergency to a large swath of the nation’s most populous state while seeking more than $6 billion in multiyear water spending as one of the warmest, driest springs on record threatens another severe wildfire season across the American West.
The Democratic governor said he is acting amid “acute water supply shortages” in northern and central parts of California as he called again for voluntary conservation. Yet the state is in relatively better shape than it was when the last five-year drought ended in 2017, he said, as good habits have led to a 16% reduction in water usage.
In a stark indication of California’s growing water crisis, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday declared a drought emergency in 41 counties, including areas of the Central Valley that had urged action on behalf of agricultural growers.
Newsom’s proclamation dramatically expands the drought emergency he declared in Sonoma and Mendocino counties last month, and now covers 30% of the state’s population.
“With the reality of climate change abundantly clear in California, we’re taking urgent action to address acute water supply shortfalls in Northern and Central California while also building our water resilience to safeguard communities in the decades ahead,” Newsom said in a prepared statement. “We’re working with local officials and other partners to protect public health and safety and the environment, and call on all Californians to help meet this challenge by stepping up their efforts to save water.”
This week’s episode of the Advancing Oceanside Podcast from the Oceanside Chamber of Commerce features the San Diego County Water Authority on Water Use Efficiency & Conservation.
Oceanside Chamber host, Hana Gilbert interviews Water Resources Manager Elizabeth Lovsted and Water Resources Specialist Joni German.
Topics included how the SDCWA has saved water by providing programs and incentives, utilizing water-saving devices, advocating for water regulations, and how simply living “WaterSmart”, can help cuts costs and create energy-efficient, water-conscious yards.
California’s drought conditions have gone from bad to worse in scarcely a month.
In the weeks following April 1, the traditional end of the rainy season, warm temperatures have burned off most of the Sierra Nevada snowpack and left the state’s water network gasping. Instead of delivering a generous volume of melted snow into California’s rivers and reservoirs, the snowpack has largely evaporated into the air or trickled into the ground.
“We got unlucky. A lot of it didn’t make it into the reservoirs,” said Jeffrey Mount, a geologist and water expert at the Public Policy Institute of California.
The Colorado River Basin appears to be out of miracles this spring.
Five years after a “Miracle May” of record rainfall staved off what had appeared to be the river’s first imminent shortage in water deliveries, the hope for another in 2021 “is fading quickly,” says the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s latest report, released Thursday.
That’s one more piece of bad news for the Central Arizona Project. A first-time shortage is now likely to slash deliveries of river water to Central Arizona farmers starting in 2022 but won’t affect drinking water supplies for Tucson, Phoenix and other cities, or for tribes and industries that get CAP water.
Chula Vista resident and Imperial Beach lifeguard Lillian Burkhart still remembers the sting on her skin after surfing in Imperial Beach waters one day last summer. Within 24 hours, she fell ill with a gastrointestinal infection, she said.
“As the day went on after I left the water, I could really smell it. It was pungent. It smelled like sewage,” she said. “The next day I woke up feeling awful and I just threw up for 12 hours straight. I’ve never been that sick in my entire life.”
