Paul Bruchez’s family has ranched cattle in Colorado for five generations. And twice in his lifetime, his generation has nearly become the last. The first time, it was the city of Denver that squeezed them out. By the 1990s, when Bruchez was still in high school, the city’s fast-growing suburbs had swept north and totally surrounded their roughly 2,000 acres in Westminster.
Amid California’s worst fire season in history, climate experts are predicting hot and dry conditions this winter. “On average there will be less moisture than we would normally receive here in California,” says Dr. Lowell Stott, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Southern California.
In research published Thursday, a team of university and government scientists identify a toxic material derived from tire treads that is washing into rivers and creeks as the killer of as many as 90% of the coho salmon in parts of the Puget Sound.
The San Diego County Water Authority board meeting Thursday, Nov. 19, approved the 2021 weighted vote allocations for SDCWA member agencies and the weighted vote for the Rainbow Municipal Water District, the Fallbrook Public Utility District and U.S. Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton will decrease from the agencies’ 2020 vote entitlements.
The Regional Water Quality Control Board rescinded the waste discharge order for Oak Knoll Campground in Pauma Valley.
Orange County sees past Poseidon’s efforts to buy support for its desalination boondoggle. Why can’t Gov. Newsom? Poseidon Water, a large water development company, has been pushing to build a $1.4-billion water desalination plant in Huntington Beach. Like Poseidon’s underperforming, high-cost plant in Carlsbad, the plant and its inflated water would be paid for by ratepayers.
The Water Resilience Portfolio directs the Water Commission to assess the state’s role in financing conveyance projects that could help meet the needs in changing climate, a task that the Commission has taken on wholeheartedly in recent months.
At their November meeting, the Commission heard from two panels: the first panel was from project proponents who discussed conveyance projects being proposed by their organizations.
Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama made infrastructure initiatives central goals of their administrations, as President-elect Joe Biden has similarly pledged to do, only to be stymied at delivering on those promises.
Industry watchers, politicians and public works contractors are all wondering if Biden will also hit a wall with his promised infrastructure package. The president-elect said his administration will invest $2 trillion into the economy, creating millions of jobs in infrastructure, housing, building construction and other projects.
Eleven Orange County water agencies have joined in a lawsuit seeking hundreds of millions of dollars from DuPont, 3M and others whose carcinogenic chemicals have leached into groundwater aquifers and forced the closure of more than three dozen wells in the central and northern parts of the county.
Water conservation isn’t cheap. But it’s not as pricey as 300-mile pipelines and water grabs.
The SNWA also approved a rate increase that will likely result in about a $10 hike in residential water bills by 2026 in order to pay for current and future projects.
