What do you do about lab-made chemicals that are in 99% of people in the U.S. and have been linked to immune system problems and cancer? Whose bonds are so stable that they’re often called “forever chemicals“? Meet PFAS, a class of chemicals that some scientists call the next PCB or DDT. For consumers, they are best known in products like Scotchgard and Teflon.
A company’s proposal to take water from farmland along the Colorado River and sell it to a growing Phoenix suburb has provoked a heated debate, and some Arizona legislators are trying to block the deal with a bill that would prohibit the transfer.
The legislation introduced by Rep. Regina Cobb would bar landowners who hold “fourth-priority” water entitlements from transferring Colorado River water away from communities near the river.
The Food and Drug Administration is expanding its own capacity to test foods for certain “forever chemicals,” a senior agency official said Monday.
Expanded federal laboratory capability should help as the Department of Defense, states, and scientific researchers increase their testing of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) near military, industrial, and other sites with a history of having used the man-made chemicals.
The additional federal resources should also help state agencies dealing with suspected PFAS contamination in food.
The Department of Water Resources announced it would be increasing its allocations to 15 percent for State Water Project participants this year, which reflects a 5 percent increase to the state’s initial estimation in December.
Yuba City is one of 29 agencies that are part of the State Water Project. The project’s largest reservoir in Lake Oroville.
Despite growing concerns of a below-average rainfall season, the city of Ontario revoked mandatory conservation measures this week, setting a 0% water conservation target with state regulators.
“We currently don’t have a water supply shortage. We have enough water so we reported that to the state,” Scott Burton, utilities general manager of the Ontario Municipal Utility Co., said during an interview on Thursday, Jan. 23.
The City Council approved the change from mandatory Stage 2 water conservation to voluntary conservation on Tuesday, Jan. 21.
Two California water agencies should not be allowed to charge a tribe for groundwater production, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians said in a new lawsuit Friday.
The tribe claims that the Coachella Valley Water District and the Desert Water Agency unlawfully imposed a “replenishment assessment charge” against federal laws that reserve the groundwater for the tribe, according to a filing in California federal court.
The point of Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed underground aqueduct is to divert water from the Sacramento River beneath the fragile wetlands, waterways and islands that make up the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to an artificial body of water about 25 miles southwest of Stockton known as Clifton Court Forebay. From there, water would continue to flow through state aqueducts to coastal and Southern California and through federal channels mostly to farm fields in the San Joaquin Valley.
Currently, the water flows not under the delta but right through it. The problem is that when the powerful pumps are running near Clifton Court to drive more water to Southern California and the Central Valley, they reverse the natural flow of delta water and interfere with migrations of endangered fish
As the world warms and precipitation that would have generated snowpack instead creates rain, the western U.S. could see larger floods, according to new Stanford research. An analysis of over 400 watersheds from 1980 to 2016 shows that winter floods driven by rainfall can be more than 2.5 times as large as those driven by snowmelt. The researchers also found that flood sizes increase exponentially as a higher fraction of precipitation falls as rain, meaning the size of floods increased at a faster rate than the increase in rain.
A “normal winter” is forecast into spring, predicted the Bay Area’s weather wizard, Michael Pechner of Golden West Meteorology. On the heels of last year’s milestone rain and snow totals for much of Northern California and with residual high lake levels going into fall, a normal winter would fill most recreation lakes for summer camping, boating and fishing and provide good winter conditions for snow sports in April.
The 2019 movie “Dark Waters” alerted the public to health hazards posed by perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, also know as PFOA and PFOS) that contaminated water and groundwater around manufacturer DuPont’s facility in Parksburg, West Virginia. The chemicals have been linked to deaths, cancer and more–and they are pervasive, found in 97% of Americans tested, PBS reports, citing a U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination study in 2015.
