Poseidon Water’s long-delayed plans to build one of the West Coast’s biggest seawater desalination plants on the Huntington Beach coastline appear headed for a key approval.
A regional water board is proposing to grant Poseidon permits for a $1-billion desalting facility that would annually produce enough drinking water to supply 100,000 Orange County households.
Los Angeles’s water sources run as far as hundreds of miles away. In some cases, water drips from the snowmelt of the Sierra Mountains, trickles down to the Owens Valley, and is collected in a system of canals and aqueducts that pump water away from its natural avenues to deliver them to faucets throughout the greater Los Angeles region.
A new federal program hopes to fill in knowledge gaps on how water moves through the headwaters of arguably the West’s most important drinking and irrigation water source.
The U.S. Geological Survey announced the next location for its Next Generation Water Observing System (NGWOS) will be in the headwaters of the Colorado and Gunnison rivers. It’s the second watershed in the country to be part of the program, after a successful pilot on the Delaware River started last year.
With parts of California yet again burned by severe fires, the state is facing a new winter of mudslides.
Why do mudslides happen so often in California?
Mudslides have always been at the heart of the peril of living close to the mountains in California. All it can take is an intense amount of rain in a short amount of time to create damaging flows of mud and debris that can kill people and destroy buildings.
Regional collaboration and partnerships are needed to solve cross-border water issues, according to San Diego County Water Authority Board Chair Jim Madaffer.
“The Water Authority is exploring innovative solutions to increase water supply reliability for the San Diego region, but also Baja California and the Southwest,” said Madaffer during today’s opening ceremony of RE:BORDER 2019 at San Diego State University. “Those solutions include the possibility of a transborder water connection that can help both Mexico and the United States.”
Two small water agencies are trying to divorce themselves from the San Diego County Water Authority and join a Riverside County water agency instead.
The San Diego County Water Authority isn’t willing to let them go so easily. Its board of directors last week approved a resolution to ask the obscure San Diego Local Agency Formation Commission “to require approval by voters across the Water Authority’s service area of any proposed ‘detachment’ by the Rainbow Municipal Water District and the Fallbrook Public Utility District from the Water Authority,” the Water Authority wrote in a press release.
The San Diego County Water Authority Board of Directors approved a contract with Sandra L. Kerl to be the new general manager of the region’s wholesale water agency, following a months-long national search. The Board approved the contract in open session during its regular monthly meeting at Water Authority headquarters.
Kerl fills the position vacated by longtime General Manager Maureen Stapleton, who retired in March. Kerl has served as the agency’s acting general manager since Stapleton’s departure, working closely with the Board to lead a staff of approximately 250 employees at offices in Kearny Mesa, Escondido, the Imperial Valley and Sacramento.
The Santa Fe Irrigation District is moving forward with a proposed three-year rate plan that would raise total revenue for the district by 3 percent per year over the next three years, beginning early next year, through rate increases and changes in the district’s rate structure.
The district provides drinking and irrigation water to about 20,000 residents in Rancho Santa Fe, Solana Beach and Fairbanks Ranch. While the overall impact to the district’s bottom line will be a 3 percent revenue increase each year, the impact on individual customers’ bimonthly bills will vary based on the amount of water they use and the size of their water meter.
Aside from advanced economies and Mediterranean climates that sustain long growing seasons, California, Spain and Australia share an intermittent feature that reshapes their overburdened water systems every time it rears its ugly head: drought.
As populations and the demand for both rural and urban water supplies increase, so have the damaging impacts of droughts and water shortages. A recent series of bitterly dry stretches have forced lawmakers in the different continents to scrap outdated approaches and become more proactive in shielding drought.
High winds Monday prompted warnings of more wildfires in parts of the north state, and a small grass fire threatened homes near Roseville.
But the prospect of rain and snow in the immediate forecast means the California wildfire season is likely nearing its end.
Southern California has already been soaked, and the north state is set to have more than a foot of snow just in time for the Thanksgiving travel rush. Despite one of the driest starts to the rainy season in years, the heavy soaking expected this week will likely mark the unofficial end to the fire season, experts said.
