In theory, because water is hard to come by in the arid West, it should be well taken care of.
But the West sometimes squanders its limited water. We have contaminated creeks, polluted rivers, broken bays, fouled beaches and, even today, hundreds of thousands of people across California who lack reliably safe drinking water.
San Diego regional water agencies are sharing water-efficiency tips during “Smart Irrigation Month.”
July is traditionally the month of peak demand for outdoor water use and the reason it was chosen as Smart Irrigation Month when it started in 2005. The month celebrates the social, economic, and environmental benefits of efficient irrigation for landscapes, recreation and agriculture.
The National Weather Service office in San Diego is forecasting the first summer heat wave for the end of this week, with inland temperatures 5 to 10 degrees above normal.
November 8, 2018 was a dry day in Butte County, California. The state was in its sixth consecutive year of drought, and the county had not had a rainfall event producing more than a half inch of rain for seven months. The dry summer had parched the spring vegetation, and the strong northeasterly winds of autumn were gusting at 35 miles per hour and rising, creating red flag conditions: Any planned or unplanned fires could quickly get out of control.
A study led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography suggests that a new pattern of wet and dry extremes is emerging in California with extreme precipitation caused by streams of moisture in the sky known as atmospheric rivers.
Bob Wieckowski stands alone. He was the only state senator to vote against Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to clean up dirty drinking water in the California’s poorest communities, which passed the Senate in a 38-1 vote on Monday.
Seismologist Lucy Jones hikes through a dirt trail into a canyon, past a riverbed, and through some brush in Altadena. She kneels down and points at a thick layer of greenish-grey clay, snaking through the sloping terrain among rocks and dirt.
“This is the fault! Isn’t it amazing?”
The Helix Water District says it remains committed to the East County Advanced Water Purification Project, a multimillion-dollar, multi-agency recycled water project facilitated by the Padre Dam Municipal Water District in Santee.
For the better part of a day this April, San Diego’s main drinking water treatment plant wasn’t doing everything it was supposed to do to kill viruses and a nasty parasite known as Giardia before reaching taps across parts of the city, North County, East County and South Bay.
San Diego faces a hidden earthquake threat — to its water supply. A quake, even one so far away that nobody in San Diego feels it, could cause an emergency and force mandatory water-use restrictions. That’s because most of San Diego’s water comes from hundreds of miles away through threads of metal and concrete that connect us to distant rivers and reservoirs.
