The City of Oceanside has started replacing old water and sewage lines in its downtown area. Some of the pipes are close to 100 years old, well past their life expectancy. This week crews are trenching Horne Street dropping in new lines made of polyvinyl chloride pipes. As part of $6.8 million project, the city will also replace hydrants, water meters and manhole covers. The work on Phase One of the project will last about a year.
The Olivenhain Municipal Water District celebrated the opening of the Village Park Recycled Water Pump Station Monday — a facility that will mean saving millions of gallons of water for the Encinitas area. The pump station itself is buried underground and is capable of pumping three million gallons of recycled water into the community every day, which is roughly 114 million gallons every year.
New satellite data released by the European Space Agency confirms that San Francisco’s 58-story Millennium Tower is sinking. “The Sentinel-1 satellites have shown that the Millennium Tower skyscraper in the center of San Francisco is sinking by a few centimeters a year,” a study by ESA says. “Studying the city is helping scientists to improve the monitoring of urban ground movements, particularly for subsidence hot spots in Europe.”
It started with a 2011 study that indicated by the turn of the century there would be no more Joshua trees in the national park named after the iconic desert plant. And likely none in California. “I was shocked when the study came out. I wanted to look at the details and change the scale,” said Cameron Barrows, a research ecologist for the UC Riverside Center for Conservation Biology in Palm Desert.
California’s northern Sierra Nevada mountain range, home to some of the state’s largest reservoirs, had the wettest first two months of the water year since 1984, the National Weather Service said Tuesday. Between October and November, the eight measuring stations along the northern range received an average of 18 inches of precipitation, or about 200% above average for the first two months of the state’s water year, said meteorologist Eric Kurth of the National Weather Service in Sacramento.
Dozens of water agencies in drought-weary California may receive only 20% of their requested deliveries in 2017, state officials said Monday. But the Department of Water Resources’ initial allocation forecast is double what was announced a year ago. Officials said winter storms in coming months may boost the first 2017 allocation, but they point out that California’s deep drought lingers. Initial allocations almost always change. This year’s 10% allocation ultimately gave way to a 60% allotment.
Hoping to push along a healthy future for one of Lakeside’s most scenic places, residents and members of a Lindo Lake committee met last month with staff of the county Department of Parks and Recreation to talk about a proposed multimillion-dollar improvement plan. The county has been taking community input for the past year about Lindo Lake Park’s biggest needs.
California’s Department of Water Resources has made its initial projection of how much water public agencies can count on receiving from the canals and pipelines of the State Water Project next year: 20 percent of their full allotments. The state’s preliminary annual estimate for the major north-to-south water artery is typically readjusted depending on rain and snowfall, and the percentage often ends up higher at the end of the winter. This year, the state initially projected 10 percent and water districts eventually received 60 percent of their full allotments.
An epidemic of tree deaths in California due to drought and bark beetles is sparking a review of state and federal policies. The Little Hoover Commission, a state oversight board, is considering how to curb the problem, before it reshapes California’s forests. “We hope to kind of come in and take a big picture look on policy changes the state can make,” said Carole D’Elia, executive director of the commission. “Can we influence at all the United States Forest Service and federal government policies?”
After a month of public outreach and meetings, the Desert Water Agency board of directors is set to vote in a rate hike next month which could result in an almost 80 percent increase to consumers’ bills over the next four years. DWA officials said the incremental hike is necessary to cover the operational costs of the utility company and replace severely aging water lines which have resulted in hundreds of leaks this year alone. At a public workshop Monday, spokesperson Ashley Metzger explained the reasoning behind the pending rate increase and the process by which the proposed rates were developed.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
