You are now in San Diego County category.

Southern California water suppliers are bracing for a possible sixth year of drought. It’s a new ‘water year’ that began this month and officials will outline their plans Monday to meet the region’s water needs. Although the region’s water-saving efforts and last winter’s rain and snow in Northern California helped improve local stored reserves, extreme drought persists in much of the region. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is maintaining a Water Supply Alert calling for continued awareness and reinforced conservation throughout the district’s 5,200-square-mile service area.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today announced it has reached an agreement with the Orange County Water District to conduct a remedial investigation and feasibility study to address a large area of groundwater contamination in Northern Orange County known as the “North Basin.” The work required by the agreement is expected to take up to two years to complete and is estimated to cost up to $4 million.

Southern California is an epicenter for earthquakes, with an estimated 10,000 small temblors hitting the region every year. Now, there’s a discovery of a new, potentially significant fault line located 120 miles east of San Diego. It runs parallel to the notorious San Andreas fault, said Neal Driscoll, professor of geology and geophysics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

 

On September 8, the California State Water Resource Control Board released its draft report concluding that it is feasible to develop uniform water recycling criteria for direct potable reuse in California. Orange County Coastkeeper and California Coastkeeper Alliance are pleased to see this economic and environmentally preferred method to securing California’s future water sources moving forward. In California, recycled water is already used for non-potable purposes, such as agricultural and landscape irrigation, in a practice known as purple pipe recycled water.

The nascent energy storage sector is often described in terms of how fast it’s currently expanding — and its potential for explosive growth in the near future. But across San Diego County decades-old deployments such as ice storage are still in use just as cutting-edge technologies such as lithium-ion storage grab so many headlines. At the sprawling Mission City office complex in Mission Valley not far from Qualcomm Stadium, 29 ice thermal storage tanks help slash the energy costs for the owners of three office towers who retro-fitted the facility in 1999.