Water savings by Californians continued to dip in January for the sixth straight month, raising questions about whether conservation efforts will satisfy Gov. Jerry Brown’s aggressive 25 percent reduction target.
Regulators announced Thursday that residents cut water use by 17.1 percent last month when compared with the same time period in 2013, the baseline year under the mandate.
This winter, areas across the globe experienced a shift in rain patterns due to the natural weather phenomenon known as El Niño. A new NASA visualization of rainfall data shows the various changes in the United States with wetter, wintery conditions in parts of California and across the East Coast.
“During an El Niño, the precipitation averaged out over the entire globe doesn’t change that much, but there can be big changes to where it happens. You end up with this interesting observation where you get both floods and droughts just by taking the usual precipitation pattern and doing a shift,” said George Huffman, a research meteorologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
California has experienced, over the past few years, its most severe drought on record. In response to worsening conditions, Governor Jerry Brown announced the first ever statewide mandatory reduction in urban water use in April 2015. This calls on Californians to reduce their use of potable (safe for drinking and food preparation) urban water by 25% from pre-drought levels. Californians are meeting the mandate.
California is entering its fifth consecutive year of drought, with many areas experiencing “exceptional” drought levels. While rain and snowfall have improved recently, water storages remain low and the long-term drought signal has not changed.
Residents are starting to fall behind California’s mandatory 25 percent water conservation target, state officials said Thursday. As of January, water users in California’s cities and towns have used 24.8 percent less water since mandatory conservation began last year, the State Water Resources Control Board said. The latest numbers mean that for the first time since June, urban Californians missed the overall mandatory water-conservation target.
Water district officials from California’s Central Valley are looking to a deeply fractured Congress for relief from what they expect to be a third straight year of no federal allocations.
Westlands Water District general manager Tom Birmingham compares the drought-related water shortages bedeviling valley communities to the drinking water contamination crisis in Flint, Mich.
While some growers may see the emerging new state groundwater regulations as a potential burden, Helm, Calif., farmer Don Cameron sees them as an opportunity.Few growers understand California’s groundwater crisis better than Cameron, who farms almonds, walnuts and about two dozen other crops on 7,000 acres on the north fork of the Kings River in the San Joaquin Valley.
Cameron’s Terranova Ranch isn’t in an irrigation district, so he relies entirely on groundwater pumping. In 2011, he used a federal conservation grant to start using flood water from the river to replenish the aquifer beneath his sandy property, and he hopes to someday flood more of his ranch during wet winters to recharge the groundwater supply.
Residents in the San Diego Water District are currently tasked with slashing water use 28 percent under state-mandated rules, but this target could be lowered to 20 percent.
General Manager Bill O’Donnell at the district’s Feb. 17 board meeting said the state might lower the district’s target based on a credit for districts that have developed local water supplies since 2013 — in this case, the Carlsbad Desalination Plant that recently opened.
Following a national search to select its top legal officer, the San Diego County Water Authority Thursday named local attorney Mark J. Hattam as general counsel.
A partner in the San Diego office of Allen Matkins, a California-based law firm specializing in real estate, litigation, labor, tax, land use and business law, Hattam will begin his new post March 14.
A drier February is having an impact on the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada.
The State Department of Water Resources said Tuesday the statewide snow pack water content is 7 percent below normal despite the fact that precipitation since October 1st is only about 5 percent above average.
The water industry in the west has an impressive history of building dams, moving water hundreds of miles to where it’s needed, removing contaminants to assure public health and safety, and developing distribution systems that have set the international standard. These accomplishments aside, twentieth century solutions are becoming less and less viable as disruptors to the status quo fundamentally challenge the way we operate. The types of incremental improvements the industry is used to aren’t adequate to address the twenty-first century challenges we are facing.
