Sweetwater Dam rises 200 feet from the floor of a rocky river gorge a few miles northeast of Bonita. The 136-year-old concrete and masonry dam holds back 28,000 acre-feet of water in Sweetwater Reservoir, a major source of drinking water in South San Diego County.
The dam, and the reservoir, have been quiet fixtures of the Bonita and Spring Valley landscape for generations. These days, they’re drawing an unaccustomed amount of attention.
Since last month’s atmospheric river that drenched the North State, the water level in Lake Shasta — California’s largest manmade reservoir — has shot up nearly 20 feet.
And after a few dry days this week, get ready for more rain in the northern Sacramento Valley as the region enters another wet pattern that is expected to go through Christmas.
San Diego appears headed for the third driest start to the rainy season in at least 152 years, a streak that would further elevate the risk of wildfires in an already parched county, the National Weather Service says.
The city has recorded only 0.13 inches of precipitation since the season began on Oct. 1. If things remain unchanged through Dec. 31, the three-month period will officially be off to an unusually dry start.
President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the nation’s health agency, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has railed against the practice of adding fluoride to drinking water, a measure that public health experts and dentists credit with reductions in tooth decay. Seven out of 10 Americans who get their drinking water from public water systems receive fluoridated water, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Juana Valle never imagined she’d be scared to drink water from her tap or eat fresh eggs and walnuts when she bought her 5-acre farm in San Juan Bautista three years ago. Escaping city life and growing her own food was a dream come true for the 52-year-old.
Then Valle began to suspect water from her well was making her sick.
Every month, Deacon Perry Owens Sr. estimates he spends at least $100 on bottled water. He doesn’t drink the tap water from his Emerald Hills home.
“It has a smell to it, a stench to it and we have tried every home remedy, and we can’t get rid of it,” he told Team 10.
Ramona Municipal Water District and the city of Poway have entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to look at the feasibility of sharing water resources.
Poway has been looking to diversify its water resources for the past 30 years, but the city is at a point where it needs to develop this.
A recent bit of good news from the western United States is a welcome bright spot in the region’s long-running efforts to conserve precious water resources amid a growing population and an expanding agricultural industry.
Water levels in Lake Mead, the country’s largest reservoir, have risen nearly 5 metres in the past two years after a sustained conservation effort in the state of California.
The Newsom administration is refining a contentious set of proposed rules, years in the making, that would reshape how farms and cities draw water from the Central Valley’s Delta and its rivers. Backed by more than $1 billion in state funds, the rules, if adopted, would require water users to help restore rivers and rebuild depleted Chinook salmon runs.
The administration touts its proposed rules as the starting point of a long-term effort to double Central Valley Chinook populations from historical levels, reaching numbers not seen in at least 75 years. But environmental groups have almost unanimously rejected it, saying it promises environmental gains that will never materialize and jeopardizes the existence of California’s iconic salmon and other fish.
Residents and officials in North County are trying to raise the water level of Lake Hodges, but they’re facing their biggest challenge — the state mandate of levels.
California government requires lakes to be no deeper than 280 feet; however, concerned people are asking that the reservoir be raised to 293 feet. As of Friday, the lake had dropped to 273 feet, which is the lowest it’s been in the last 40 years.
