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California’s Drought Regulators Lose Big Case. What it Means for State’s Power to Police Water

/in , /by /Sacramento Beeby Dale Kessler and Ryan Sabalow

California’s drought regulators have lost a major lawsuit that could undermine their legal authority to stop farms and cities from pulling water from rivers and streams.

With California in its third punishing year of a historic drought, an appeals court ruled Monday that the State Water Resources Control Board lacks the power to interfere with so-called “senior” water rights holders and curtail their diversions of water from rivers.

The case stems from orders imposed by the state board in 2015, during the previous drought, when it halted farms and cities throughout the Central Valley from taking water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers.

 

 

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Critically Low Water Levels at Lake Shasta, California’s Largest Reservoir

/in , , /by /FOX KTVUby Mark Sayre

KTVU is continuing its week-long series of stories about the drought with a look at the dire situation at California’s largest reservoir.

Lake Shasta provides water not only to agriculture in the Central Valley, but also to several regional Bay Area water systems. Lake Shasta is located 10 miles from Redding, in Shasta County, and about 200 miles north of the Bay Area.

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Settlement Blocks New Federal Fracking Leases in California

/in , /by /AP Newsby Kathleen Ronayne

Leasing for new oil and gas drilling on federal land in central California is temporarily blocked under a settlement announced Monday between the state and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

The deal, which still needs court approval, centers on more than 2,500 square miles (6,475 square kilometers) of land and subsurface mineral rights owned by the federal government in California’s Central Valley, a hub for oil and gas activity.

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Lawmakers Call on Kern Stakeholders to Engage on Water Investment

/in , , /by /Bakersfield.comby John Cox

Farmers and water managers may need to do more to engage with lawmakers from outside the Central Valley before the state Legislature can be persuaded to make important investments in water storage and other infrastructure projects, members of Kern’s Sacramento delegation told an audience Tuesday of the Water Association of Kern County.

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Report Revealing Hundreds of Failing Water Districts in California

/in , , /by /KBSYby Austin Herbaugh

A state audit found that nearly one million Californians have contaminated drinking water.

The report found that 920,000 people could face health issues from unsafe drinking water.

The California State Auditor found there are 370 failing water systems in California that are putting almost a million residents at risk.

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Audit: California Too Slow to Fix Contaminated Water Systems

/in , /by /AP Newsby Kathleen Ronayne

The water that comes out of the tap for more than 900,000 Californians is unsafe to drink and the state isn’t acting fast enough to help clean it up, state auditors said in a report released Tuesday.

Thousands of water systems supply the state’s 39 million people, and about 5% of them have some type of contaminant, like nitrates or arsenic, in them, according to the audit. That means people can’t safely drink the water or use it to cook or bathe. Most of the 370 failing systems are in economically disadvantaged communities, many in the Central Valley, the state’s agricultural heartland.

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Opinion: The Drought is Decimating My Farm and Many Others. What California Should Do to Help Us

/in , , /by /Los Angeles Timesby Joe L. Del Bosque

As I drive across my family’s farm in the San Joaquin Valley, it feels as if I’m traveling on a chessboard. I cross one square with crops and then another without crops — our fields that must lay fallow. Our farm’s crops have been decimated by the drought.

Last year, reduced water deliveries in the state led to 395,000 acres of cropland being idled, according to UC Merced researchers, and about 8,750 agricultural workers lost their jobs.

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Agencies Looking to “Plan B” as More Valley Towns on Brink of Going Dry and Emergency Water Suppliers are Tapped Out

/in , , /by /SJV Waterby Jesse Vad

Groundwater levels are dropping and domestic wells throughout the San Joaquin Valley are going dry as California’s third year of drought grinds on.

That includes entire towns, such as East Orosi and Tooleville in Tulare County, which both went dry last week.

It’s bad. But it may get worse.

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California’s Idle Crop Land May Double as Water Crisis Deepens

/in , , /by /Bloombergby Kim Chipman

California’s historic drought may leave the state with the largest amount of empty farmland in recent memory as farmers face unprecedented cuts to crucial water supplies.

The size of fields intended for almonds, rice, wine grapes and other crops left unworked could be around 800,000 acres, double the size of last year and the most in at least several decades, said Josue Medellin-Azuara, an associate professor at University of California Merced.

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California Gives Rivers More Room to Flow to Stem Flood Risk

/in , , /by /ABC Newsby Kathleen Ronayne

Between vast almond orchards and dairy pastures in the heart of California’s farm country sits a property being redesigned to look like it did 150 years ago, before levees restricted the flow of rivers that weave across the landscape.

The 2,100 acres (1,100 hectares) at the confluence of the Tuolumne and San Joaquin rivers in the state’s Central Valley are being reverted to a floodplain. That means when heavy rains cause the rivers to go over their banks, water will run onto the land, allowing traditional ecosystems to flourish and lowering flood risk downstream.

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