Several Congressional leaders sent a letter to Governor Gavin Newsom expressing disappointment in the decision to issue an Incidental Take Permit (ITP) for long-term operations of the State Water Project. The six Members of Congress who represent a large portion of California noted that the ITP will have a detrimental impact on cooperative efforts to govern California waterways.
The State Water Board on Tuesday, April 7 issued key documents that move the Klamath River Renewal Corporation (KRRC) significantly closer to removing four dams and re-opening 360 miles of the Klamath River and its tributaries to imperiled salmon, according to a news release.
When the Trump administration rolled back endangered species protections in the Bay Area delta that serves as the hub of California’s water-supply system, the state decided to go its own way.
RANCHO SAN DIEGO — After several years of work, the Otay Water District announced in late December that it completed its $10.3 million Campo Road Sewer Replacement Project in Rancho San Diego near the San Diego National Wildlife Refuge.
The project, which began in September 2017, replaced 1.41 miles of 10-inch diameter sewer main with a 15-inch diameter sewer main. The old main could no longer provide adequate capacity for sewer flows in the area, the district said.
California’s water policy can be complex, and—let’s be honest—often polarizing.
Water decisions frequently get distilled into unhelpful narratives of fish versus farms, north versus south, or urban versus rural. Climate change-driven droughts and flooding threats, as well as our divided political climate, compound these challenges.
We must rise above these historic conflicts by finding ways to protect our environment and build water security for communities and agriculture. We need to embrace decisions that benefit our entire state. Simply put, we have to become much more innovative, collaborative and adaptive.
The Trump administration this week declared that pumping more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to supply farms will not jeopardize the endangered salmon and smelt that live in the estuary. This clears the way for the federal government to deliver more water, possibly as soon as next year.
The decision is a big and controversial step toward providing more water for people and less for fish. But the battle, yet another in a decades-long struggle for California’s water, has only just begun.
Just how far will Gov. Gavin Newsom go in his high-profile fight with the Trump administration over environmental protections?
The next few months will provide an answer, as Newsom is forced to take a stand on Trump rollbacks in a long-contested battleground — the Northern California delta that helps supply more than half the state’s population with drinking water and fills irrigation canals on millions of acres of farmland.
Concerns by conservation and wildlife groups about the destruction of grebe nests at Lake Hodges because of fluctuating water levels has caught the attention of water managers and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The issue was raised last week in a letter to the city of San Diego, owner of the water storage reservoir just south of Escondido. Recent changes in water levels at the reservoir have resulted in as many as 300 grebe eggs being destroyed because adult birds could not reach the nests after water levels suddenly dropped. Brian Caldwell lives adjacent to Lake Hodges and operates Lake Hodges Photo Tours. He was one of the first to sound the alarm about nests being destroyed.
Many are imperiled by loss of habitat, rising ocean temperatures and rural and urban areas’ demand for ever-increasing amounts of fresh water. Worldwide, the U.N. assessment found that of an estimated 8 million plant and animal species, about 1 million are on the brink of extinction because of the damage humans are inflicting on the Earth through global warming, logging, farming, mining and other activities. It was compiled by 145 expert authors from 50 countries. The full report won’t be made public until later this year, but a summary released Monday offered a damning assessment of human impacts over the last five decades.
As a young biologist in the 1970s, Peter Moyle remembers towing nets behind boats in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and catching 50 to 100 translucent, finger-length smelt in a matter of minutes. Moyle doesn’t see those days coming back. “I think extinction is imminent the way things are going,” said Moyle, a prominent UC Davis fisheries biologist. State biologists have found hardly any Delta smelt in their sampling nets in the past two years. Consecutive surveys in late April and early May found no smelt at all. Those results don’t mean the smelt have completely vanished.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
