Kneeling on its concrete bank, Silva reached down through the water of the Los Angeles River and pulled out the perfect thing: a handful of mud.
He makes freshwater aquariums, and the mud of the river makes for the perfect base. “It has worms, nemotodes, rocks, it’s all there.”
With long hair banded back, he put the precious mud into two Home Depot orange buckets.
Buried in San Diego County’s lagoons are centuries worth of carbon, cached in muddy stockpiles that scientists say could help combat climate change. Recently, scientists with the conservation organization Wildcoast and Scripps Institution of Oceanography started studying how much carbon coastal wetlands can capture, and how to restore these environments to boost that capacity.
Tom Kennedy, general manager of Rainbow Municipal Water District, is not related to the principal with the Kennedy/Jenks consulting firm which has a contract with the district for the design of lift station projects. The contract had been for $1,434,485 and was scheduled to expire Dec. 31, but a 5-0 Rainbow board vote, Dec. 8, approved a change order increasing the contract to $1,674,108 while extending the contract until July 30, 2021.
California isn’t meeting its recycled water goals, and billions of gallons of treated wastewater are being discharged into the ocean or other water bodies each year, according to state regulators, who say drought conditions could cause future supply challenges.
Deltas globally adjust with changes and fluctuations in external conditions, internal dynamics, and human management. This is a short history of big changes to California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in the past and present, and its anticipated future. This history is important for understanding how many of the Delta’s problems have developed, changed, and continue to change.
The Friant Water Authority cleaned up some of the most important work in the last month of the year hashing out a legal settlement with farmers in southern Tulare County.
Represented by the Eastern Tule Groundwater Sustainability Agency farmers agreed to contribute at least $125 million to repair the significant subsidence-caused sag in the gravity-fed canal that has cut water deliveries by 60%.
Parts of the world economy may have been on pause during 2020, dampening greenhouse gas emissions for a while. But that didn’t slow the overall buildup of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which reached its highest level in millions of years.
If anything, research during the year showed global warming is accelerating. Symptoms of the fever include off-the-charts heat waves on land and in the oceans, and a hyperactive and destructive Atlantic hurricane season.
Extreme weather will surely have its own chapter in the turbulent history of 2020. The human and economic toll of Covid-19 was already enormous this fall, when it became clear that 2020 was on track to break the previous record for big weather disasters, fueled in part by climate change. From the derecho that battered the Midwest with hurricane-force winds to unprecedented wildfires that scorched more than 700,000 acres in Colorado and gave California its worst fire season in history, weather and climate events like these represented only a few line items in the latest tally of the nation’s billion-dollar disasters.
Just a short paddle up the Elkhorn Slough, kayakers can spot Hester Marsh. Degraded by decades of diking and draining, and threatened by rising sea levels, the marsh is now being lifted out of the muck.
Labeled the Tidal Marsh Restoration Project, the restoration will ensure Hester Marsh outlasts the drowning of most other Elkhorn salt marshes, projected to occur within 50 years.
These marshes provide vital natural habitat and play a critical role in fighting climate change, experts say, through their ability to capture and store large amounts of atmospheric carbon.
While negotiators largely sidelined energy issues during months of stalled talks on COVID-19 relief, a number of significant energy and environmental provisions will hitch a ride on the year-end agreement set to pass today.
House and Senate leaders yesterday announced they had reached a deal on a $1.4 trillion fiscal 2021 spending omnibus, pandemic relief legislation and a number of major items that will ride along. Final text had yet to be released by publication time.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
