As part of a $250 million commitment to support four water supply projects in Southern California, Los Angeles will receive $139 million over 25 years for its Groundwater Replenishment Project in the San Fernando Valley, officials announced on Monday, April 15.
Crop water demand in California’s San Joaquin Valley has increased to the size of a major reservoir in just 12 years due to climate change, a study has found.
An integral region for agriculture, particularly in fruit and nut production, it has been subjected in the past 10 years to severe drought conditions, with extreme temperatures that have evaporated water supply.
While this week’s atmospheric river drenched Southern California with record-breaking rainfall, some water managers were busy capturing some of that runoff to save for dry days ahead. Others were busy fending off an environmental disaster.
U.S. agriculture is at risk from climatic extremes and groundwater over-extraction, says a new report from the Environmental Defense Fund.
In recent decades, as water has grown increasingly precious, Californians have tried countless ways to find more of it and make it last longer, including covering agricultural canals with solar panels to prevent evaporation, building costly desalination plants and pulling out tracts of water-hungry grass.
It might seem hard to imagine, but there’s a connection between water supplies in Northern California’s Sacramento region and distant cities such as Las Vegas. We may be separated by deserts and mountain ranges, but these very different places could actually share water. And with a little cooperation, all of us could survive the challenges of climate change, whether it’s a shrinking Colorado River or declining Sierra Nevada snowpack.
Noah Cross, the sinister plutocrat of the movie
“Chinatown,” remarked that “politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”
He might have added public works projects to that list: If they get talked about long enough, sometimes they acquire the image of inevitability. That seems to be the case with the Sites Reservoir, a water project in the western Sacramento Valley that originated during the Eisenhower administration.
Groundwater is one of America’s most precious resources. The water that fills wells, stored naturally in underground aquifers, allowed vast cities to emerge and turned the nation into an agricultural powerhouse.
But the country’s stewardship of groundwater relies on a patchwork of state and local rules so lax and outdated that in many places, oversight is all but nonexistent, a New York Times investigation has found.
America’s stewardship of one of its most precious resources, groundwater, relies on a patchwork of state and local rules so lax and outdated that in many places oversight is all but nonexistent, a New York Times analysis has found.
The majority of states don’t know how many wells they have, the analysis revealed. Many have incomplete records of older wells, including some that pump large volumes of water, and many states don’t register the millions of household wells that dot the country.
Record water flow this year has propelled the Kings River region closer to groundwater sustainability.
After multiple years of drought, the Kings River ended the 2023 water year with a record breaking 4.5 million acre-feet of runoff.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
