Los Angeles will take most or all of its allotment of water from Mono Lake through March, disappointing local environmentalists and conservation experts after raising hopes that more water would be left in the iconic alpine lake. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had indicated last spring that it might, in a rare move, substantially reduce the amount taken from Mono Lake.
As crews have fought the fast-spreading fires across the Los Angeles area, they have repeatedly been hampered by low water pressure and fire hydrants that have gone dry. These problems have exposed what experts say are vulnerabilities in city water supply systems not built for wildfires on this scale.
The water system used to fight the Palisades fire in Los Angeles buckled under the demands of what turned out to be the most destructive fire in city history, with some hydrants running dry as they were overstressed without assistance from firefighting aircraft for hours early Wednesday.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power captured nearly 14 billion gallons of stormwater last month, an 8.4 billion-gallon increase over the rainwater captured in February of 2023, Mayor Karen Bass announced.
The city of Los Angeles has agreed to pay millions of dollars in refunds for six years’ worth of allegedly inflated sewer charges. And if you’re still a customer of the city’s sewer services, here’s the good news: If you qualify, your refund will come to you automatically.
With its haunting rock spires and salt-crusted shores, Mono Lake is a Hollywood vision of the apocalypse. To the city of Los Angeles, however, this Eastern Sierra basin represents the very source of L.A.’s prosperity — the right to free water.
For decades, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has relied on long-standing water rights to divert from the streams that feed this ancient lake as part of the city’s far-flung water empire. But in the face of global warming, drought and lawsuits from environmentalists, the DWP is now facing the previously unthinkable prospect of ending its diversions there.
A new film about the transfer of water from the high desert to Los Angeles – called “Without Water” – has just been released on the internet. The film highlights the struggle between the community around Long Valley, which is between Mammoth and Bishop California – and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LA DWP).
Amid a record-breaking drought and calls to drastically reduce water use across California, Los Angeles residents saved a staggering 6 billion gallons during the hottest months of the summer, officials announced Monday. From June through September, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers used 6 billion gallons of water less than during the same period last year.
Even as worsening drought and aridification force Los Angeles to end its overwhelming dependence on imported water, Angelenos may soon realize that weaning themselves off supplies from the rugged eastern Sierra Nevada doesn’t mean they will stop paying for the city’s long, complicated history there. That’s because, even if the city is able to make good on a pledge by Mayor Eric Garcetti to recycle 100% of its water by 2035 and increase its ability to capture storm water, Los Angeles will still have to pay millions of dollars to control the region’s hazardous dust pollution — an environmental consequence of L.A.’s draining of Owens Lake more than a century ago, as well as recent diversions that have lowered the level of Mono Lake farther north.
