Though it doesn’t hold historical contentiousness like its counterpart along the Central Valley Project, the Kings River has its own tale to tell.
Serving as a lifeline of sorts for three of the central San Joaquin Valley’s five major counties, the Kings is filled with its own universe of water agencies run by engineers, lawyers, farmers, and politicos jockeying to manage the state’s most precious resource on one stream.
Has the San Joaquin Valley reached its Chinatown moment? For farmers who rely on water from the Kings River, the answer winds up as some shade of “yes.” But the players are different. This isn’t the Owens Valley and William Mulholland doesn’t work for the City of Los Angeles. Uneasy about a slowly-marching plan to siphon Valley water for Southern California, farmers and some water managers are worrying about the growing shadow of one of the region’s largest land owners.
A California company that produces Crystal Geyser bottled water was sentenced Wednesday to three years of probation and ordered to pay $5 million in fines for illegally storing and transporting hazardous waste, federal prosecutors said.
In step with President Trump’s push for more energy development in California’s deserts, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced Thursday it wants to transform 22,000 acres of public land in the southern Owens Valley into one of the largest geothermal leasing sites in the state.
The agency has determined that the aquifer deep beneath the surface of the vintage Old West landscape of Rose Valley, about 120 miles north of Los Angeles, is a storehouse of enough volcanically heated water to spur $1 billion in investments and provide 117,000 homes with electricity.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has launched studies of ambitious plans to store water in the lake’s underground aquifer so that it could be pumped up in summer months and drought years to create pools of water to limit the dust sweeping across the vast lakebed’s salt flats.
Los Angeles’s water sources run as far as hundreds of miles away. In some cases, water drips from the snowmelt of the Sierra Mountains, trickles down to the Owens Valley, and is collected in a system of canals and aqueducts that pump water away from its natural avenues to deliver them to faucets throughout the greater Los Angeles region.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
