Project Clean Water, San Diego County’s initiative dedicated to protecting water quality won a gold award at the MarCom Awards, an international creative competition that recognizes outstanding achievement by marketing and communication. The award is for the “52 Ways to Love Your Water” video that was created as part of the 5-year county-wide public education and outreach initiative around stormwater pollution and water quality.
Thousands of jobs in infrastructure — like clean energy and roads — could come to California and San Diego thanks to a $1 trillion package signed Monday by President Joe Biden.
The hard-fought, bipartisan package, inked into law by Biden on the White House lawn, makes major financial commitments into broadband internet, the power grid, airports and environmental cleanup efforts, among others areas. Its largest area of spending is in road and bridges where new spending over the next five years is expected to be $110 billion.
Top federal environmental regulators in California laid out a $630-million plan on Monday to capture and treat sewage-tainted water that routinely flows over the border from Tijuana into Imperial Beach and up the coast.
The blueprint focuses largely on installing a pumping system in the Tijuana River north of the U.S.-Mexico border to suck polluted flows out of the channel before they can foul shorelines in San Diego. Trash booms would be installed directly upstream of the intake.
Mayor Todd Gloria and other civic leaders Wednesday unveiled the “Our Climate, Our Future” initiative, intended to address climate change, improve San Diego’s public health and quality of life and increase innovation in the economy.
“Our vision is for San Diego to be a global leader on inclusive climate action and Our Climate, Our Future is an invitation to join in building that vision,” Gloria said.
San Diegans could be forgiven for not knowing how seriously to take California’s current drought.
Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a statewide emergency last week, reiterating a desire that urban water users from San Diego to Sacramento voluntarily cut consumption by 15 percent. That would bring water use back down to roughly where it was in 2016, after then-Gov. Jerry Brown issued the state’s first-ever mandatory drought restrictions.
California is no stranger to droughts, and while much of California is straining to conserve water, San Diego is in no such predicament.
A recent analysis from the New York Times found that San Diego, over the course of nearly 30 years, has become adept at conserving water and at preparing for dry years.
In many parts of the state, reservoirs are hitting some of their lowest recorded levels.
However, San Diego County’s water supply has stayed mostly the same.
According to a new report from the New York Times, the San Diego County Water Authority estimates that it would have sustainable water supplies through 2045 even if these dry conditions persist for years.
The county’s key water storage site San Vicente Reservoir is about as full as usual, which is in stark contrast to the rest of the state’s reservoirs.
Drinking water from this tap makes San Diego County Water Authority’s General Manager Sandy Kerl smile — and for good reason. Back in the drought of the ’90s, 95% of San Diego’s water came from one source, and they faced 30% cuts for 13 months.
Small amounts of oil and tar washed ashore as far south as San Diego County on Thursday as cleanup and recovery efforts accelerated following the oil spill along the Orange County coast.
Officials said they’ve made progress in the cleanup and hope to advance even further over the weekend. But a storm that meteorologists say could bring 20-mph winds to the region is moving in, raising concerns that more oil could reach the shores. So far, much of the crude has remained offshore, but striations have been seen in Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach.
San Diego’s sewer rates haven’t gone up in ten years. Now, the city is playing catch up with a four-year string of rate hikes they say is needed to maintain the aging system, and fund the Pure Water project.
The city says the increase was long overdue. But so are the unpaid water bills of thousands of lower income San Diegans. California’s pandemic water shutoff moratorium is set to end September 30.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
