With California’s reservoirs brimming, this is the moment to strengthen our long-term water future, before the next drought. Unfortunately, the State Water Board has just taken a major step back from the fastest and cheapest way of securing water supplies for cities and towns by rolling back its own proposed conservation rules.
It was awesome to see so many local elected officials finally have their “aha!” moment on the South Bay sewage nightmare in June and complain so loudly and uniformly that the federal government’s response has been woefully inadequate. But any inclination to start handing out kudos should be tempered by a reality that in retrospect seems unfathomable: For years, many of these same leaders essentially accepted broken Tijuana sewage infrastructure constantly fouling our coast from the Mexican border to Coronado.
More moisture-packed storms are expected to pay a visit to California during the first week of 2023 following an atmospheric river that dropped a historic amount of rain on the San Francisco Bay area as well as heavy snow in higher elevations on New Year’s Eve. Because of the saturated state of the ground, another atmospheric river during the middle and latter part of the week will lead to more flooding and mudslides in the Golden State, AccuWeather meteorologists warn.
The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission is urging nearly 3 million water customers throughout the Bay Area to cut water usage by 10%, as it declares a water shortage emergency due to the ongoing drought.
“With California still experiencing devastating drought and the uncertainty around this rainy season, we need to make tough decisions that will ensure that our water source continues to be reliable and dependable for the future,” Mayor London Breed said in a statement Tuesday.
San Francisco’s robust water supply, long unruffled by the severe dry spell now in its second year, has finally begun to feel the pinch of drought, and city water managers are recognizing it may be time to cut back.
Officials at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission plan to ask city residents and businesses to reduce water use by 5%, compared to two years ago, and ask the more than two dozen communities that buy water from the city to reduce water use nearly 14%. The goal is a cumulative 10% savings.
Faced with a worsening drought and the ever-present threat of more wildfires, the Bay Area needed a miracle. And last month, it got one. An unexpected and almost unprecedented October deluge gave the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, the primary water supply for San Francisco and most of the Bay Area, a more than 21-foot bump in its water level. That’s an 11% boost; and the prospect of breaking the drought this rainy season suddenly no longer sounds impossible.
For nearly three years, some of California’s biggest water users, including San Francisco, have been quietly meeting with the state to figure out how much water they should be taking from the San Joaquin River and its tributaries.
The talks were launched to prevent some of California’s mightiest rivers from drying up, and keep fish populations from disappearing, while still allowing cities and farms to draw the supplies they need. The vision was nothing short of a grand compromise on divvying up California’s water.
Anchor Brewing is San Francisco’s oldest operating brewery, producing its flagship steam beer since 1896. Now it’s making history in a new way.
The brewery will soon operate the city’s largest commercial water reuse facility. Instead of dumping out water after rinsing fermentation tanks and cleaning bottling lines, Anchor will collect, treat and recycle much of what used to go down the drain.
It’s not an undertaking to go into lightly. California is contending with one of its worst droughts in modern history, and water shortages are becoming an increasing part of day-to-day life. Getting Anchor’s water reuse system up and running is part of a broader effort by San Francisco water officials to preserve supplies by encouraging water users to recycle more and use less.
How dry? The region received a little more than a third of normal precipitation from Oct. 1, 2020, to Sept. 30, 2021, according to data from the National Weather Service — a common occurrence for the past several years, which bodes ill for a region already at the worst “exceptional” level on the U.S. Drought Monitor map.
Yan Yu Lin and her seven-year-old daughter live in a tight studio in San Francisco’s Chinatown, in a century-old building where 60 or so residents on each floor share a bathroom.
Along the back wall of the room is a plastic potty – the kind designed for toilet training toddlers. The shared bathrooms are out of order so often, so rank and unhygienic, that Lin has her daughter use the plastic potty instead. “It’s safer,” she said.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
