Major renovations will begin Wednesday on the Anderson Dam tunnel project in Santa Clara County. The project will require the reservoir to be drained – and it will be unable to be used for 10 years.
Santa Clara county, the home of Silicon Valley, issued mandatory water restrictions this week during a severe drought that has already reached historic levels.
The move was championed by analysts and researchers who have pushed for more conservation efforts across California amid concerns that the state will fall deeper into a drought disaster through the hot, dry summer and autumn.
Santa Clara County on Wednesday became the most populous county in California to impose mandatory water restrictions, saying that the worsening drought poses a significant threat to the local groundwater supplies that provide nearly half the drinking water for 2 million residents.
On a 7-0 vote, the Santa Clara Valley Water District board declared a water shortage emergency and set a target of reducing water use 33% countywide from 2013 levels, a year the state uses as baseline. The district, a government agency based in San Jose which serves as the county’s wholesale water provider, also urged cities and private water companies who buy its water to put in place water wasting rules and other mandates, including limiting lawn watering to no more than three days a week. As in the last drought, the rules are likely to include monthly water allocations for each home beyond which financial penalties would apply.
In the latest and possibly most severe evidence yet of California’s worsening drought, the federal government on Wednesday announced it will cut water deliveries to urban areas it serves by more than half — and to zero for many farmers across the Central Valley.
The move will result in mandatory water restrictions across Santa Clara County, said Rick Callender, CEO of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, which provides water to 2 million people.
“We are truly in an emergency situation,” Callender said. “We’re going to be seeking everything we can do to address this emergency. The public should expect tighter restrictions.”
While drought conditions are upon the Bay Area, water officials in Santa Clara County plan to draw from distant reserves for now and seek to increase storage and expand water recycling in the future.
Half of the water in Santa Clara County comes from somewhere else, sometimes hundreds of miles away.
In a major and potentially fatal setback for plans to build the largest dam in the Bay Area in more than 20 years, the price tag to construct a new reservoir in southern Santa Clara County near Pacheco Pass has nearly doubled, from $1.3 billion to $2.5 billion.
Sewage data analyzed in Silicon Valley wastewater treatment plants confirms that the latest wave of coronavirus infections is sharply worse than the ones in the spring and summer.
Officials in Santa Clara County have been routinely testing solid waste samples in sewage to detect levels of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 as part of a project funded by Stanford University.
Three months after federal dam safety regulators ordered Anderson Reservoir, the largest reservoir in Santa Clara County, to be drained due to earthquake concerns, new details are emerging on what will happen to all that water, the fish that depend on it, and the water supply for Silicon Valley.
The Santa Clara Valley Water District, which owns the 7-mile-long reservoir located east of Highway 101 between Morgan Hill and San Jose, has drawn up plans to begin emptying it starting Oct. 1.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
