With the North Bay’s LNU Complex Fire topping 124,000 acres Wednesday and new state evacuation orders emerging every few hours, local and state officials urged Bay Area residents to take a variety of precautions. The city of Healdsburg said Wednesday evening that all of its roughly 12,000 residents should be prepared to evacuate their homes “soon.”
Californians have been speculating whether they can get fined for taking a shower and doing laundry on the same day. The Association of California Water Agencies clarified information last week about water-use targets placed by California Senate bills that went into effect in May 2018. The association says there aren’t any statewide laws that require household to meet specific water-use targets.
The war over California’s water between Governor Gavin Newsom and the Trump administration is at a crossroads, with new federal guidelines loosening the restrictions on water pumping set to take effect soon. The new guidelines call for diverting more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to agribusiness and urban areas further south. Barbara Barrigan-Parilla with the group Restore the Delta, says despite Newsom indicating he was going to sue over the new federal guidelines, that hasn’t happened yet.
A storm currently along the California coast is loaded with moisture and will slam the northern part of the state with inches of rain and yards of snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the first couple of days of December.
The storm will be double-barreled in nature with the first part set to slam Northern California into Monday afternoon. The second phase is likely to focus on Southern California during Tuesday night and Wednesday.
The shallow wells Sonoma County’s water agency is drilling near 11 waterways have nothing to do with delivering water to 600,000 residents of Sonoma and Marin counties.
Instead, the 21 wells will serve as measuring sticks to determine whether pumping groundwater in the county’s three basins — the Santa Rosa Plain, Petaluma Valley and Sonoma Valley — is curbing the flow in creeks inhabited by federally protected fish and other species.
The $300,000 project is the latest consequence of a state law, enacted during California’s five-year drought, requiring long-term sustainability of underground water supplies that were heavily tapped during the prolonged dry spell.
The next huge natural catastrophe to strike California might not be an earthquake. New research suggests that a major flood could inundate large swaths of California in the next few decades. The last “200-year flood” was more than 150 years ago, and climate change is jacking up the odds of a repeat sooner rather than later. In order to prepare, state water officials must rethink whether big, costly dams really are the best investment of limited resources.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
