The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power captured nearly 14 billion gallons of stormwater last month, an 8.4 billion-gallon increase over the rainwater captured in February of 2023, Mayor Karen Bass announced.
California fails to capture massive amounts of stormwater rushing off city streets and surfaces that could help supply millions of people a year, according to a new analysis released today.
From January to February, Southern California went from quite dry to overwhelmingly wet, as a series of storms dropped more than a year’s worth of water in just a few weeks, loading up the L.A. River.
In the past few decades, we have witnessed the pendulum swinging back and forth in California between managing drought, to questions about how we will handle too much water. While the weather might be fickle, one thing is certain, climate change will make extreme weather more common and will require residents to invest in their stormwater infrastructure.
Noah Cross, the sinister plutocrat of the movie
“Chinatown,” remarked that “politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”
He might have added public works projects to that list: If they get talked about long enough, sometimes they acquire the image of inevitability. That seems to be the case with the Sites Reservoir, a water project in the western Sacramento Valley that originated during the Eisenhower administration.
Perhaps the biggest development in water over the last three decades has been the change in attitude among consumers about their liquid assets. After repeated droughts punctuated by history-making deluges, Californians appear more open than ever to embracing reuse of stormwater, wastewater and seawater — as long as we can be certain that it is clean and safe to drink.
Hours after another storm soaked Southern California, LA County’s principal stormwater engineer Sterling Klippel stands at the base of the San Gabriel Dam, looking like a kid in a candy store. He gazes in awe at the thousands of gallons of stormwater rushing through this dam every second.
“Just this October, this facility was completely drained,” he says.
It seems like we’re always in a drought in Southern California, so when it rains, the question becomes: Where did all that precious water go?
Well, not all of it ends up in the ocean. According to Art Castro, watershed manager at the L.A. Department of Water and Power, in the last four days alone, the city of L.A. captured enough water to fill about 8,900 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
A new study from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) finds that, if global warming persists, blue lakes worldwide are at risk of turning green-brown.
Shifts in lake water color can indicate a loss of ecosystem health. The study presents the first global inventory of lake color.
While substances such as algae and sediments can affect the color of lakes, the new study finds air temperature, precipitation, lake depth, and elevation also play important roles in determining a lake’s most common water color.
San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria on Tuesday signed off on a loan with the Environmental Protection Agency to fix up the city’s aging storm drain system.
The loan will allow for up to $733 million to be invested in stormwater infrastructure projects over the next five years. It’s one of the biggest infrastructure investments in recent years. The mayor’s signature kicked off the first installment of $225 million.
The loan will fund more than 80 projects.
“Our storm drain system is largely underground and out of sight, but the implications of this aging infrastructure failing are massive – from serious flooding in our neighborhoods to pollution of our bays and the ocean,” Gloria said in a statement. “While replacing storm drains and upgrading pump stations doesn’t capture the public’s attention like fixing potholes, these major investments in critical infrastructure are incredibly important to our neighborhoods and quality of life.”
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
