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Will California Get Another Wildflower Super Bloom? Here’s What the Experts Predict

/in , , /by /The Tribune by Lindsey Holden

A lackluster winter rain season has left much of California on the cusp of a drought — so what does that mean for the state’s much-Instagrammed wildflowers?

Particularly rainy winters yielded super blooms throughout the state in 2017 and 2019, from the Carrizo Plain National Monument in San Luis Obispo County all the way down to Anza-Borrego Desert State Park east of San Diego.

In spring 2019, photo-seeking visitors packed places like Walker Canyon near Lake Elsinore just south of Los Angeles, where a California poppy bloom drew “Disneyland-size crowds.”

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Desperate For New Water Supplies, SLO County Bets On Cloud-Seeding Program

/in , /by /The Tribune (San Luis Obispo, Calif.)by Monica Vaughan

It was the summer of 2015, and San Luis Obispo County was in the fourth year of severe drought with no rain in sight. Half-empty reservoirs were declining, the water table was noticeably dropping, farmers had fallowed fields. Water managers responsible for city and agricultural supplies frantically looked for possible emergency water sources if conditions got worse. Brian Talley, third-generation farmer and president of Talley Fields and Talley Vineyards in Arroyo Grande, made the tough call to plant fewer crops in the fields around Huasna Road after the wells used to irrigate the farm and vineyard “became very unproductive.”

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Dam Spillway Near SLO County Has Significant Cracks, Is ‘Unsafe For Use,’ State Says

/in , , /by /The Tribune by Monica Vaughan

Remember when the concrete spillway of the nation’s tallest dam developed a giant hole, and downstream communities were evacuated out of fear that a wall of water would charge down the river?

It turns out that the same structural problems that caused the failure at Oroville Dam in February 2017 also exist at the spillway of San Antonio Dam, just two miles north of Lake Nacimiento and above the community of Bradley.

Those problems have been known “for quite sometime,” according to the current manager of the dam operator. But the state didn’t take notice or downgrade the dam’s safety condition until after it revamped its oversight process following the massive failure in Northern California.

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OPINION: State Lawmakers May Ask Us To ‘Donate’ A Monthly Fee To Fund Clean Drinking Water. Bad Idea

/in , /by /The Tribune (San Luis Obispo)

Everyone in California — and everywhere else, for that matter — deserves clean drinking water. But relying on charity to upgrade failing water systems in low-income California communities is not the way to meet a basic human need. Yet that’s essentially what state Sen. Bill Monning is proposing in SB 845. The bill would require water purveyors throughout the state to offer their customers the “opportunity” to pay a monthly fee of 95 cents per household.

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