The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has dramatically increased the amount of water flowing from two dams in Tulare County, sending massive flows down river channels toward farmlands in the San Joaquin Valley. Federal records show that water releases from Terminus Dam at Lake Kaweah and Schafer Dam at Lake Success jumped early Friday morning.
The California state water board on Monday formally announced that the Sites Reservoir project failed to get federal approval, a situation they say isn’t permanent and can be rectified.
The rejection by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is the latest setback for the estimated $4 billion project in Northern California that would capture water during the rainy season. Officials have said the reservoir would hold up to 1.5 million acre-feet of water, or enough for 3 million homes a year.
San Diego was selected Wednesday to receive $240.6 million in loans for Lake Hodges dam improvement projects and possible replacement by the U.S Army Corps of Engineers.
This funding comes from the Corps Water Infrastructure Financing Program, intended to provide low-cost loans to maintain, repair and upgrade dams not under the federal government’s jurisdiction. The CWIFP is part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
The cavalry is coming, so to speak, in the form of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which entered into a feasibility study agreement with local and state government agencies to find shovel-ready solutions for saving the Salton Sea.
The significance of the collaboration was highlighted at a signing ceremony held at the North Shores Beach and Yacht Club near Mecca on Friday, Dec. 16, where the Salton Sea Authority, California Natural Resources Agency, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers entered into the Imperial Streams Salton Sea Feasibility Cost-Share Agreement, which will develop and propose solutions to save the ever-receding Salton Sea.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has agreed to review both short-term and long-term options for restoring the Salton Sea, which could ultimately net billions for major public works to restore the crashing ecosystem of California’s largest water body. First up, the federal agency will, by March 1 of next year, complete streamlined federal environmental reviews of projects that are part of the state Salton Sea Management Program’s 10-year plan that is supposed to be completed by 2028, including some that are underway.
In late January, the EMWD (Eastern Municipal Water District) was awarded nearly $4.5 million by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The funds will go towards the water district’s desalination infrastructure. Kevin Pearson is a spokesperson with the EMWD. “EMWD has a portion of its service area that has a salty groundwater basin, it’s naturally occurring, it has a higher salt contents than drinking water standards,” said Pearson.
Pearson says the water district uses reverse osmosis to purify the water and also discussed the award’s significance. The funds will go towards a study on future well sites and improvements to pipeline access.
Our country faces a flood crisis. More people and places are at risk, with climate-induced flooding threatening widespread social, environmental and economic impacts.
We need a holistic approach to reduce flood risk now. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has focused on building levees, spillways and hardened infrastructure to address episodic storm events. But, by focusing solely on storm surge, they leave millions exposed to chronic flooding from sea level rise, tides and extreme rainfall.
Our country faces a flood crisis. More people and places are at risk, with climate-induced flooding threatening widespread social, environmental and economic impacts.
We need a holistic approach to reduce flood risk now. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has focused on building levees, spillways and hardened infrastructure to address episodic storm events. But, by focusing solely on storm surge, they leave millions exposed to chronic flooding from sea level rise, tides and extreme rainfall.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is known for damming rivers and building levees to keep waterways at bay. But a new initiative seeks natural flood control solutions as climate change brings increasingly frequent and severe weather events that test the limits of concrete and steel.
It only makes sense to use Mother Nature’s flood defenses as one of the tools to combat destruction from intense rains in the middle of the country and storms and sea level rise on the coasts, says Todd Bridges, who heads the Corps Engineering with Nature initiative.
Modern forecasting methods fueled by advances in understanding and predicting atmospheric river storms have enabled U.S. Army Corps of Engineers operators to better optimize water resources at Lake Mendocino, a Northern California reservoir. A multi-agency report issued Feb. 4, 2021, describes how these forecasting tools have helped operators increase the lake’s dry season stores of drinking water, improve its ability to alleviate flood risk, and enhance environmental conditions in the downstream Russian River to support salmonid species.
Four years after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers upgraded the flood risk for the Whittier Narrows Dam from high urgency to very high urgency, the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday approved a budget package that included nearly $385 million to fix the dam.
