Suez Water Technologies and Solutions will install additional tank fall protection improvements at Rainbow Municipal Water District reservoirs.
Rainbow’s board voted 4-1, with Helene Brazier casting the dissenting vote, Aug. 25, to approve a change order to the 2018 contract.
“This adds some additional safety enhancements for our steel reservoirs,” Tom Kennedy, general manager of Rainbow, said.
Oceanside’s major water reclamation project is getting a financial injection from the Environmental Protection Agency.
The EPA is loaning Oceanside nearly $70 million to help finance the city’s water reuse plans. The San Diego County city currently imports most of its water from the Sacramento Bay-Delta and the Colorado River.
The federal loan for the $158 million project will ultimately help Oceanside generate three to five million gallons of drinking water a day.
Five wells punch the scorching Nevada desert.
Water in this area is locked underneath the ground. It flows silently and invisibly as part of an aquifer stretching roughly 50,000 square-miles. Much of this water collected here thousands of years ago when lakes covered most of Nevada. Now wells are summoning it for human use. The problem is there’s not enough to go around.
At the center of this tension are the five wells.
A housing developer, Coyote Springs Investment, owns four wells, planted to one day pump water for a sprawling new community in the desert, filling the highway stretch about 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas. The remaining well belongs to the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
Along a Huntington Beach coastline dotted with oil rigs and a power plant, one of California’s largest remaining saltwater marshes has been a source of pride for local environmentalists.
But the marsh, known as the Bolsa Chica Wetlands, is endangered despite a years-long struggle to pull together sufficient public funding for its upkeep.
Nearby, the Poseidon Water Co., which has been in a decades-long, controversial fight to build a seawater desalination plant next to the AES energy station at the south end of the city, has justified its project partly with a promise to finance the wetlands’ conservation.
Former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt writes that a “Grand Bargain” in California water is needed to end the “political culture of deferral” and allow major water projects to advance. On the contrary, what’s needed is an adult regulator that will make hard choices that water users refuse to make.
For at least five years, the state and various water users have postponed balancing the state’s water budget by promising a grand bargain. This promised new grand bargain is not the solution to the aptly named “culture of deferral.” The grand bargain is the current center of deferral.
The risks of water shortages continue to grow along the Colorado River, which supplies about 40 million people from Wyoming to Arizona.
Federal water managers released projections Tuesday showing higher odds of shortages occurring within the next five years.
The Colorado River is in the 21st year of a severe drought that’s being compounded by hotter temperatures influenced by climate change, and the river’s flows have increasingly been insufficient to meet all the demands of cities and farms across the region.
The Colorado River’s largest reservoirs are expected to keep struggling over the next five years due to climate change, according to the federal agency that oversees them.
The Bureau of Reclamation’s new modeling projections, which include this year’s record-breaking heat and dryness in some parts of the southwestern watershed, show an increasing likelihood of an official shortage declaration before 2026.
If dry conditions like the Colorado River Basin has seen since 2000 persist, the agency’s model shows an almost 80% chance of seeing an official shortage declaration by 2025. The chance of seeing the reservoir drop to a critically low level is about 20% in that same time period.
Amid a global pandemic and protests against police brutality, Erin Brockovich is trying to get America to pay attention to yet another issue: water.
“We are in a water crisis beyond anything you can imagine. Pollution and toxins are everywhere, stemming from the hazardous wastes of industry and agriculture. We’ve got more than 40,000 chemicals on the market today with only a few hundred regulated. We’ve had industrial byproducts discarded into the ground and into our water supply for years. This crisis affects everyone – rich or poor, black or white, Republican or Democrat. Communities everywhere think they are safe when they are not,” she wrote in an opinion story for the Guardian.
For the second time in two years, federal officials are warning that Lake Mead could drop in five to six years to levels low enough to possibly warrant major Central Arizona Project water cutbacks to Tucson and Phoenix.
These warnings were ratcheted up significantly compared to forecasts made earlier this year. That’s due to the severely hot and dry weather that struck most of the West during the summer, including the hottest two months on record in Tucson and Phoenix in August and July, respectively.
Olivenhain Municipal Water District’s Recycled Water Pipeline Extension 153A was recognized September 10 as a 2020 Project of the Year by the San Diego and Imperial County Chapter of the American Public Works Association at its virtual awards event.
The pipeline extension connected the Surf Cup Sports youth soccer fields in San Diego to OMWD’s recycled water distribution system. By allowing Surf Cup to convert the irrigation of 55 acres of grass fields to recycled water, OMWD has reduced potable water demands for irrigation by up to 100 million gallons per year.
“OMWD’s board is honored to receive this award for a collaborative project, which expanded the use of recycled water while protecting the environment,” said OMWD Board Treasurer Larry Watt. “Additionally, state grant funding helped pay for the project, reducing costs for our ratepayers.”
The project involved the installation of 1,600 feet of 8-inch PVC pipeline that required specialized drilling and interagency cooperation to be completed. The pipeline needed to cross the San Dieguito River, causing design, permitting, and construction obstacles. OMWD’s design team used horizontal directional drilling to install the pipeline more than sixty feet below the river bottom.
Horizontal directional drilling reduces not only surface area damage, but also environmental impacts from construction site dust, making it less impactful to nearby habitat and communities than traditional excavation work.
OMWD worked with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife on a streambed alteration agreement to ensure the protection of fish and wildlife habitat. OMWD also worked with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect nesting birds such as the federally listed clapper rail and barn owl.
By OMWD taking proactive steps, such as daily biological sweeps of the project and inspections of the trenchless process, there was no adverse impact to habitat or species in the project area.
Interagency cooperation was also required for the project. The property is served water by Santa Fe Irrigation District and owned by the City of San Diego. While SFID did not have nearby recycled water infrastructure, it wanted to provide Surf Cup fields with a drought-resilient water supply. The OMWD pipeline project meets that need. The San Diego City Council approved a permanent utility easement allowing crews to access the property.
California’s Department of Water Resources awarded $202,300 for the project in Proposition 84 funding, which is administered by water wholesaler San Diego County Water Authority through the Integrated Regional Water Management program. The San Diego IRWM Program supports collaborative water management to increase regional self-reliance throughout California.
APWA is a professional association of public works agencies, private companies, and individuals dedicated to promoting public awareness through education, advocacy, and the exchange of knowledge. The APWA San Diego and Imperial County chapter annually recognizes the best public works projects and professionals in San Diego and Imperial Counties. The Project of the Year award is also intended to highlight the collaboration and cooperation between public and private agencies, contractors, and consultants, to complete public works projects.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
