Groundwater is one of America’s most precious resources. The water that fills wells, stored naturally in underground aquifers, allowed vast cities to emerge and turned the nation into an agricultural powerhouse.
But the country’s stewardship of groundwater relies on a patchwork of state and local rules so lax and outdated that in many places, oversight is all but nonexistent, a New York Times investigation has found.
Less than a year after facing historic water shortages, California this week was declared drought-free thanks to a year of epic rains, with an El Niño forecast that could keep wet conditions going into 2024.
For California, especially Southern California, El Niño can typically mean larger storms in the winter which can mean more rainfall and larger waves along the coast. Graphic: NOAA
High in the mountains of Colorado, it’s a time of quiet.
The summer leaves have given way to bare branches, but the ski slopes haven’t yet filled with tourists—or snow. Soon, the flakes will begin to pile up, burying alpine valleys and recharging the Colorado River.
State lawmakers are advancing a bill that would prohibit the planting of new, nonfunctional turf.
If the bill passes next year, it would prohibit local and state governments and unit owners associations from allowing the planting of nonfunctional turf or nonnative plants or installing artificial turf in commercial, institutional or industrial properties beginning in 2025.
Leo Ortega started growing spiky blue agave plants on the arid hillsides around his Southern California home because his wife liked the way they looked.
A decade later, his property is now dotted with thousands of what he and others hope is a promising new crop for the state following years of punishing drought and a push to scale back on groundwater pumping.
It’s still more than seven weeks before the official start of winter (Dec. 21), but weekend storms in Colorado’s high country are reason enough to look in on snowpack levels that will eventually provide the water that flows to Lake Mead.
A month into the 2023 “water year,” snowpack levels are slightly above normal in the Upper Colorado River Basin: 114% as of Nov. 1, according to data on the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s website. The water year runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30 each year.
A bipartisan congressional delegation led by California Democrat Senator Alex Padilla and Republican Representative Doug LaMalfa on Tuesday sent a letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers urging them to prioritize “critical emergency repairs” to levees in the Sacramento and San Joaquin River watersheds.
The San Diego County Water Authority will begin aqueduct maintenance next spring, with the $66 million project expected to be complete in summer 2026. The project area will include pipelines that run through Rancho Bernardo and Poway.
The Southern First Aqueduct Facilities Improvement Project will focus on 99 aqueduct support structures in streets, along access roads and within utility easements. There are two 48-inch- and 54-inch-diameter critical regional pipelines involved, officials said.
The plan is for one pipeline to be taken offline at a time, according to engineering manager Brent Fountain, who spoke at the Rancho Bernardo Planning Board’s Oct. 19 meeting. The project is “very proactive” because it will be replacing some of the concrete vault structures and doing other infrastructure work to components, such as air vents and pump wells, before it becomes absolutely necessary, Fountain said.
It was a rough debut. JB Hamby, 26 years old, had rocketed to the innermost circle of state and federal officials charged with saving the Colorado River from collapse. In mid-January, he was elected to chair California’s river board, representing Imperial Irrigation District, by far the biggest recipient of the overused river’s supply.
Federal officials had bluntly threatened to impose mandatory cuts across the region if huge voluntary reductions weren’t made.
But 12 days later, after contentious closed-door talks, he watched in dismay as media outlets across the U.S. published stories about six states releasing a joint plan to save the river, with only his state, California, refusing to sign on.
The Biden-Harris administration October 25 announced next steps in the efforts to protect the stability and sustainability of the Colorado River System and strengthen water security in the West. The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation released a revised draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) as part of the ongoing, collaborative effort to update the current interim operating guidelines for the near-term operation of Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams to address the ongoing drought and impacts from the climate crisis.
