In 1992, prospectors in Los Angeles hatched an idea for a new water supply that was improbable and speculative, even by Southern California standards. Far off in the Mojave Desert, beneath the flat dry lake bed of the Cadiz Valley, millennia’s worth of groundwater could be pumped and piped 43 miles to the Colorado River Aqueduct, the crown jewel of the Metropolitan Water District’s massive web of infrastructure.
The State Water Resources Control Board adopted a new fee schedule that will be applied to groundwater pumpers in basins where compliance with the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act comes up short. The Board approved an emergency regulation containing the fees and related provisions on May 16. The fees are expected to be imposed, starting this summer, in medium- and high-priority basins where groundwater sustainability agencies are not formed by the statutory deadline.
During California’s epic five-year drought, most of the state’s irrigation districts didn’t comply with a 2007 law that requires them to account for how much water they’re delivering directly to farmers, a Bee investigation has found. State regulators are largely powerless to stop them, but they don’t seem too bothered by it.
California farmers in the Central Valley pumped enough water out of the ground to fill Lake Mead, which can store the entire average flow of the Colorado River for two years. It’s enough to drown the state of Pennsylvania in a foot of water.
The Department of Water Resources (DWR) has announced the release of its 2017 Draft Proposal Solicitation Package for Groundwater Sustainability Plans and Projects. The grant program is funded by Proposition 1, the $7.5 billion water bond overwhelmingly approved by California voters in 2014.
The massive scale of California’s groundwater pumping is outlined in a study released Wednesday by researchers at UCLA and the University of Houston. The researchers conclude that California’s pending groundwater regulations remain woefully behind what is necessary to bring the state’s groundwater levels back into balance.
Gov. Jerry Brown was on a roll, enthusiastically preaching to a choir of environmentalists about how carbon use and global warming are a looming catastrophe for California and the world. … But a growing number of environmentalists argue that the governor’s long-standing refusal to ban hydraulic fracking, a controversial process that has helped revive the oil industry in California, opens the state to just the type of environmental disasters he regularly rails against.
The Nevada Irrigation District has adopted a resolution approving a Memorandum of Agreement that unifies nearby water districts hoping to promote groundwater sustainability. NID will join the cities of Lincoln and Roseville, Placer County Water Agency and Placer County in forming the West Placer Groundwater Sustainability Agency.
Starting Monday morning and continuing through much of the week, a helicopter will be flying low over a coastal section of Monterey County, sending pulses of electrical current underground. The Marina Coast Water District-sponsored flights are part of a groundwater management effort aimed at assessing the extent of seawater intrusion in area water basins linked to the district’s water supply.
In preparation for California adopting a maximum contaminant level for 1,2,3-trichloropropane in drinking water, the State Water Resources Control Board staff discussed potential reporting requirements and changes to regulations at a recent public hearing. The Board expects to take action to adopt the final regulations later this year. The contaminant, commonly known as 1,2,3-TCP, is an extremely potent carcinogen that was found in industrial solvents and pesticides, among other sources.
The heavy rain and snow over the past six months in California could reverse the infamous decline of the state’s groundwater stores, but the relief may last only a season or two, according to a hydrologist with University of California, Davis, who says water agencies must find efficient ways to refill depleted aquifers.
Google currently has the right to pump up to half a million gallons a day at no charge. Now the company is asking to triple that, to 1.5 million. That’s close to half of the groundwater that Mount Pleasant Waterworks [South Carolina] pumps daily from the same underground aquifer to help supply drinking water to more than 80,000 residents of the area.
Agriculture is by far the biggest water user in the San Joaquin Valley, accounting for 89 percent of the region’s annual net water use. As such, the farm sector will have to play a crucial role in tackling the valley’s various water challenges―from sustainably managing groundwater resources to addressing a number of water-related environmental and public health concerns. Valley farms vary greatly in size, and broad regional solutions to the valley’s resource management challenges must take this into account.
Even as Soquel Creek Water District has highlighted its pursuit of a water recycling facility to meet long-term customer water supply needs, a parallel cooperative effort with the city of Santa Cruz remains in the works.
The rain has largely stopped after one of the wettest winters in California. But as spring temperatures begin to climb and snow in the Sierra Nevada melts, the threat of flooding has communities across the Central Valley on edge. … The concerns are magnified in some areas by subsidence, a festering problem exacerbated by five years of drought in the Central Valley.