After two multi-year episodes of intense drought over the past decade, there is finally a centralized hub of resources and information for well owners and communities that suffered when their wells went dry. Before the most recent drought lifted thanks to this year’s historic winter, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) launched its Be Well Prepared program in May.
After California’s record-breaking winter rains, public health officials are warning about an increased risk for valley fever this summer.
“California’s dry conditions, combined with recent heavy winter rains could result in increasing valley fever cases in the coming months,” California Department of Public Health Director Dr. Tomás Aragón said in a news release.
Californians could drink highly purified sewage water that is piped directly into drinking water supplies for the first time under proposed rules unveiled by state water officials. The drought-prone state has turned to recycled water for more than 60 years to bolster its scarce supplies, but the current regulations require it to first make a pit stop in a reservoir or an aquifer before it can flow to taps.
They’re back! Arising out of their dusty/muddy/sandy graves, the zombie lakes of California are reclaiming their own. For geologic ages, they have lain there, undead — well, often drought-dry, and not their original saturated selves. But now the monumental rains of this winter and spring filled them and then some, reminding us of California’s paleo-hydrology, our ancient lakes and waterways.
Most of California is in recovery mode after a years-long drought plagued the Golden State from 2020 until 2022, which depleted the state’s reservoirs and groundwater resources. Thanks to the historic wet winter season, many areas, such as Los Angeles, Merced and Alameda countries, are no longer in a drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. However, with the summer season in full swing, temperatures across the state have begun to increase and the hotter weather brings renewed potential drought concerns for many across the state.
Solar farms stretch out mile after mile along Interstate 10 around Palm Springs, creating one of the densest areas of solar development in North America in the heart of California’s Colorado Desert. But the area’s success in meeting the state and the nation’s renewable energy goals is running up against the Southwest’s biggest climate challenge: having enough water.
California’s two biggest reservoirs are all but full after reaching perilously low levels late last year. Lake Shasta, at 96% full, and Lake Oroville, at 100%, had fallen to around 25% to 30% of their capacity before the state’s historically wet winter rejuvenated them.
Council voted unanimously to continue the 20 percent reduction in water use per the 2020 Water Shortage Contingency Plan last week despite an abnormally wet winter that pulled much of the state out of drought. The decision was part of the Annual Water Shortage Assessment Report that is due each year by July 1 to the California Department of Water Resources and also requires formal adoption by Santa Monica City Council.
At one of Los Angeles’s main water treatment plants a few miles north of the Port of Los Angeles, a small-scale facility is demonstrating what might be part of the solution to the region’s water woes. The Pure Water Southern California Demonstration Plant facility uses membrane bioreactors, reverse osmosis, and ultraviolet radiation to process about 500,000 gallons of treated wastewater a day, further purifying it into something clean enough to use in industry, replenish the region’s groundwater, and potentially put back into the city’s drinking water system.
Mountains are capped with record snowpack, rolling hills are covered in a rainbow of wildflowers, reservoirs are filled to the brim, and rivers are rushing with snowmelt.
A vast majority of California is finally out of drought this month, after a punishing multiyear period of severe aridity that forced statewide water cuts and fueled existential fear over the future of the water supply.
