The story of California’s water wars begins, as so many stories do in the Golden State, with gold. The prospectors who raced westward after 1848 scoured fortunes out of mountainsides using water whisked, manically and in giant quantities, out of rivers.
The San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted 3-0 Wednesday to align county regulations with a court ruling allowing users in the Borrego Springs Subbasin to pump groundwater.
In 2021, a San Diego Superior Court judge ruled that users in the Borrego Springs Subbasin have the right to pump groundwater. In connection with that ruling, a required 70% reduction in groundwater use to comply with the state Sustainable Groundwater Management Act must be achieved by 2040.
During a winter of blizzards, floods and drought-ending downpours, it’s easy to forget that California suffers from chronic water scarcity — the long-term decline of the state’s total available fresh water. This rainy season’s inundation isn’t going to change that.
How is this possible, given the unrelenting series of atmospheric river systems that have dumped near-record snowfall over the Sierra and replenished the state’s reservoirs?
New snow blankets the landscape of Shasta Lake, California’s largest reservoir. Last week, California water officials announced that the statewide Sierra Nevada snowpack was recorded at 190% of seasonal average on March 3. Meanwhile, at a water conference, state officials warned they expect warming conditions to persist and called for partnering on water supply solutions.
A record number of water wells in California have gone dry as climate change amplifies heat and drought in the parched state. Residents reported having 1,394 dry wells statewide from January through last month, an increase of nearly 40 percent from the same time last year. It’s the highest number since the start of record keeping in 2013.
In a fast-paced trip through the evolution of California’s water rights, attorney Valerie Kincaid explained how the system has gone from the “wild, wild west” to one pervaded by ever greater government creep.
By expanding its authorities under what had been thought of as several limited court decisions, state government is now essentially dictating operations on several watersheds, has ignored priority rights and is on the verge of amassing even more control under the guise of “modernization,” Kincaid told a packed room during a Water Association of Kern County luncheon on Tuesday the Water Board.
Over the past decade, California has gone from being the state with the least groundwater regulation to adopting a law that serves as an international model. How the state implements its landmark groundwater law during California’s worst drought on record could inform global climate change adaptation practices for generations.
The Golden State has one shot over the course of the next 20 years to bring its depleted aquifers into balance and achieve sustainability. Californians are counting on the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act to get the state there.
Thousands of acres of crops, from corn to nectarines, surround Melynda Metheney’s community in West Goshen, California — one of the key battlegrounds where residents say irrigation and overpumping have depleted drinkable water.
“You know what you’re up against when you live in these communities. You have to decide, are there enough of us?” said Metheney, standing in her parched yard.
As the state’s water supplies continue to dwindle during this drought, it’s always worth weighing the pros and cons of desalinization to meet the state’s water needs
Groundwater keeps shrinking, reservoirs keep drying. Is it time for California to use desalinization to increase its depleted water supplies?
Here we are again: California is enduring another punishing drought, this one only a few years after the last one ended, which was the most severe drought in the state’s nearly 500 years of recorded history.
Managers of California’s most overdrawn aquifers were given a monumental task under the state’s landmark Sustainable Groundwater Management Act: Craft viable, detailed plans on a 20-year timeline to bring their beleaguered basins into balance.
It was a task that required more than 250 newly formed local groundwater agencies – many of them in the drought-stressed San Joaquin Valley – to set up shop, gather data, hear from the public and collaborate with neighbors on multiple complex plans, often covering just portions of a groundwater basin.
Altogether, they submitted plans for 20 basins for review by the California Department of Water Resources in January 2020. Earlier this year, DWR rendered its verdict: Most of the basin plans were incomplete.
Earlier this year, DWR rendered its verdict: Most of the basin plans were incomplete. Now groundwater agencies responsible for 12 of the 20 basins are racing to meet a late July deadline to submit revised plans that meet SGMA’s requirements or risk the state stepping in to manage their groundwater basins.
