What has been done and what still needs to be done to untangle physical, financial and political barriers blocking fair access to clean drinking water in California?Continue readingCentral Valley Communities Struggle for Drinking Water: Q&A with Felicia Marcus, California Water Expert
Category: Water & the West
Farmers, large and small, are beginning to grapple with what the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act means for them. Many expect to see cutbacks on pumping once the program is fully implemented in 2040.Continue readingSmall Farmers Wait for California’s Groundwater Hammer to Fall
With new rules coming into effect, farmers and municipalities using groundwater must either find more water to support the aquifers or take cropland out of use. To ease the pain, engineers are looking to harness an unconventional and unwieldy source of water: the torrential storms that sometimes blast across the Pacific Ocean and soak California. Continue readingPutting a Tempest into a Teapot: Can California Better Use Winter Storms to Refill its Aquifers?
New rules and new technology are giving farmers and managers a better look at groundwater supplies.Continue readingAs California’s Groundwater Free-for-All Ends, Gauging What’s Left
The fraught statewide conditions that led to passage of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act in 2014? They afflicted Ventura decades earlier. Continue readingPainful Experience Helps to Chart the Future of Groundwater in Ventura County
Lake Mead on the Colorado River has become an hourglass of shrinking water supplies. Can lower-basin states turn back the clock?Continue readingLower Basin States Work to Keep Lake Mead Afloat
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In Other Words, Water
From multiple tongues came multiple terms for how water flows, and how it works in the West.Continue readingIn Other Words, Water
Like the topsoil, structures built 40 years ago to contain floodwaters are cracking, too.Continue readingTo Save Crops, Farmers Took Groundwater. Then the Land Sank
This is the first of a series of occasional posts looking at at how the West would have changed if a major historical event had – or had not – occurred. Here, we look at the implications of a different Supreme Court decision in the 1963 Arizona v. California case.Continue readingWhat If California Had Won the 1963 Case Over the Division of the Colorado River?
A vineyard in Paso Robles. Mattyshack via Flickr By Felicity Barringer A hidden treasure, groundwater has long sustained agriculture through California’s cycles of drought. Decades ago, state water officials started researching the geological formations that hold groundwater. By the 1950s, hydrogeologists had created an atlas showing the boundaries of more than 500 groundwater basins or…Continue readingTo Manage Groundwater, California Must First Get Basin Boundaries Right