Category: Blog Round-Up

Dams be damned: California rebuilds the salmon habitat it destroyed:  “Wander out the back door of the tasting room at Truett Hurst Winery in Sonoma County, California, and follow the dirt path to the red Adirondack chairs next to Dry Creek. Look just downstream to the side channel that splits off the main waterway. You will see sets of interwoven […]

The hidden opportunity for water storage in California:  Maurice Hall writes, “California’s historic winter ended the drought in many parts of the state and piled up record levels of snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. With so much precipitation, surface water infrastructure – our network of dams, reservoirs and levees – has been called into action like never before, and […]

Trump provides California water solutions as Governor Brown focuses on his legacy:  Aubrey Bettencourt writes, “On May 13, 2017, Governor Brown outlined his revised budget proposal focusing the state’s financial resources on his High Speed Rail legacy project and renewing its efforts to fight the Trump Administration on multiple fronts. While he may have dropped the mic with an antagonistic […]

Groundwater overdraft is a fixable problem:  The California Farm Water Coalition writes, “Overdraft. It’s the condition in which something is being removed faster than it’s being replaced. At a bank it’s when you’re spending more money than what you have in your account. In the water world it’s much the same thing. You’re taking more water, usually out of the […]

California would be an unrecognizable ‘parallel universe’ without Oroville Dam:  Todd Fitchette writes, “A Sacramento Bee article questions the “lethal arrogance” of late Gov. Pat Brown when pushing to build Oroville Dam in the 1960s.  The lens of hindsight might be clearer, but it’s only such because we see things through the history that predecessors did not have, nor could […]

Facing extinction II: Making hard decisions: Jason Baumsteiger and Peter Moyle write, “In part I of our blog, we projected a bleak future for many freshwater fishes, especially in California. Some difficult decisions will need to be made to prevent extinctions or to verify them.  However these decisions will rely on answers to one sweeping question: When is a species, […]

State’s survey of other tunnel projects scrutinized:  Alex Breitler writes, “As the Delta tunnels hearings resumed in Sacramento this week, an engineering expert for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California testified that many other large tunnels have been drilled “without incurring risk or injury to project stakeholders.”  As the Delta tunnels hearings resumed in Sacramento this week, an engineering […]

Independent science review panel finds problems with Delta tunnels biological opinion:  Restore the Delta writes, “An analysis by an Independent Review Panel has been made public by the Delta Stewardship Council (DSC).  The panel was convened by the DSC Science Program to provide the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and California Department of Fish and […]

Wetlands at risk from federal rule change:  “The federal government’s Clean Water Act includes dozens of regulations to reduce water pollution. But it doesn’t include a clear definition of what types of water systems it covers. The Trump administration recently ordered federal agencies to begin the formal process to repeal an Obama-era rule—called the Waters of the United States rule. […]