California Water Issue 2024
Featured Articles
Annual Water Issue 2024 – Let’s Talk Water!
Dear Reader, Welcome to the Water Committee’s annual water issue which we put together in honor of World Water Day, which is Friday, March 22nd, 2024. Water - one of my favorite topics, though it is a very volatile business here in California. I’m often asked about...
Looking Back to Move Forward
By Charming Evelyn On a recent trip to Los Angeles City Hall, I couldn’t help but stop in wonder at the beautiful sight of the Los Angeles Native Toyon trees filled with red berries that populated the front lawn of City Hall. The Toyon is the official plant of the...
Water for Peace: World Water Day 2024
By SK Bulander With half of the world’s population experiencing water scarcity for at least a month a year,1 we are teetering on the brink of a global crisis. Our freshwater sources are stretched thinner and thinner as our populations grow and climate change...
Vandenberg – Phantom Rocket Launches
By Leslie Purcell The United States Space Force recently released a Draft Environmental Assessment (EA) for a proposal by the Phantom Space Corporation for up to 48 launches a year, from Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) in Santa Barbara County, of expendable rockets...
Newsom’s Salmon Strategy Doubles Down on Harmful Water Policy
By Erin Woolley Last week, Governor Newsom released a strategy aimed at reversing the decline in California’s salmon population. The document sets forward six priorities and lists 71 actions to build healthier, thriving salmon populations in California. Many of the...
The Water We Eat! (Our Edible Water Footprint)
An overview of growing an edible garden with limited water. Minimal Water, Maximum Food Production (at home or for the home gardener) By Kalyn Simon We all (hopefully) know the moment of bliss when you bite into a fresh plum or pick the first vine-ripened tomato of...
The Color of Water Initiative
By Water Hub @ Climate Nexus The Color of Water Initiative was created by the Water Hub to build voice and visibility for people of color in the water movement. Our goal is to connect reporters with a more diverse set of experts, and build capacity for these experts...
Stopping the Harms: Newsom Undermines His Own 30×30 Goals
By Mahtisa Djahangiri What is 30x30? 30x30 is the global movement to protect 30% of our planet’s land and water by 2030 as a stepping stone toward protecting at least half of the Earth by 2050. 30x30 aims to protect and restore biodiversity, expand access to nature,...
Where the Jobs Are: Water Agencies are Hiring
By Alec Mackie, Guest writer After two years of hefty rainfall, our reservoirs are refilling and California’s water outlook is looking better. Our next big water challenge is a shrinking workforce as specialized workers have reached retirement age and are leaving....
Ecological Impacts of Southern California’s Thirst on the Owens Valley Region
By Jackson Goulding “There it is. Take it”. William Mulholland, mastermind behind the now 110 year old Los Angeles Aqueduct, spoke these words as water first surged down through the channel and began to make its way towards Southern California. Now over a century...
Hydrogen: Not a Silver Bullet Climate Solution
By Teresa Cheng, California Field Manager Hydrogen has been touted as a clean energy panacea to replace polluting sources including gas plants, airplanes and heavy industry. The Biden administration has infused billions of dollars to kickstart the budding hydrogen...
Metropolitan’s Budget Woes
By Caty Wagner Metropolitan Water District (MWD), the water wholesaler for Southern California, whose 19 million residents make it the largest wholesaler in the country, has a budget proposal up for a vote on April 9. MWD is proposing a whopping 21% increase in water...
Residential Stormwater Capture, You Can DIY
By Dr. C. Tom Williams, PhD Real Time Experience with Putting the LID on Runoff – Where to put the runoff? As part of a settlement regarding the pollution of Santa Monica Bay, the County and City of Los Angeles developed the concept of collecting and reducing surface...
SoCal’s Water Resilient Future looks like VenturaWaterPure
By Conner Everts & Kellie Prather Southern California Cities are moving towards independence from imported water from faraway watersheds and the Bay Delta Estuary. Given the extremes of dry and wet weather with climate change, forward thinking Southern California...
Sinking Thinking – Contrasts in Approaches to Water Law & Policy
Angeles Chapter’s Water Committee’s newer member Shirley Nixon, a former public interest environmental lawyer from WA state, ponders her continuing discoveries of differences between Washington & California’s approaches to water management. As I drove south from...
Depleting an Ancient Desert Aquifer? Cadiz Is At It Again
By Bryan Baker To the untrained eye and incurious, the California desert may seem a barren wasteland. When I was a kid, my family would drive across the desert toward points east or north, and I’d be bored through the hours it took to get through the seemingly endless...
Update on the Whittier Narrows Dam Safety Modifications
By Yvonne Martinez Watson The Whittier Narrows Dam is an earthen dam constructed in 1957 by the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The dam stretches across a narrow gap between the Montebello Hills and the Whittier Hills at the confluence of the Rio Hondo and San...
Why isn’t the LA Regional Board Doing More to Protect Groundwater?
Why isn't the LA Regional Board Doing More to Protect Groundwater? Protecting Groundwater Through the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board By: Annelisa Ehret Moe, Heal the Bay & Charming Evelyn From the mountains, through our streets, rivers, and...
Tapping In To Clean Drinking Water Everywhere
By Evelyn Wendel WeTap and the Sierra Club are the perfect ‘water partners.’ Collaboration and communication are the keys to healthy communities and a clean environment. The mission of WeTap is to: Bring greater awareness to the high-quality, publicly provided...
San Diego Has a Cross Border Sewage Problem
By Sydney Pitcher and Barry Pulver For decades, raw sewage from Tijuana, Mexico has, and continues, to flow across the border into San Diego, California. This discharge flows into the Tijuana River Valley, and ultimately to the Pacific Ocean. This pollution has...
Remote Participation at Public Meetings – A Right or A Privilege?
[Update: Because of this article, BAWSCA's CEO, Nicole Sandkulla, reached out to Sierra Club California staff to share an update on the Board's progress to return remote participation. They shared that technical difficulties have delayed their efforts but that live...
[Top header image: Boy on Scooter at Whittier Narrows Lake. ©Mimi Fuchs and Chiara Scaramuzzino.]
Videos
Water Committee 2025 Year in Review
Dear Readers, Every year when I decide to put pen to paper, it is usually difficult trying to decide where to begin. However, this year it’s very simple, we begin with the 2025 fires of Pacific Palisades and Eaton (Altadena & Pasadena). The devastation those fires...
In Memoriam – Chuck Gooley
This article is dedicated to Charles ‘Chuck’ Gooley. Chuck was one of the founding members of this Water Committee. From the beginning he helped set up our first website and handled all things HTML. He was also our map builder and the direct conduit to the GIS...
Water, Environmental Racism, and Reproductive Justice
The quality of water we have access to and drink is inextricably linked to our health, and many common drinking water contaminants can cause reproductive health impacts for women. Yet in Los Angeles, as across the Country and globe, communities of color and low income...
Tap Water is Affordable; Customers Cannot Afford to Defer Investment
Water is one of California’s most essential shared resources. Every day, communities depend on safe and reliable drinking water, yet the systems that make that possible are often overlooked. Keeping water affordable while strengthening these systems is one of the most...
Cadiz Inc.’s Painful Last Two Years
For two punishing years, Cadiz Inc. has watched the prospects of its desert damaging Mojave Desert water mining project steadily dim. Water districts have concluded that the water mining project is unsustainable since Cadiz Inc. would drain much more water from a...
With Snowpacks Shrinking, California Needs Local Water Solutions
For anybody who skis, the plight of California’s snowpack this year is no surprise. Resorts up and down the state closed sooner than expected this year, some as early as mid-March. Warmer than usual spring temperatures caused less precipitation to fall as snow, and...
Pure Water Los Angeles Women Leading a Sustainable Water Future
Pure Water Los Angeles is a transformative engineering initiative designed to provide a new, sustainable, local water supply for the City of Los Angeles. This effort is powered by people and a promise to the next generation. Today, women are leading many essential...
Wading into Data Centers
Data centers have existed since the Internet, but new ones are now being built in response to Artificial Intelligence (AI). Writing this article was a challenge since limited knowledge exists and there is a lack of transparency and regulations surrounding the new...
50 Years of Coastal Protection
The California Coastal Commission protects the state’s coast and ocean resources as well as public access to the shore so that current and future generations can experience the incomparable beauty, inspiration and joy of a healthy, vibrant coast. In 2026, we celebrate...
Have You Ever Heard of the Golden Trout – California’s State Fish?
Mountain meadows serve as a key habitat for many inland native trout species across the West. Unfortunately for California’s inland trout populations, some sixty percent of meadow habitat in the Sierra Nevada—home to eight distinct native trout species—is considered...
North vs. South – the Controversial Delta Tunnel Project
California loves a good rivalry—Bay Area versus Los Angeles, north versus south, mountains versus coast. Most of the time, it’s all in good fun. But when that rivalry enters into water discussions, it stops being playful and becomes a problem. The debate over the...
LA’s Hidden Watersheds: Connecting To Water Through SoCal’s Reservoirs
In the 1986 book Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner talks about the whole history of the West being about, “moving water from where it is, and presumably isn't needed, to where it isn't, and presumably is needed. “ And dams and reservoirs have been one of the main tools...
Not Just A Flood Channel- Spending Time With Rivers in LA
“For Angelinos to care about conservation they first need to think of water as not just something that somehow gets piped in from wherever into their faucets and shower heads. They need to see it as part of what they love and want to preserve about this city.” This...
There’s A Freeway In The Creekbed! Finding The Wild Places Along The Arroyo Seco
“All freeways (in LA) were built not just on top of water, but from the history of water” –Charles Hood, A Salad Only The Devil Would Eat Do you ever wonder where all the water is in LA? In many cases we are driving on top of it. If you’ve been on the 110 freeway...
The Hippie Mayor and the Fight to Save the Coast: Inside the Early California Coastal Commission
By Frank Egger Born, raised and educated in San Francisco, my family Summered in Cazadero, Sonoma County. My Grandparents had immigrated from Bozano, Italy to the City in 1905 and in 1918, they bought a small ranch in Cazadero. I fished for steelhead, Coho &...
Protecting San Pascual Park: Draft EIR is out. Help us protect an irreplaceable environmental treasure
The Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) for the Pasadena/South Pasadena Arroyo Seco Water Reuse Project was released today. The 1300-page document shows a project that is basically the same as the one that the San Pascual Community of Highland Park sued to stop....