Archive: Water

An estimated 188,000 people fled areas downstream from Lake Oroville after a hole was spotted Sunday in the giant dam's emergency spillway. LA swift-water rescue teams are headed north.

Two views of the river: Sunday's rain-swollen racetrack and the big concrete ditch we usually see.

A line of storms is coming toward California — just like they used to before the drought.

Rivers are high, snow pack is deep and new storms are coming. Los Angeles, however, remains one of the driest places in the state.

The writer of On the Public Record.com sat down with Peter H. King of the LA Times after seven years of anonymity.

The first media op of the season was today. Water content across the range is at 108 percent of normal.

Looks like California will have a ski season and maybe even a winter snowpack.

The Center for Investigative Reporting got the story rolling. Now Steve Lopez is on the case.

The drought has gone on so long there may be new Angelenos who have never seen the concrete Los Angeles River raging. Hola, El Niño.

A new study looks at blue oak tree rings in the Sierra Nevada. "The 2015 low is unprecedented in the context of the past 500 years," says a journal report.

An echo from the recent past at the scenic brine lake on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada range.

Climate change, the drought and development pressure are all taking a toll on the symbolic succulents that grow only in the Mojave Desert.

My post last week on the Mormon lawn in Westwood had a weird, short life as a media drought nugget. After hedging, the landmark temple now says, yes, the lawn is going dry to help out.

I don't know if this a drought measure or what, but the big expanse of green grass on Santa Monica Boulevard in Westwood is mostly brown.

Tim Egan, Dana Goodyear, Mark Arax, Grace Peng and others weigh in on the drought and California's future, while the New York Times style editors again give Angelenos something to wag their tongues about.

First came the almond farmers, then the cantaloupes, then the golf courses — and so on.

Expect a day of rain on Tuesday with snow above 4,500 feet. NWS expects about up to an inch of rain.

Gov. Brown orders the state's first-ever 25% cut in water use as the winter ends with essentially no snowpack. "This is the new normal,” Brown says. “We will learn how to cope with this.”

Roughly half of California's fresh water arrives in this quirkily engineered, mis-named place, writes Emily Green. 25 million Californians depend on freshwater from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta.

With this drought year starting to look like the worst yet, the Metropolitan Water District is offering rich deals and Northern California rice farmers are selling.

Heavy rain and snowfall, blizzards above 6,000 feet and more are expected this week -- in Northern California. But that's good enough for us in the south. The Ridiculously Resilient Ridge has moved out of the way for now.

As the drought deepens, a new study finds, the year 2014 has been the worst single year since 800 AD — and rising temperatures mean it could yet get worse.

The big rain should arrive Tuesday. In the meantime, Northern California is getting a reminder of what "normal" looks like.

I first wrote about negotiations between the Owens Valley and Los Angeles over the noxious dust that blows off of Owens Lake 25 years ago. So it seems a little bizarre that they finally have a deal both sides can live with.

Drought gardener and blogger Emily Green wants people to remember that they need to deep-water their trees or the drought can have a worse effect than necessary.

If you missed last year's rare opening of the gates to the historic Cascades in Sylmar, the DWP is allowing visitors on Sunday.

It's still a crapshoot, but NOAA's seasonal outlook sees a good chance of at least a normal precipitation winter in California.

So much water is missing that the tectonic plate on which the West sits is rising. And that's not the worst news.

The sinkhole created by that water main break near UCLA has been filled in and as of 20 minutes or so ago was being paved. Update: Sunset reopened early Monday morning.

Enough water to sustain 100 families for a year was lost in the pipeline break that flooded parts of UCLA. More than 900 cars are stranded in underground garages and half of those may have been submerged.

So many fans went to the bathroom as play stopped between the U.S. and Germany that water use spiked. It then spiked again at the end of Thursday's match.

Credit for the headline to the High Country News, which notes that "with each passing day it seems more certain: 2014 is going to be an El Niño year, and probably a big one."

Awesome weather map. The free water will be here Friday morning.

The blocking ridge of high pressure over the Pacific Ocean off North America couldn't last forever. It just seemed that way. An explanation.

He gets that "the whole fantasy of modern California has long been dependent on an audacious feat of engineering." This time is different, he argues.

Even after last week's heavy rainfall up north, the drought maps are still a dry sea of red. And oh by the way, it looks as if the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge may be re-forming out in the Pacific.

Folsom Lake is six feet higher, but that only means the reservoir is at 19% of capacity instead of 17%. Nice graphic shows how water use differs around the state.

Since the deadly Sylmar earthquake in 1971 it has been recognized that the flood control dams in the San Gabriels were not built sufficiently strong to hold up if a severe regional quake hit while the dams retained a full load of water.

Marcie Edwards, Mayor Eric Garcetti's choice to become general manager of the Department of Water and Power, worked at the utility for 24 years before taking a senior job in Anaheim. Most recently she has been the Anaheim city manager.

Check out to the NOAA satellite pictures and a release from Mono County. Plus: Olympic hopefuls like Lindsey Jacobellis (video) are in Mammoth this weekend.

State hydrologists report today they found more bare ground than snow in the first Sierra snowpack measurement of the year. That's bad. Here's why no storms are getting through to California.

Have you ever wanted to see and hear (and get sprayed by) the Sylmar cascades up close? The Department of Water and Power is leaving the gates until the end of the day on Saturday.

For months now, Los Angeles media, historians and civic officials have been thinking and talking about the city's water link to the Eastern Sierra and what it all means. It has been a good and useful exercise. Tuesday's reenactment was itself pretty cool.

Part 2 of an excerpt adapted from "San Fernando Valley: America's Suburb" for the 100th anniversary of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.

A couple of the chapters in my book on the San Fernando Valley deal with the Los Angeles Aqueduct and how abundant water changed the city and the valley. It holds up, I'm pleased to say. For this week's anniversary, here's an adapted version.

Mark Berry was 17 when he and a friend stole some dynamite and, in Sept. 1976, blew up the Alabama Spillway gate on the Los Angeles Aqueduct in the Owens Valley.

The editors of Boom: A Journal of California asked writer Bob Sipchen and his son Rob to defend LA’s right to exist. Which they did.

The quarterly magazine from UC Press devotes its entire fall issue to water, the aqueduct from the Sierra Nevada and the Mulholland legacy. The issue will be a keeper for anyone with an ounce of water geekdom in them, and for many others who just like LA's layered backstories.

AP reporters Michael Blood and Elliot Spagat investigated what happened when state water was stored in an underground aquifer in Ventura County — the water vanished.

One of the state's top water journalists until he joined the Brown Administration, Taugher was spokesman for the Department of Fish and Wildlife. He died while snorkeling off Maui.

Emily Green, the water journalist and gardening writer who blogs at Chance of Rain, took some pictures this week at the defunct “Rock-a-Hoola Waterpark“ at Newberry Springs in the eastern Mojave. The derelict park, which used groundwater from the Mojave Aquifer, has also operated as Lake Dolores and the Discovery Waterpark.

The editorial board of the Arizona Republic newspaper didn't care for last week's LA Times op-ed essay in which a New Mexico environmental author argued that Phoenix, already a pretty sucky place, is in the cross-hairs of Southwest climate change. Instead of refuting the guy's case, they go after LA.

Photos: The California Aqueduct near Littlerock, moving Northern California water across the Mojave Desert on Wednesday afternoon.

The lake bed is currently exposed and the dirt is being pushed around to form habitat for fish to thrive and plants to grow. "The lake bed has to be lined to keep the water from seeping into the ground. What would that look like, I wondered?," Judy Raskin writes at The Eastsider LA.

The plan cooked up by politically connected investors to deliver water from a remote corner of the Mojave to thirsty Southern California cities refuses to die after more than two decades. How the LA Times can do a new story on Cadiz without mentioning Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa or Arnold Schwarzenegger (and barely mentioning their pal who is at the center of things, Keith Brackpool) is a mystery. Note: No time for the Morning Buzz today.

The DWP, which is scrambling to repair a flurry of water main breaks it blames on work at the distant Lower Franklin Canyon reservoir, says that West 3rd Street will remain closed between Fairfax Avenue and Ogden Drive until 7 p.m.

KPCC ventures into the mud with the local councilman, Eric Garcetti.

Emily Green reported and wrote (and apparently went through editing hell to finally publish) a long seres in the Las Vegas Sun on a big Nevada water grab. And she's miffed to find a lot of parallels between her reporting and a chapter on Nevada in "The Ripple Effect" by Alex Prud’homme.

The author and granddaughter of one of Los Angeles' most discussed historical figures, the water legend William Mulholland, died today of natural causes at her home in Camarillo.

The first stages of a "narrative experience" about a fictional flood hitting Los Angeles will be unveiled at this weekend's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at USC.

The animated movie is set in the fictional town of Dirt. There's a character, a desert tortoise named Mayor, who dreams of imported water turning Dirt into a green paradise.

On Feb. 22, 1911, trains from Los Angeles delivered the first buyers of vacant lots to the new town of Van Nuys.

Heal the Bay president Mark Gold isn't a fan of the Department of Water and Power reform measures that may appear on the March ballot in Los Angeles.

ow they have gone too far. The Department of Water and Power, already in the running for least popular city agency, has closed its cafeteria to the public,

The design isn't much to brag about, and they were partisan to the max, but one thing about the newspapers of Los Angeles a hundred years: they were chock full of news.

Floyd Dominy changed the map of the West as commissioner of the federal Bureau of Reclamation from 1959 to 1969. It was on his watch that Glen Canyon Dam was built, forming giant Lake Powell on the upper Colorado River.

Illogical as it sounds, a panel of experts convened by the city has concluded that last year's siege of water main breaks was triggered by the DWP's Monday-Thursday watering restrictions creating higher pressures on aging pipes.

We can probably close the books on this year's local rain season, JPL meteorologist Bill Patzert says in an email exchange picked up by Emily Green, the ace water blogger at Chance of Rain.com.

Switzerland's Large Hadron Collider is also on the list, along with Norway's seed vault and the iPhone. No, it's not your typical architecture list.

A segment of "60 Minutes' on CBS will focus on the California water situation, with reporter Lesley Stahl talking to Governor Schwarzenegger, farmers and others. It's scheduled to air Sunday,...

Patrick McGreevy likely wrote about Keith Brackpool and the Cadiz water scheme in the Mojave Desert when he was a City Hall reporter for the L.A. Times, given that Brackpool...

Click on the cartoon to view it bigger, as always. More by Steve Greenberg....

Dramatic geyser is blowing higher than the rooftops on Van Nuys Boulevard near Sherman Way. Screen cap is from CBS 2. * Noon update: DWP says the main, which broke...

I just heard interim DWP chief S. David Freeman say on Patt Morrison that the rash of water main breaks is all perception: the result of a quicker news cycle,...

The San Diego editorial writer who is upset that the L.A. Times blew off coverage of the Metropolitan Water District pensions controversy is intrigued by a new angle — that...

Former DWP chief David Nahai would be paid up to $27,300 a month from Oct. 7 through Dec. 31 to "provide consulting services and provide knowledge transfer" about the job...

The giant Metropolitan Water District buckled to public and media pressure and yanked off its board agenda for today new five-year contracts that "would have hiked employee pensions 25 percent,...

There's too much chlorine smell in the L.A. tap water lately, blogs Atwater Village Newbie. He has collected Twitter reports from others as well. OK, maybe it's not the mysterious...

Nice image of the national weather picture — clouds almost everywhere but the Southwest — at the Chance of Rain blog. The blog also has a take on Gov. Schwarzenegger's...

That question is being asked by San Diego Union-Tribune editorial writer Chris Reed, who can't believe the L.A. Times has written repeatedly about the $82,000 David Nahai will get after...

Eight inches fell on Mammoth Mountain over the weekend with a "generous delivery of powder" in the Lake Tahoe area, and with that the winter snowpack watch begins. The start...

In the media follows to Friday's exit of DWP chief H. David Nahai, the L.A. Times noted that his "support within Villaraigosa's office had eroded dramatically, and Brian D'Arcy, the...

Today's Daily News editorial endorses Valley city councilmember Greig Smith's flouting of the city's water law by irrigating his lawn three times a week instead of two. In a city...

Gov. Schwarzenegger today named Keith Brackpool to the state horse racing board. Brackpool is the friend-of-Antonio and water speculator who employed Mayor Villaraigosa as a consultant when he was between...

City Councilman Greig Smith defies the city's rules on use of sprinklers at his home, and insists he saves water by doing so....

Police chief William Bratton and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa have a 12:15 p.m. media availability in the mayor's office. The Los Angeles Times' Joel Rubin reports "Bratton is expected to announce...

L.A. Times coverage of the Los Angeles Kings is the poster child in a Sports Business Journal examination of waning sports reportage in newspapers and how worried pro sports teams...

You remember Cadiz — that was the venture to bank water beneath the distant Mojave Desert, then pipe it into urban Southern California, envisioned by Friend-of-Antonio (and many other Democrats)...

When you're woken up by a downpour in June, the same week that Los Angeles imposes mandatory water cutbacks, the subject of today's commentary became almost a no-brainer. It airs...

An investigative series in the Contra Costa Times up north says that an environmental program to benefit the delicate Sacramento-San Joaquin delta instead provided cash and cheap water for wealthy...

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa put on his jeans and outdoor boots and helicoptered up to the Eastern Sierra this morning to all but apologize to the locals for Los Angeles stripping...

The DWP has decided to dump all the water in Silver Lake and the Elysian reservoir because of unusually high traces of the carcinogen bromate, which formed in the water...

The largest pre-industrial metropolis in the world, in today's Cambodia, relied on elaborate waterworks — and died away in the 16th century after "overpopulation and deforestation filled the canals with...

Benett Kessler lives 225 miles from Los Angeles but has been covering the Department of Water and Power as a local story for more than 25 years.

Professor emeritus Ralph Shaffer has been trying without success to get Times writers to stop referring to Los Angeles as a desert, climate-wise. Simply put, he says it rains too much for the coastal plain to qualify as a desert.