NEWS

California’s two prolonged droughts – along with greater surface and groundwater restrictions  – are pitting farmer against farmer in some parts of the San Joaquin Valley. In the Wheeler Ridge-Maricopa Water Storage District farmers who rely on groundwater only are being asked to pay a share of costs for other farmers who contract for surface…
Water users for both the State Water Project and Central Valley Project will get a 100% allocation, agencies announced Thursday. The string of storms that battered California over the past few months have inundated the state with water and built up a record-breaking snowpack in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. The extraordinary amount of water is…
by Jesse Vad, SJV Water
The state Department of Water Resources (DWR) announced Wednesday, Jan. 26, that it will increase water allocations from 5% to 30% thanks to the recent storms that doused California with rain and snow.  The new allocation comes out to 1.27 million acre feet for the State Water Project and 29 of its public water agencies,…
by Rose Horowitch, SJV Water reporting intern
It may be raining now but Michael George, Watermaster for the San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta, urged his colleagues at the State Water Resources Control Board to always be planning for drought. ​​“The Delta mantra: we pray for rain; we’re getting it. We plan for drought; it will be back,” George said during his final report before…
The Cross Valley Canal is a key cog in the southern San Joaquin Valley’s water machinery. It moves water east and west between the California Aqueduct along Kern County’s western edge to the Kern County Water Agency’s facilities near Manor Street in Bakersfield. Along the way, it also connects with the federally owned Friant-Kern Canal,…
by Lois Henry
If you were looking for some bargain priced water this year, you’re out of luck. “We got out of the market when we started seeing prices north of $900 an acre foot,” said Jason Gianquinto, General Manager of Semitropic Water Storage District in western Kern County. “That’s just too much for us. We had some…
by Lois Henry
Editor’s note: This article was produced by SJV Water, the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) and the New York Times. The collaboration between SJV Water and CCIJ was led by the Institute for Nonprofit News as part of a project called “Tapped Out: Power, justice and water in the West.”   This story was written with funding from the…
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