(With expanded coverage of all the Western States)
For August 18, 2022
by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20220818-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf
A Note to Readers
The first item below is the announcement of meeting and Zoom broadcast in which I will be the lead speaker on the water crisis and solutions.
This week saw the deadline set by the Bureau of Reclamation for the seven states of the the Colorado River Basin to submit their plans for reducing their withdraws from the river by 2 to 4 million acre feet for the next few years, beginning in 2023. The states failed to come together and present a plan. The Bureau punted, and gave them more time. Should they fail to come to an agreement by now some date in the near future, then the Bureau will impose its plan. As the director of the Basin for the Bureau has stated, we will not let the river fail.
Our coverage of all this is the main feature of this week’s report.
The Rest of the Report:
This week we have three maps from the U.S. Drought Monitor: A national, a Western states map, and the California map. The national map is included this week because the Northeast of the nation now is in drought. A short article follows on the intensity of the drought in Massachusetts.
Next is a section of the impact of the drought, both in California and Texas, especially. Though the impact is also severe in other southwest and mid-western states also. For space reasons I have heavily excerpted these reports.
I will try to include such broader coverage each week, thus the added subtitle of the report, beginning this week: California Water and Infrastructure Report (With expanded coverage of all the Western States).
Governor Newsom of California appears to be continuing his preparation for a presidential run in 2014, and this week launched his “Proposal to Keep Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant Running Into 2030s.” Such a run would not look good in his resume if his home state continues to experience electricity black outs and cutoffs. We had a warning yesterday for residents to save electricity to avoid cuts to their power, as temperature in parts of the state went over 100 degrees.
We are near the end of August and thus far the fire season has been very mild compared to the millions of acres burned each year for the last 3-4 years. A short report on the current fires is included this week.
