Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, announced a resolution Friday designating the week of Feb. 26 as Eating Disorders Awareness Week, bringing attention to a serious problem affecting about 28 million Americans while underscoring the need for prevention.
“Eating disorders are serious conditions that are potentially life-threatening and have a great impact on our physical and emotional health,” Sen. Dodd said. “We must improve the public’s understanding of the causes, encourage early intervention and lay to rest the stigma of this pervasive affliction. As someone who’s had a loved one suffer from an eating disorder, I know how difficult it can be, but with support recovery is possible.”
Sen. Dodd’s resolution, Senate Concurrent Resolution 105, raises awareness of a range of significant disorders affecting people across all backgrounds. Conditions include anorexia, bulimia and binge-eating disorders, among others.
National Eating Disorders Awareness Week is a collaborative effort consisting primarily of volunteers, including eating disorder professionals, health care providers, students, educators, social workers, and individuals committed to raising awareness of the dangers surrounding eating disorders and the need for early intervention and treatment access.
California Treasurer Fiona Ma is a co-sponsor of SCR 105. Supporters have included the National Eating Disorders Association, American Nurses Association-California, Cielo House and the Eating Disorders Resource Center.
“Eating disorders affect nearly one in 10 Americans from all walks of life,” Treasurer Ma said. “While common, these serious conditions don’t have to become debilitating or deadly. Let’s break the stigma around anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating so everyone living with these conditions can find the help they need to be healthy. I’m proud to join Sen. Dodd as Eating Disorders Awareness Week will raise awareness and help those affected find hope, the first step in healing.”
“The National Eating Disorders Association is grateful to Sen. Dodd for this resolution recognizing Eating Disorders Awareness Week,” said Doreen S. Marshall, chief executive officer of the National Eating Disorders Association. “Let us all take steps this week to learn more about eating disorders as complex mental health illnesses that affect people of all races, genders, ages and body types. By elevating the national dialogue about eating disorders, we can help to ensure that those impacted by eating disorders are met with compassion, resources and support.”
LAKEPORT, Calif. — On a bright Sunday in the last days of January, the students of Lake County shared their voices through the beauty and power of poetry.
The Soper-Reese Theatre resonated with dynamic recitations by the finalists of Lake County’s annual Poetry Out Loud competition, a national arts program that encourages the study of poetry and culminates in a live, juried recitation event.
The competition was created by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Poetry Foundation and has been proudly hosted for over a decade by the Lake County Arts Council in partnership supported by a grant from the California Arts Council.
This year, four students represented the best of the best from their high schools: Madelin Muniz-Espinoza, Clear Lake High School; David Wilkes, Kelseyville High School; Jocelyn Knapp, Lower Lake High School; and Lily Morita, Middletown High School.
Each of these amazing students had already competed and won first place in the competition at their individual school levels and came to the county level finals with two full length poems memorized for performance.
They had spent weeks studying, memorizing and rehearsing each piece with adult performance coaches Tim Barnes (Clear Lake High School), John Tomlinson (Kelseyville and Lower Lake High Schools) and Michele Krueger (Middletown High School).
The students read in rounds, each presenting one poem per round.
The audience, judges and the Master of Ceremonies Laura McAndrews Sammel, treasurer and a member of the Board of Directors of the Lake County Arts Council, were often moved to tears by the depth of passion and understanding in the students’ poetic delivery.
Jordan O’Halloran was the coordinator of this year’s Poetry Out Loud competition and also had the daunting task of tallying the scores of the tight competition.
She gathered a group of local poets and educators to serve as judges: Lake County Poet Laureate Emeritus Richard Schmidt, artist, writer and teacher Diana Liebe Schmidt, poet and retired educator Pamela Bordisso, political poet and theatrical artist Beulah Vega and poet Brenda Yeager.
In between the students’ recitations, as O’Halloran was tallying the scores, the poet judges read a stunning and diverse array of their original work.
Then, the performances culminated with an exquisite reading by Georgina Marie Guardado, the current Lake County Poet Laureate, who spoke of how moved she was by the caliber of student performances. She honored the students and audience with a reading of her own original work and a poem by the current National Poet Laureate, Ada Limon.
After a tight competition of deeply inspiring recitations, Lily Morita of Middletown High School took first place with her soulful and insightful performances of “Listening In Deep Space,” by Diane Thiel and “Backdrop Addresses Cowboy,” by Margaret Atwood. She will move on to the next level of Poetry Out Loud’s California State final competition in Sacramento.
David Wilkes of Kelseyville High School took second place and will be the backup competitor at Sacramento if Morita should find herself unable to attend.
Madelin Muniz-Espinoza of Clear Lake High School won third place and Jocelyn Knapp of Lower Lake High School was the runner up.
Congratulations and best of luck in Sacramento (and beyond!) to Lily Morita and to all of the student competitors who have moved us with their stunning performances to understand how truly poetry can help us find beauty “when we find each other.”
LAKEPORT, Calif. — A popular downtown Lakeport thrift shop is about to close, but there are hopes that it will return in a new location.
The Lakeport Senior Center’s Meals on Wheels Thrift Store, located at 120 N. Main St., will close on April 30, said Lisa Morrow, executive director of the Lake Family Resource Center, which has managed the senior center since July of 2020.
Morrow said the store stopped accepting donations on Feb. 15 in anticipation of winding down. There are plans for several upcoming sales ahead of the closure, ranging from 25% to 75% off.
The popular store, which opened on Halloween of 2011, has supplemented the Meals on Wheels operations for the last 12 years.
However, sales have dropped, said Morrow, who added that retail sales are down everywhere.
“The sales are just not the same as they used to be,” she said.
The store has an “amazing” group of volunteers, as well as getting help from Ability Road to sort donations, she said.
The senior center has had to hire people to keep the store open, and the rising cost of minimum wage has also had an impact, Morrow explained.
While the drop in sales is part of the reason to close the store, Morrow said the bigger issue is that they can’t keep up with the building’s maintenance, coupled with the rising cost of electricity.
She said the building is hot in summer, has a basement that floods and it leaks in the winter time. The most recent cost estimate to fix the latest leak was $8,800.
“That building is just too much,” she said, adding, “It’s just not a good setup is all.”
The Lakeport Senior Center owns the building outright. Morrow said they plan to put the building on the market this spring rather than continue to put money into it.
Once the dust settles, assuming they can sell the building, Morrow said they plan to reopen a store in a more appropriate location, although they don’t yet know where.
Meantime, Meals on Wheels will continue, Morrow said.
The thrift store has supplemented the program’s main funding, which comes primarily through the Area Agency on Aging.
Morrow said she’s been surprised to find out that community members care so much about the store.
As the changes take place, Morrow said the senior center will look at other revenue streams while it seeks a smaller and more feasible location for the store.
The store’s manager, Sandy Baroni, put a sign on the door that explained the closure and ended with a word of thanks.
“Thank you for your patronage during the past twelve years,” the note read. “It has been my pleasure working here and supporting the Meals on Wheels program for all of that time, not to mention meeting so many wonderful community members.”
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
California could become the first state in the U.S. to welcome a new pair of giant pandas in the latest round of a collaborative conservation effort with China.
The San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance announced that it has signed a cooperative agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association and filed a permit application with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. According to reports, two pandas could arrive by the end of the summer.
“California and China share deep cultural and economic ties, and we look forward to the opportunity to again welcome these iconic bears to the Golden State,” said Governor Gavin Newsom, who led a weeklong visit to China last October. “From securing a safe future for this national treasure to fighting climate change, we’re proud to continue our long history of working together towards shared goals.”
In San Francisco last November during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, Summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping signaled that China planned to send new pandas to the United States as "envoys of friendship” between the nations.
The APEC Summit followed Gov. Newsom’s October travel to China, during which he met with President Xi and other high-level Chinese officials to discuss climate action and cooperation, promote economic development and tourism, and strengthen cultural ties.
The state hopes that this week’s announcement will lead to further exchanges and cooperation between California and China, which have a strong foundation of partnership built by governors Schwarzenegger and Brown and the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, as well as Gov. Newsom while serving as Mayor of San Francisco.
Is local news readily available in your town? Do reporters still cover your school board and other municipal meetings?
If you answered yes, you are likely wealthier than the average American, and you live in or near a metro area.
The State of Local News Project at Northwestern University documents the changing local news landscape across the country. Our latest report shows that where you live and how much money you make affect whether you live in a news desert or a news oasis. This divide is related to other factors affecting the health of our democracy, as analysis of our data by the nonprofit Rebuild Local News showed.
For more than a decade, I have worked in organizations that study and support local journalism, and I’m intimately familiar with both the challenges and the solutions for the local journalism landscape.
Inequity in local news
One of the most vexing problems, as our report shows, is the persistence of inequity between communities that are local journalism haves and have-nots.
The have-nots are news deserts with few, if any, journalists to do the daily newsgathering and reporting that people require to participate meaningfully in their local communities and democratic institutions.
The main challenge for news outlets in have-not communities is the migration of advertising money from the printed page – where it made up roughly 80% of news organizations’ income – to the screen, where it now makes up less than 20%. This decline in ad revenue, a trend for the last decade-plus, has forced many outlets to rely on audience funding, philanthropy, cost-cutting or some combination of the three.
In communities with little disposable income to put toward news subscriptions or donations and no local philanthropies, cost-cutting becomes the only option. This creates a self-reinforcing spiral of lower quality and declining readership and, ultimately, closure.
In 2023, the country lost more than 130 print newspapers, which continue to be the newsrooms most likely to produce original local content that other outlets circulate.
Since 2005, the U.S. has lost almost 2,900 papers.
New digital outlets are not being created fast enough to fill that huge void. The number of digital outlets has held steady at roughly 550 in recent years, with about 20 new outlets opening each year – and roughly the same number closing.
All told, 1,558 of the nation’s 3,143 counties have only one news outlet, while 203 are news deserts with zero, meaning there are likely thousands of communities that simply do not have access to local news.
For example, both Texas and Tennessee had four counties lose their only remaining newspaper last year. All eight papers were independently owned.
What it takes to thrive
Wealthier communities do better sustaining local news organizations.
Our data shows that counties with an average household income over US$80,000 can support a robust local journalism ecosystem – meaning 10 or more outlets. Those with an average household income of $54,000 or less are more likely to be news deserts. By the same token, the percentage of the population below the poverty line in news deserts averages more than 16%, versus 12% in counties with robust markets. This finding aligns with other research, including a previous study I did of local news in New Jersey.
In addition to household income, population density correlates to the number of outlets serving a local community. In our data, counties with 10 or more outlets are overwhelmingly urban or dense suburbia, while news deserts are usually rural – though news deserts also occur in low-income pockets of metro areas. Densely populated communities tend to include higher-income households and have network effects that come from the ability of businesses to reach a larger number of people in a relatively small footprint.
This phenomenon leads to the third factor related to number of outlets in a county: gross domestic product per capita. In any town, city or country, the GDP represents the amount of money netted from sales of services and merchandise, divided by population. For the news oases in our study, the average GDP per capita is $75,140. For the news deserts, it is just $8,964. This difference reflects the retail and services base, and the number of businesses that could buy advertising in their local news outlet, or create jobs that would allow residents to donate to one.
An example that highlights the importance of this factor is the newspaper Moab Sun News, which is thriving in the rural rocky highlands of Utah, thanks in part to a robust tourism industry and retail base. Though it serves a relatively small permanent population of 5,321, the Moab Sun News has built a sustainable business model through strong advertising revenue, a user-friendly website that welcomes subscriptions and donations, and creative collaborations with other community organizations in town.
The final factor that contributes to a community being a journalism have or have-not is access to high-quality broadband. Emerging metrics show that this near-necessity of contemporary life is not yet reliably available to rural Americans.
What’s working
Despite these seemingly intractable problems, solutions to local journalism inequality are becoming clearer.
One is collaboration. For example, in Colorado, the national nonprofit news outlet The Daily Yonder has hired a reporter based in a rural community to write stories about life there and share them out with both local and national organizations.
Another is philanthropy. The new Press Forward initiative has begun local chapters across the country, with at least one planning to serve rural communities. Organizations like the National Trust for Local News have been buying outlets that would likely otherwise be sold to hedge funds, and turning them into nonprofits that will continue to serve their communities.
Public policy should also play a role. At the state level, policies to support local news have seen success in New Jersey, California and elsewhere, and more bills are working their way through state legislatures. People seem to be realizing that having quality local news is just as vital as having public education and access to health care. With any luck, every community will have the opportunity to be a journalism “have.”
But when someone experiences arsenic poisoning, it’s usually not the direct result of a diabolical plot – in fact, it usually isn’t. So how do you figure out how the arsenic got into someone’s bloodstream?
That’s the question a team of fellow chemical engineers and I tackled more than 20 years ago after an abrupt jump in the number of U.S. cases of arsenic poisoning. We later published a peer-reviewed study documenting the investigation.
Finding the source of arsenic poisonings is not always easy, but it’s extremely important for public health. Scientists often need to combine science and detective work, which led us to conclude that landfills could be a significant source of contamination.
Arsenic is a chemical element that occurs naturally in the environment. In its organic form, with a carbon molecule attached, it is harmless. But it is highly toxic in its inorganic form, without carbon. Inorganic arsenic is present in high levels in groundwater in 70 countries, including Chile, China, India, Mexico and the United States.
Prolonged exposure to inorganic arsenic, mainly through drinking water and food, can lead to chronic poisoning, the most characteristic effects of which are skin lesions and skin cancer.
In 2002, I was a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona studying anaerobic processes in nature – or those that occur without oxygen. My colleagues and I were focused on how anaerobic bacteria can change the number of electrons in arsenic, affecting its solubility. This is important because when arsenic is soluble, meaning it can dissolve in water or other liquids, it can become mobile.
Based on that data, we set ourselves the goal of finding out where the arsenic may have come from and exploring what possible human-related activities were involved. To do so, we used the scientific method, which can be summarized in three stages: observation of a phenomenon, establishment of an explanatory hypothesis and validation with experimental results.
After observing the rise in arsenic cases in the data and considering a few possibilities, we hypothesized that arsenic might be escaping from city landfills and entering the American food supply via groundwater.
Arsenic is found in many household and industrial products, from pesticides and food additives to semiconductor chips and pharmaceuticals. And when disposed of, the arsenic in the products can leach from the landfill into the soil.
Investigating a hypothesis
To validate our hypothesis, we designed an experiment that used three biological reactors to simulate the chemical process of how an improperly maintained landfill could leach arsenic into the groundwater. Two of the reactors contained various mixtures of insoluble arsenic and organic and inorganic material, as well as anaerobic bacteria, while the third was used as a control without the bacteria.
About 250 days after our experiment began, we found that anaerobic bacteria and organic matter had transformed the insoluble arsenic, which wasn’t able to travel through water, into its soluble form, which could travel through water. This allowed it to move through the ground as contaminated water, or leachate, and eventually end up in groundwater. From there, the arsenic can find its way to humans via drinking water or the food chain, such as in rice crops or chicken eggs.
To determine what else might be going on here, we teamed up with the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at the University of Arizona. With their help, we detected the presence of cacodylic acid in the leachate. This compound exponentially multiplies the toxic effects of the leachate stream, such as by promoting tumors.
The European Commission seems to be trying to take more aggressive action against illegal landfills, which are less likely to use appropriate safeguards, and recently announced it was referring Spain to the Court of Justice of the European Union for failing to ensure that its landfills – namely, 195 illegal ones – don’t endanger human health or harm the environment.
As our research suggests, the only ways to solve the problem of arsenic leaching into the food supply is by proper landfill design and management, which necessarily involves monitoring and treatment of the leachates they generate.
Moreover, I believe the implementation of a circular economy strategy – in which reuse and recycling are maximized – in the management of cities and in the individual behaviors of citizens would lead to a minimization of waste and also greatly reduce the potential release of toxic heavy metals such as arsenic from landfills.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control has dozens of dogs needing new homes this week.
The Clearlake Animal Control website lists 57 adoptable dogs.
This week’s dogs include “Emily,” a 1-year-old female Doberman pinscher with a red and copper coat. She has been spayed.
There also is “Turbo,” a male Belgian malinois mix with a black and brown coat. He has been neutered.
The shelter is located at 6820 Old Highway 53. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
For more information, call the shelter at 707-762-6227, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.
This week’s adoptable dogs are featured below.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Due to increasing lake levels in Clear Lake, motorboat users are reminded of local recreation Ordinance 3065, which requires idle speed when boating within one-quarter mile or less from the shore of Clear Lake.
“Idle speed” means operating a motorboat at a speed that does not produce a wake, protecting shoreline property and infrastructure from harmful wave action.
This Ordinance goes into effect when the lake reaches 8.0 feet or higher on the Rumsey scale for a 24-hour period.
Clear Lake passed the “full” mark of 7.56 feet Rumsey, the special measure for the lake, since Monday.
As of early Thursday morning, it was at 8.38 feet Rumsey.
The requirements are lifted when Clear Lake drops to 7.9 feet Rumsey, or lower, for a 24 hour period.
Violating this Ordinance constitutes a misdemeanor and may result in a fine not to exceed $500, or up to six months imprisonment in the County Jail.
Please continue to exercise caution due to floating and submerged debris
Additionally, all boaters are advised to use extra caution when operating motorboats throughout Clear Lake due to floating and submerged debris hazards resulting from the ongoing atmospheric river storm events that have occurred in late January and February.
Floating and submerged debris such as trees, branches, full or partial floating docks, abandoned or detached boats, trash, and other objects can cause significant damage, particularly when coming into contact with boats operating at normal to significant speed.
Boaters should remain vigilant and aware of their surroundings and maintain a safe, slower speed when boating throughout all of Clear Lake this time of year.
For questions regarding this topic, or to report in-lake hazards such as debris, floating docks, or missing or found hazard buoys, please contact the Water Resources Department at 707-263-2344 or email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, or VLT, astronomers have characterized a bright quasar, finding it to be not only the brightest of its kind, but also the most luminous object ever observed.
Quasars are the bright cores of distant galaxies and they are powered by supermassive black holes. The black hole in this record-breaking quasar is growing in mass by the equivalent of one Sun per day, making it the fastest-growing black hole to date.
The black holes powering quasars collect matter from their surroundings in a process so energetic that it emits vast amounts of light. So much so that quasars are some of the brightest objects in our sky, meaning even distant ones are visible from Earth. As a general rule, the most luminous quasars indicate the fastest-growing supermassive black holes.
“We have discovered the fastest-growing black hole known to date. It has a mass of 17 billion Suns, and eats just over a Sun per day. This makes it the most luminous object in the known Universe,” said Christian Wolf, an astronomer at the Australian National University, or ANU, and lead author of the study published today in Nature Astronomy. The quasar, called J0529-4351, is so far away from Earth that its light took over 12 billion years to reach us.
The matter being pulled in toward this black hole, in the form of a disc, emits so much energy that J0529-4351 is over 500 trillion times more luminous than the Sun.
“All this light comes from a hot accretion disc that measures seven light-years in diameter — this must be the largest accretion disc in the Universe," said ANU PhD student and co-author Samuel Lai. Seven light-years is about 15 000 times the distance from the Sun to the orbit of Neptune.
And, remarkably, this record-breaking quasar was hiding in plain sight. “It is a surprise that it has remained unknown until today, when we already know about a million less impressive quasars. It has literally been staring us in the face until now,” said co-author Christopher Onken, an astronomer at ANU. He added that this object showed up in images from the European Southern Observatory Schmidt Southern Sky Survey dating back to 1980, but it was not recognised as a quasar until decades later.
Finding quasars requires precise observational data from large areas of the sky. The resulting datasets are so large, researchers often use machine-learning models to analyse them and tell quasars apart from other celestial objects.
However, these models are trained on existing data, which limits the potential candidates to objects similar to those already known. If a new quasar is more luminous than any other previously observed, the programme might reject it and classify it instead as a star not too distant from Earth.
An automated analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite passed over J0529-4351 for being too bright to be a quasar, suggesting it to be a star instead. The researchers identified it as a distant quasar last year using observations from the ANU 2.3-metre telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.
Discovering that it was the most luminous quasar ever observed, however, required a larger telescope and measurements from a more precise instrument. The X-shooter spectrograph on ESO’s VLT in the Chilean Atacama Desert provided the crucial data.
The fastest-growing black hole ever observed will also be a perfect target for the GRAVITY+ upgrade on ESO’s VLT Interferometer, or VLTI, which is designed to accurately measure the mass of black holes, including those far away from Earth.
Additionally, ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, or ELT, a 39-meter telescope under construction in the Chilean Atacama Desert, will make identifying and characterizing such elusive objects even more feasible.
Finding and studying distant supermassive black holes could shed light on some of the mysteries of the early Universe, including how they and their host galaxies formed and evolved. But that’s not the only reason why Wolf searches for them.
“Personally, I simply like the chase,” he said. “For a few minutes a day, I get to feel like a child again, playing treasure hunt, and now I bring everything to the table that I have learned since.”
California is taking advantage of this year’s storms to expand water supplies, building off of last year's actions to capture stormwater.
Last year, the Newsom Administration said its actions resulted in three times more groundwater recharge capacity than would have otherwise occurred.
Since 2019, the governor has allocated $1.6 billion for flood preparedness and response, part of the historic $7.3 billion investment package and to strengthen California’s water resilience.
Here’s what the state is doing this year to capture water:
45 BILLION GALLONS: That's how much water California has either permitted or is working to permit for groundwater recharge, enough for 1.3 million Californians’ yearly usage – all during this wet season alone.
CAPTURING 95% OF STORMWATER RUNOFF: The state-funded Santa Anita Dam captured 95% of the stormwater runoff to groundwater recharge facilities in the San Gabriel River Watershed.
NEARLY $1 BILLION TO CAPTURE MORE WATER: California has distributed nearly $1 billion to support 13 recharge, recycled water, and other stormwater capture projects that will add more than 28 billion gallons to the state’s water supplies every year.
BETTER STORMWATER CAPTURE: California has invested more than $160 million to capture, store, and reuse stormwater runoff – helping local governments like Los Angeles County bolster their stormwater infrastructure. Here’s what we did last year to boost California’s ability to capture water:
EXPANDING SUPPLY & STORAGE BY 358 BILLION GALLONS: California bolstered supply and storage through groundwater recharge and other projects, enough for 2.2 million households’ yearly usage.
EXECUTIVE ORDERS & LEGISLATION TO CAPTURE & STORE MORE WATER: During last year’s storms, Governor Newsom signed executive orders and legislation to accelerate stormwater capture to boost groundwater recharge and other conservation measures.
MORE GROUNDWATER RECHARGE & STORMWATER CAPTURE: The state is expanding groundwater recharge by 180 billion gallons in potential capacity — streamlining permits and $1 billion for groundwater recharge projects.
But more water storage is needed — if the Delta Conveyance Project was in effect, this year alone it could have captured 148 billion gallons of water; the Sites Reservoir could hold enough water to serve 7.5 million people for an entire year.
These winter’s storms are another example of California’s changing climate and shifts from one extreme to another.
California has gone from a historic three-year drought to historic snowpack last year, to a series of very intense, warmer, wetter storms that are bringing more rain than snow.
As of Friday morning, the statewide snowpack is 86% of average for this date, and 70% of its April 1 average, which is considered the peak snowpack for the season.
As outlined in Gov. Newsom’s Water Supply Strategy, these kinds of extremes are why we need to continue to invest and be ready with water management strategies like stormwater capture, groundwater recharge, and recycled water to ensure that our water supply remains safe and reliable in a changing climate.
The Department of Water Resources on Wednesday announced an increase in the State Water Project allocation forecast for 2024.
The forecasted allocation is now 15% of requested supplies, up from the 10% initial allocation announced in December. This translates to about 200,000 acre-feet of additional water for the 29 public water agencies that serve 27 million Californians.
This assessment does not include the results of any of the storms that hit California earlier this month. The State Water Project will review conditions and may revise the forecasted allocation in mid-March.
The February allocation forecast update takes into account snow survey measurements and data up until Feb. 1 and spring runoff forecasts outlined in the first Bulletin 120 of the season.
While California has seen a series of winter storms the past two months, those storms have been warmer and brought historic rainfall to Southern California. Northern California, the headwaters of the State Water Project, has seen less of a benefit from these storms and precipitation for that region was below average.
The State Water Project has been able to take advantage of these storms, increasing storage at both Lake Oroville and San Luis Reservoir. Lake Oroville has increased 460,000 acre-feet and San Luis Reservoir has increased 85,000 acre-feet since January 1.
“We will continue to assess our State Water Project allocation forecast as more storms materialize in February and March,” said DWR Director Karla Nemeth. “This season is an important reminder of our extreme conditions and shift to bigger, flashier storms and the need to continue increasing the state’s ability to capture and store stormwater when it comes as rain instead of snow.”
As of Wednesday, the statewide snowpack is 86% of average for this date, and 69% of its April 1 average, which is considered the peak snowpack for the season.
“January’s storms allowed the state to increase, though slightly, its storage and delivery of much-needed water supplies from the SWP. The storms California has experienced so far have brought historic rainfall to Southern California, while Northern California — where the SWP and its infrastructure begins — has seen less precipitation,” said Jennifer Pierre, general manager of the State Water Contractors.
“With several weeks left in this year’s wet season, we hope more rain and snow can drive this allocation even higher. SWP reservoirs remain above average for this time of year, and following last year’s historic storms, both Lake Oroville and San Luis Reservoir’s storage have increased since the first of the year. And had the Delta Conveyance Project been in place, we could have moved an additional 314,000 acre-feet of water, which would have resulted in a higher allocation,” Pierre said.
Pierre added, “California’s climate extremes — characterized by larger, more unpredictable storms followed by prolonged dry periods — show how critical it is for our water managers to have the ability to make real-time water management decisions based on forecasting and current hydrology, capture as much water as possible when it’s available, and protect water supplies and deliveries for the 27 million Californians who rely on the SWP.”
State Water Project reservoirs remain above average for this time of year, as the state continues to benefit from last winter’s historic snowpack and efforts to capture and store as much water as possible. Lake Oroville, the State Water Project’s largest reservoir, is at 134 percent of average for this date.
With recent storms bringing more rain than snow, DWR continues to work with local water agencies to capture and store as much stormwater as possible. DWR is also supporting efforts statewide to capture stormwater and use it to recharge critical groundwater basins.
Each year, DWR provides the initial State Water Project allocation by Dec. 1 based on available water storage, projected water supply, and water demands.
Allocations are updated monthly as snowpack, rainfall, and runoff information is assessed, with a final allocation typically determined in May or June.