California Awards $3 Billion in Water-Storage Projects

The California Water Commission awarded nearly $3 billion in funding to help kick-start a range of water-storage projects, including a new reservoir in the state’s biggest such investment in a generation.

By Jim Carlton

Dam Reservoir Lake Shasta, Representative Image, Source: Pixabay

The commission took the conditional action at a meeting in Sacramento Tuesday, four years after California voters approved the expenditure of $2.7 billion in bonds when the Golden State was suffering its worst drought on record.

A total of eight projects that would add the equivalent of a new Shasta Lake received the funding, including the proposed Sites Reservoir 75 miles northwest of Sacramento, which got about a third of the money and would be California’s first new state reservoir in decades.

Unlike more controversial dams that block rivers, Sites would be built in a farm valley without any streams. Instead, Sites would fill up in unusually wet years with water that now mostly ends up in the ocean. It would hold 1.8 million acre-feet of water—enough to roughly meet the needs of nine million people for a year.

Supporters of the project say it would add a badly needed cushion to the state’s water reserves. Little new surface storage has been added in California over the past 40 years, as its population has nearly doubled to about 40 million even as the weather has become hotter and drier.

Read full article: The Wall Street Journal

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Taxonomy

• Resource Management
• Water Resource Management
• Drought
• Sustainable Water Resource Management
• Natural Resource Management
• Lake Management
• Water Supply
• Infrastructure
• Dams
• Reservoir
• Water Resource Management
• green infrastructure