In a dry year, Cloverdale will be short of water by a third. That is the city’s own estimate. It is published in a new draft plan posted to the city’s website on Wednesday. And it is the first time a Russian River town has put a number on what life will look like after…
Category: Water
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Federal gauges below Lake Sonoma have gone dark just as Sonoma Water calls a dry year on the Russian River
The river at Guerneville more than doubled within the same week. The public gauges that would tell us why have nothing to say. When Sonoma Water put the upper Russian River into a “dry water supply condition” on April 16 — the first such call in years — the regional coverage looked exactly one direction:…
The Lake Sonoma contract the board no longer votes on
For forty years, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors voted every spring on the same small contract — Sheriff’s deputies patrolling Lake Sonoma from May through September, paid back by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. They asked questions. They kept watch. This spring the vote didn’t happen, and it won’t happen again. The contract…
Photo courtesy City of Cloverdale
Cloverdale’s own water plan says the city doesn’t need the Eel River dams its vice mayor is fighting to save
Cloverdale Vice Mayor Todd Lands has spent the better part of this month working the phones with the Trump administration, lobbying USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins and her staff to derail PG&E’s plan to tear down the Potter Valley dams. He told the Press Democrat last week that 750,000 people in the Russian River basin depend…
Lake Mendocino.(Alexey Komarov)
The lake that feeds the upper Russian River is losing ground
Lake Mendocino was about 10,000 acre-feet above the threshold for critical conditions on April 24. Operators have already cut Coyote Dam outflow by about 65%. Lake Mendocino is getting tight, and Russian River releases are dropping Lake Mendocino entered the last week of April with less room than water managers want heading into summer. On…
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Three years in: Is Sonoma County’s groundwater plan actually working?
The well at the back of your property doesn’t care what’s in a state filing. It runs, or it doesn’t. For thousands of Sonoma County households on private wells, that is the bottom line of the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, the 2014 state law that forced local agencies to manage several of the county’s most…