Word: california
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Buildings may topple and lives may be lost if the Big One shakes the wrong part of California but another catastrophic consequence of an enormous earthquake in the San Francisco area may involve water. Two thirds of the state's drinking water supply flows through the gigantic Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta region east of San Francisco Bay - and the levees that help direct the massive amounts of water south to farmlands and cities are so antiquated that many may simply collapse with a major temblor. The resulting flooding could also put California's huge farm belt, hundreds of thousands...
Everyone has known of that doomsday scenario for years - a time in which the needs of farmers, the ambitions of environmentalists and the thirst of cities clashed. The big news this week is that California finally passed legislation to overhaul the state's aging water system. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called it "an historic agreement" and promised to sign into law. "Water is the lifeblood of everything we do in California," Schwarzenegger said. "Without clean reliable water, we cannot build, we cannot farm, we cannot grow, we cannot prosper." (See a story about the water crisis in the American west...
...years, the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta has funneled the Sierra Nevada snow runoff from the Sacramento Valley in the north to the giant farms in California's central valley and the now nearly 20 million people who live in Southern California. Both the economy and population of California are growing, but the amount of available water remains the same, or declines, as is currently the case with the state's worst drought in two decades. The legislation creates a new seven-member council to oversee and restore the fragile Delta, imposes a 20% conservation mandate for cities...
...Today, the Golden State has nearly 38 million residents and the population is expected to grow to 50 million. In a recent speech, Pat Brown's son, state Attorney General Jerry Brown, the former governor who leads in polls to succeed Schwarzenegger, recounted the perils of water politics in California. In 1981, Brown signed a bill to build a periphery canal, which would have transported Sacramento River water around the ecologically fragile Delta and directly into a southbound aqueduct. "After passage an unholy alliance united against it," said Brown. "Farmers thought there were too many environmental restrictions and environmentalists thought...
...will sign. Many key provisions were weakened during the final weeks of negotiations, and the Sierra Club, for one, opposed the legislation, saying too little is being achieved. But frequent foes in the past, including the Westlands Water District, representing agribusiness, and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the state's biggest urban supplier, came together to support the legislation. "No one is getting 100% of what they want," says Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, a Los Angeles Democrat, but "it is the only way to balance the many different individual interests for the overall greater good...