Free Republic

A weekend spring storm that drenched the San Francisco Bay area and closed Northern California mountain highways also set a single-day snowfall record for the season on Sunday in the Sierra Nevada. The wet weather system had mostly moved out of the state by Sunday morning, but officials warned that roads would remain slick after around two feet (60 centimeters) of snow fell in some areas of the Sierra. “Did anyone have the snowiest day of the 2023/2024 season being in May on their winter bingo card?” the University of California, Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab asked on the social...

If April showers bring May flowers then what does May bring? Apparently significant snow at higher elevations. The National Weather Service in Reno has issued a winter weather advisory for the greater Lake Tahoe basin and parts of the high Sierra. The NWS says snow accumulations up to three to six inches are expected around Lake Tahoe and six to 12 inches over higher Sierra passes, with up to 10 to 14 inches across the Sierra crest above 7,000 feet. The bulk of the storm moves through Saturday and wraps up by 8 a.m. on Sunday, May 5. Roads, especially...

Water in the aqueduct that helped fuel Los Angeles' growth was flowing toward the city Wednesday for the first time in six months after workers removed an earthen and concrete dam that had diverted runoff to the parched Owens Valley. ... Owens Valley ranchers are .. at the mercy of Los Angeles .. LA owns most of the water rights it furtively bought in the early 1900s in a widely chronicled land grab loosely recounted in the movie Chinatown. William Mulholland conceived the gravity-fed channel to slake the growing city's thirst and famously quipped, "There it is. Take it," as...

When Daniel Wilson learned earlier this year that the state of California wants to bulldoze his family's pear orchard to build a giant Sacramento River water diversion, he and his brother were making a major new investment in the crop. Located near the town of Hood, in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the orchard has grown Bartlett pears for 50 years as the foundation of the family farm. But Bartletts are not as marketable as they once were. So the brothers were grafting thousands of trees to grow new pear varieties – Bosc and River Maid Red – to ensure viable...

Reason TV gives a report on the problems plaguing California’s Central Valley, once a breadbasket to the world, and now a government-created basket case of dust, unemployment, poverty, and now starvation. The short documentary focuses on two federal policies that heavily impact the farming region, the first water policy and environmentalism, and the second immigration: The crisis in the Central Valley comes directly from the application of the Endangered Species Act to the Delta smelt, one of a number of bait fish species indigenous to the area. The order by a federal judge relying on that law cut off irrigation...

LOS ANGELES-"There it is. Take it." With those simple words, engineer William Mulholland heralded the first flow of Owens Valley water into the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The 233-mile conduit would give the booming metropolis its life and turn the valley into a parched desert. Nearly a century later, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is expected to offer his own observations when he pushes the button to return some of the Owens Valley's water to a river left dry by the city's water diversions. The mayor's inauguration of the Lower Owens River Project on Wednesday won't be as auspicious an occasion...