Water facilities

Mitigating the Impact of Extreme Weather and Climate Uncertainty on Reservoirs
Abrupt weather extremes, changing climate and frequent natural hazards such as floods and droughts create challenges for our nation’s aging reservoir systems. Researchers are working to help mitigate these problems.
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Climate Change-Driven Water Crises More Severe Than Previously Thought
The interference of climate change with the planet’s water cycle is a well established fact. New analyses suggest that in many places, runoff responds more sensitively than previously assumed.
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There’s a Deal to Save the Colorado River — If California Doesn’t Blow It Up
After months of tense negotiation, a half-dozen states have reached an agreement to drastically cut their water usage and stabilize the drought-stricken Colorado River — as long as California doesn’t blow up the deal. The plan would cut water use on the river by roughly a quarter, drying up farms and subdivisions across the Southwest.
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A Water War Is Brewing Over the Dwindling Colorado River
Diminished by climate change and overuse, the river can no longer provide the water states try to take from it.
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A Simmering Revolt Against Groundwater Cutbacks in California
In 2014, California legislators, focused on groundwater’s accelerating decline during a prolonged drought, passed the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act. New agencies find making sustainability plans is hard, but easier than persuading growers to accept them.
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Flash Droughts Becoming Big Concern for Farmers, Water Utilities
Many people are familiar with flash floods – torrents that develop quickly after heavy rainfall. But there’s also such a thing as a flash drought, and these sudden, extreme dry spells are becoming a big concern for farmers and water utilities.
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Drought Encouraged Attila’s Huns to Attack the Roman Empire, Tree Rings Suggest
Hunnic peoples migrated westward across Eurasia, switched between farming and herding, and became violent raiders in response to severe drought in the Danube frontier provinces of the Roman empire.
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The Cold War Legacy Lurking in U.S. Groundwater
In America’s rush to build the nuclear arsenal that won the Cold War, safety was sacrificed for speed. ProPublica has cataloged cleanup efforts at the 50-plus sites where uranium was processed to fuel the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Even after regulators say cleanup is complete, polluted water and sickness are often left behind.
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Maintaining Mountain Snowpacks Essential for Preserving Valuable Freshwater Resource
Snowcapped mountains generate mountain water runoff and snowmelt, which flow down to streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans. Around a quarter of the world depends on these natural “water towers” to replenish downstream reservoirs and groundwater aquifers for urban water supplies, agricultural irrigation, and ecosystem support. Carbon mitigation strategies are needed to maintain snowpack throughout the Americas.
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Managing Water Resources in a Low-to-No-Snow Future
With mountain snowpacks shrinking in the western U.S., new Berkeley Lab study analyzes when a low-to-no-snow future might arrive and implications for water management.
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Texas’ Plan to Provide Water for a Growing Population Ignores Climate Change
Texas’ biggest single solution to providing enough water for its soaring population in the coming decades is using more surface water, including about two dozen new large reservoirs. But climate change has made damming rivers a riskier bet.
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Removing One Dam after Another: Water in the West
Many of the cities of the American southwest would not exist were it not for dams. Dams come with a cost, but removing them without offering alternatives is a folly, Edward Ring writes. If the proponents of dam removal would simultaneously support practical new infrastructure solutions, then rewilding America’s rivers could happen without impoverishing the farms and cities that depend on water,” Ring writes. “There is naïveté, and also nihilism, in fighting to remove the building blocks of civilization without facing the realities of energy and water economics.”
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Parched California prepares for first-ever Colorado River Cuts
An emerging deal would cut water deliveries to Southern California — but fall far short of federal demands.
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As Colorado River Dries, the U.S. Teeters on the Brink of Larger Water Crisis
The megadrought gripping the western states is only part of the problem. Alternative sources of water are also imperiled, and the nation’s food along with it.
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Water Plant Breaks Down in Mississippi’s Capital
Jackson, the capital city of Mississippi, has been left without safe water to drink and for other uses after its long-neglected water treatment plant broke down Monday.
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