Problems were first publicly revealed in January after public complaints about discolored water. This led Fresno officials to review how the city dealt with complaints and whether it had complied with laws requiring water issues be reported to state regulators.

This review led to a grim discovery: A former city water official kept hidden several hundred complaints from about 2004 to 2011, raising the prospect that thousands of young Fresno residents among the city’s half-million population may have been exposed to lead poisoning growing up, which can cause cognitive problems that persist for a lifetime.

Mayor Ashley Swearengin, City Manager Bruce Rudd and public utilities director Thomas Esqueda outlined what they had found at a grim news conference last week. They said Robert Moorhead — who ran the water plant in the northeast part of Fresno where water complaints have been most common — had kept complaints to himself on his private computer and personal cellphone.

By law, Moorhead was required to pass along the complaints to the State Water Resources Control Board. City officials said he was also supposed to inform his boss, at the least. Instead, he kept quiet about an estimated 150-200 annual complaints for seven years until his firing for undisclosed reasons in 2011. The reason for his silence may have been his apparent failure to make repairs to his water plant in 2005 despite direction to do so from his boss.

Moorhead, however, told local media that he was being made a “scapegoat” for decisions made above his pay grade. He said he was responsible for the water plant, not water distribution, and that he had done his job well.

Lead contamination in 18% of examined homes

The revelations have triggered alarm in the city’s northeast neighborhoods. So far, the city has found evidence of lead contamination in 51 of the 280 homes it had inspected as of late July — about 18 percent. The problem has been fixed in 11 homes.

Problems in Flint appear far worse. A federal state of emergency was lifted Sunday for the Michigan city, but problems with water supplies remain, and there is vast public anger over a contamination problem that began in April 2014 when local officials began using cheaper water from the polluted Flint River instead of water from Lake Huron delivered by the city of Detroit’s water department 70 miles to the south. Up to 45 percent of households in the city of 100,000 had water with dangerously high levels of lead. There are also concerns about children exposed to lead in water at local schools. Nine officials face criminal charges for not disclosing the problem.

The state of emergency was lifted after Virginia Tech researchers reported considerable improvement.

One of those researchers, Marc Edwards, along with Vernon Snoeyink of the University of Illinois are leading the independent investigation of Fresno’s water woes.

The latest measurement …  showed that the “snowpack is growing quite nicely.”

 

Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program for the California Department of Water Resources, said the measurement was 130 percent of average at Phillips Station off Highway 50 near Sierra-at-Tahoe Road. He says the storms are making a difference in building snowpack so far this winter.

 

“These are not major storms, but they are making a difference in terms of snowpack accumulation,” Gehrke says. Gehrke says “this snow is not going anywhere” and will be important for “reservoir recovery.”

 

Both the depth and water content at Phillips Tuesday were the highest since 2005, when a depth of 77.1 inches and water content of 29.9 inches were recorded, according to the DWR.

While the snowpack is the most crucial measurement, since the water it provides lasts for months to come and helps communities statewide, the drought news was also good on many other fronts. Here’s one example:

San Francisco recorded an impressive 6.94 inches of rain during the month, far above the 4.5 inches it averages in January and the most the city has seen in any January since 2008 … . The total, in fact, is more than the city received over the past five Januarys combined. (Don’t forget: San Francisco saw no rain for the first time in 165 years of record-keeping in January of last year.)

That’s from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Water officials: Too early to ease tough rules

But as the Sacramento Bee reported, state officials object to any complacency on the drought front:

California’s drought regulators agreed Tuesday to extend water conservation mandates through the end of October. The decision came in spite of increasing evidence that El Niño is delivering better-than-average precipitation, including an encouraging measurement of the Sierra Nevada snowpack recorded just hours earlier.

 

The new regulations adopted by the State Water Resources Control Board mean urban Californians will have to reduce their water usage between March and October by about 23.4 percent compared with the baseline year of 2013.

 

That represents a slight easing of the existing mandates expiring this month, which require a savings rate of 25 percent compared to 2013. Sacramentans will be among the main beneficiaries of the relaxed rules, as the state board voted to ease requirements for hot inland communities where it takes more water to keep trees and lawns alive.

Nevertheless, as CalWatchdog reported on Jan. 19, state officials have already acted to ease conservation rules announced by Gov. Jerry Brown a year ago. Bureaucrats appear to be trying to strike a balance — acknowledging good news on the water supply front without discouraging conservation efforts that have been strikingly successful at times.

But a California-based journalist who specializes in science reporting based on hard evidence — Hank Campbell, author of “Science Left Behind” and founder of the popular Science 2.0 website — takes a broader view based on the last 50 years of state governance.

In an essay titled “California Government Is The Big Water Management Problem,” featured on the Real Clear Science site, Campbell notes that ….

… much of the fresh water that California has runs into the Pacific Ocean. You might wonder why the Pacific Ocean needs so much, since 96 percent of Earth’s water is already in oceans, but the oceans are not asking for it. Instead, it is due to anti-science policies lobbied for by well-heeled California environmentalists.

Environmental regulations mandate that water that would sustain 4.4 million families gets flushed this way, regardless of drought conditions (however, farmers do get penalized during a drought, the environment must come before food). Meanwhile, Governor Jerry Brown just now got around to mandating water conservation among his wealthiest and most loyal voters. It had to be mandated because the wealthy are not conserving anything the way the more agricultural sections of California have been doing for two years. …

[If] we cared about the actual problem — having enough water in good times and bad — the situation would be easy to resolve. For example, enough water to sustain 2.6 million California families was dumped into the ocean because there isn’t enough storage capacity in the north of the state and environmental rules limit the amount of water that can be pumped to reservoirs in the south.

An intentional effort to not prepare for drought

Campbell notes that this isn’t just a failure of government foresight. He says this inaction was the goal of powerful interests.

Why not allow more water to be stored in the south or build more reservoirs in the north instead of dumping fresh water into the ocean? Californians know water is important, we have agreed to water bonds totaling $22 billion in recent years, but the money has ended up going to environmental projects rather than things that help the people paying interest on those bonds.

Most of California is actually desert, the green parts are all watered to be that way, and we know droughts will happen — this is the fourth one in 50 years — so it would make sense to store more water, a literal anti-rainy day plan. But environmentalists block all efforts to create more reservoirs even though we know this sort of thing has always happened and will continue to happen. ….

Because of environmental impact lawsuits and lobbying by environmental groups, there hasn’t been a real investment in water infrastructure since the 1960s, when there were only 16 million people in California. Now there are 40 million people all using the same major infrastructure. …

The common denominators in our water problem are a lack of snow and lawsuit-driven, rather than science-driven, environmentalism. We can only fix one of those.

Greens bitterly fight desalination plants

California environmentalists have also been the biggest opponents of a soon-to-open desalination plant in Carlsbad and one proposed for Huntington Beach. They say it is because of legitimate concerns about effects on fish, ocean water quality and the coastline.

Defenders of desalination efforts, such as former state Sen. Mark Wyland, R-Carlsbad, say that many greens’ real long-term goal is blocking growth or making it more difficult. Constricting water supplies could be seen as a tactic toward that end.