drought – News Agency nabakhabar

Mammoth snow year has lifted half the West out of drought and promises to raise parched Lake Powell by 60 feet

News Agency nabakhabar — Wed, 10 May 2023 14:10:55 +0000

Nearly half of the U.S. West has emerged from drought this spring, but the welcome wet conditions haven’t entirely replenished the region, scientists said Tuesday.

Hydrologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said deep snowpack across much of the West will bring short-term relief, but the equally deep “bathtub rings” at Lake Powell and Lake Mead reservoirs are a reminder of the long road to bringing supply and demand in balance.

This winter brought bountiful and persistent snow from the Sierra Nevada to the Rocky Mountains, stranding residents in their homes while setting accumulation records and pulling a large swath of the region out of drought. The quantity of precipitation is impressive, but the fact that snow stuck around this late in the season is perhaps rare, said Joseph Casola, NOAA’s western regional climate services director.

“With climate warming, the odds for such a long-lived anomaly of cold over a large area like the West — the odds for that just go down and down,” Casola said.

A continued slow melt helps reduce the danger of flooding and delays the onset of the worst wildfire danger in the region. Meanwhile, all that rain and snow means California can provide 100% of the water requested by cities and farms for the first time in years, and is flooding farmland with surplus runoff to replenish precious groundwater.

The big question is how much relief this winter’s snow will bring to the Colorado River, which has been depleted by climate change, rising demand and overuse.

A May 1 forecast by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center said up to 11 million acre-feet of water, or 172% of average, could flow into Lake Powell, a massive reservoir that stores Colorado River water for Arizona, Nevada, California, Mexico and dozens of tribes. That amount could be less depending on how much water the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation spreads among upstream reservoirs.

According to the Bureau’s 24-month operating plan, Lake Powell could rise to around 3,590 feet by mid-summer, up 60 feet from its current state. That’s a level that hasn’t been seen since 2020.

The robust winter takes some pressure off the system and gives states a bit more room to reach an agreement on how to implement water cuts, said Jennifer Pitt of the National Audubon Society, who is working to restore rivers throughout the basin.

As Lake Powell and Lake Mead hit record low levels last summer, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation told states they would need to cut their water use by 15% to 30%. Those cuts are still being negotiated, while federal officials consider holding back more water at the major dams.

“If everybody plays a part in solving the problem and we don’t place the problem entirely on any one user or one sector or one geography, then by spreading the pain, maybe it hurts a little less all the way around,” Pitt said.

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Motorbike ambulance saves mothers and babies in Kenya: UNFPA

News Agency nabakhabar — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 15:10:37 +0000

The hardship being felt across the Horn of Africa by the worst drought in 40 years has left many women weak and malnourished. The UN agency dedicated to women’s sexual and reproductive health, UNPA, is helping save mothers’ lives in Kenya, through the donation of a simple but effective way of accessing hard-to-reach areas – a motorbike, to enable safe emergency deliveries in the hospital.

“I cannot imagine them giving birth without the support of a skilled health professional”, said Mark Epeyon, a community health volunteer at the Katilu hospital in Kenya’s Turkana County.

Since November, the motorbike ambulance has protected lives that would have been lost without prompt transportation to their nearest health facility.

Help on wheels

Even before the current climate crisis, skilled birth attendance rates were low in Kenya. Today the maternal death rate remains high, despite some progress, at 342 mothers per 100,000 live births – nearly 90 percent of which are attributed to inadequate quality of care.

Mathew Bundotich, a medical superintendent at the Katilu hospital, explained that families are now forced to migrate ever further from health facilities in search of water, food and pasture for their animals.

While midwives used to assist at least 60 births every month, he said that the drought has caused ante-natal visits to dwindle.

“We pride ourselves on having recorded zero maternal deaths in our facility over the last year”, said Mr. Bundotich. “But now we have to follow women into their communities in order to reach them”.

Driver on the case

Having worked in the community for more than 11 years, Mr. Epeyon has mastered the art of navigating both on and off-road terrain – quickly locating a mother in urgent need of assistance, even in the most inaccessible areas.

“I became a community health volunteer because I saw the impact that a lack of proper health information and access to services was having on my people”, he told UNFPA.

“When my wife got pregnant the first time, she gave birth at home. Our child developed health complications that have affected him into adulthood”.

Spreading the word

To reach more women and girls in drought-affected communities, Mr. Epeyon has been going door-to-door, telling others about the motorcycle ambulance, and encouraging pregnant women to call him when in need, day or night.

In its first month of operation, the scrambler safely transported five women with obstetric emergencies to the hospital, likely saving their lives and those of their newborns.

Delivering life

As the motorbike can safely and comfortably transport one patient, an outreach medical worker and emergency supplies for on-site treatment, it has significantly reduced the time needed to deliver essential help to those in remote areas.

“In the past, women have given birth on the roadside while trekking to the hospital because they live too far from a health facility”, explained Mr. Epeyon.

“With the motorcycle ambulance, even if a woman delivers on the way, she is able to do so in a dignified manner, on a comfortable stretcher and with the help of a healthcare worker and myself”.

Heartfelt appeal

Due to the ongoing drought, more than 4.3 million Kenyans need humanitarian assistance, including 134,000 pregnant or breastfeeding women.

Through its Response Plan for the Horn of Africa Drought Crisis 2022-2023, UNFPA is appealing for $113.7 million to protect the sexual and reproductive health and rights of millions of women and girls across the region.

©UNFPA/Luis Tato / The ongoing drought has made it much harder for women in Turkana County, Kenya, to access essential health services – a dangerous situation that the UNFPA motorcycle ambulance is helping to address.

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Will California’s extreme storms offset its years-long drought?

News Agency nabakhabar — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 21:38:12 +0000

Located on the West Coast of the United States, California — the country’s most populous state — has experienced a devastating, multiyear drought that has depleted reservoirs, forced officials to plead with residents to conserve water and constrained supplies to vital farmland.

But over the last three weeks, the state has been hit by a sudden, severe series of storms, with more expected in the coming days.

The rain is soaking a state that desperately needs water, even as it takes a devastating human toll. The office of Governor Gavin Newsom estimates that at least 17 people have been killed during the extreme weather.

While experts say the precipitation will help drought conditions, it isn’t yet clear exactly how much. And the rain and snow won’t be enough to fix some of California’s long-term water problems that climate change is making worse.

“We are transitioning to a climate that is warming and arider,” said Jeannie Jones, the interstate resources manager at the California Department of Water Resources.

Here’s how the storms will likely affect California’s long struggle with drought.

Where is the rain helping?

California has experienced heavy precipitation from six atmospheric rivers — narrow bands of concentrated water vapor — in recent weeks.

And the state is bracing for as many as three more, with the wild weather set to continue for at least another week, Governor Newsom said on Tuesday, January 10 from Santa Cruz County, where raging ocean water damaged an iconic wooden pier.

The storms have poured a tremendous amount of water on the state, especially in central California, including the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento Valley. Precipitation is 138 percent of the average for this time of year, officials said. The storms have also dumped snow on the Sierra Nevada mountain range that runs along California’s eastern border.

Most of the state’s reservoirs remain below average for this time of year, but some have begun to fill, especially those close to the hard-hit Sacramento region and along parts of the Sierra Nevada.

The reservoirs are essential for irrigating the Central Valley, a productive stretch of farmland that grows large amounts of fruits, nuts and grains. The reservoirs also supply water to millions of people living in coastal cities.

For example, a small reservoir in Sonoma County that was at roughly half its historical average on December 25 had risen to 80 percent of that average by January 9.

“What we’ve got so far puts us in good shape, probably for at least the next year,” said Alan Haynes, the hydrologist in charge of the California Nevada River Forecast Center.

Snowpack is its own type of reservoir, storing moisture that ideally melts slowly into reservoirs, supplying residents with water during the drier months of summer and fall. But now that snowpack often melts too quickly and reservoirs aren’t able to capture enough of it.

“The California system was built for a climate we don’t have anymore,” said Laura Feinstein, who leads work on climate resilience and environment at San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR), a public policy non-profit.

Where could the storms fall short?

It’s still early in the winter and it’s unclear what the next few months will bring. Last year, statewide snowpack around this time also looked promising. But a few warm, dry months followed, and when the snowpack was supposed to peak in early April, it was just 38 percent of the historic average.

“We are not out of the drought yet,” said Feinstein.

Plus, the storms haven’t dropped as much water in Northern California. The state’s largest reservoir at Lake Shasta, which was at 55 percent of its historical average on December 25, had risen to 70 percent by January 10 — an improvement, but still well below historical averages due to years of water scarcity, according to Haynes.

The atmospheric rivers aren’t striking everywhere. They move around “like a garden hose if you are spraying it across the yard”, said David Gochis, an expert in how water affects the weather at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

“Those biggest reservoirs are just so massive it is probably going to take a while for them to fill,” he said. For some of the biggest, most crucial reservoirs, it may take five or six such drenchings, he said.

David Novak, director of the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center, says the atmospheric rivers still to come will likely be weaker. The problem is the already wet ground will not be able to absorb much more water, creating problems with runoff. In about 10 days, weather patterns may shift and finally “turn off the spigot”, he said.

And the Colorado River, a major source of water for Southern California, has also been stricken by drought that has depleted major reservoirs on that river. The recent storms won’t fix that problem.

What about long-term issues like climate change?

Many farmers in California pump water from underground, with the enormous amounts pulled from aquifers depleting groundwater. Some wells are running dry. It is an entrenched problem and is not going to be solved by a short-term series of storms, experts said.

“Our management of land has prevented it from being recharged very well,” said Mike Antos, a watershed specialist at Stantec, a consulting company. He says the Central Valley needs more places for water flows to seep down and replenish aquifers.

And California is facing a long-term problem. Although there have been some wet years mixed in, California’s drought has been going on for roughly two decades. Climate change is creating drier, hotter conditions. Water evaporates faster. California officials predict there will be less water in the state’s future.

“So in that big picture, this series of storms really is kind of just a drop in the bucket,” Jones said.

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From the Field: Ethiopia’s worst drought threatens ‘deadly consequences’ for women

News Agency nabakhabar — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 09:00:43 +0000

Women and girls face “deadly consequences” in the Somali region of Ethiopia due to the worst drought conditions in forty years, according to the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA.

A family in the Somali region of Ethiopia builds a temporary shelter after fleeing 
their home., by © UNFPA Ethiopia/Paula Seijo

More than 286,000 people have been driven from their homes in the region after crops failed and animals died due to the drought and over 1100 schools are either fully or partially closed, leaving young girls especially vulnerable to sexual and physical violence and coercion, child labor and early marriage.

Women, children and survivors of gender-based violence have reduced access to a range of services including medical and reproductive care, support for newborns and their mothers as well as protection services.

The UNFPA 2022 Humanitarian Response Appeal for Ethiopia is calling for nearly $24 million to strengthen the health system and build back the capacities of maternal and reproductive services in eight crisis-affected regions. To date, just over half of the appeal has been funded.

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California Water Regulators in the Dark on Oil Field Wastewater Risks

News Agency nabakhabar — Fri, 27 May 2022 22:00:52 +0000

California is heading into its dry season after one of the driest winters on record, preceded by a brief reprieve from the worst drought in its history. No wonder water managers in the Central Valley’s parched farm belt are increasingly interested in a controversial practice: reusing oil field wastewater to grow crops.

Last fall, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board assured critics that it had reviewed studies of the practice and found no elevated risks to human health or crop safety. The board focused primarily on one question—are crops grown with produced water safe to eat?—and considered beyond the scope of its responsibility the wider range of potential harms associated with recycling the oil industry’s wastewater.

The board acknowledged that it did not study how long-term use of oil companies’ “produced water” might affect crops and soil that are irrigated with it, or whether toxic chemicals in the wastewater could accumulate over time in the nuts, oranges, and grapes that are sent around the world. Nor did the board consider the ecological risks of spreading oil field wastewater across the land in a county where at least 20 threatened or endangered species live within about a mile of an oil field, a proximity that has already resulted in millions of gallons of oil and wastewater inundating their habitat.

But scientists in other parts of the country have investigated these questions, looking at both the consequences of intentional reuse of oil wastewater for irrigation and disposal and accidental spills of the wastewater on wildlife and the environment. And a growing body of research shows that even highly diluted produced water can harm soil, plants, and aquatic life, and that oil drilling boosts groundwater concentrations of naturally occurring toxic elements like arsenic, and radioactive elements like radium, while also endangering sensitive ecosystems and protected wildlife.

Research over the past several years has shown that produced water can lower crop yields; suppress plant disease defenses; inhibit seed vigor and germination; impair soil health by reducing microbial diversity; and harm fish, amphibians, and mollusks. Scientists have also documented accumulations of metals and other toxic compounds from produced water in plants, including the shoots and roots of grasses and the stems and grain of wheat.

None of these studies have been done in Kern County. But scientists who have conducted, or reviewed, the findings said there’s enough evidence to proceed with caution in California.

“There are a number of studies available now that can help guide what precautions we ought to take and what contaminants we might expect could be persistent or show up,” said Isabelle Cozzarelli, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who has studied the environmental impacts of oil and gas contaminants in several Eastern and Midwest states. “We know enough to know we better be careful.”

Farmers have long struggled to sustain thirsty crops like almonds and pistachios in Kern County, where it rains less than 10 inches in a normal year. And with climate change, hopes of a “normal” year are disappearing faster than the Sierra Nevada snowpack needed to replenish the state’s water supplies.

But as it gets harder and harder to extract California’s tarry crude oil from aging wells, the massive stream of wastewater keeps increasing.

The ratio of wastewater generated to oil extracted has more than doubled over the last 20 years. And Chevron’s sale of produced water to Kern County’s Cawelo Water District increased from an average of 19,000 acre-feet—or about 6 billion gallons—in the mid-1990s to nearly 30,000 acre-feet, or nearly 10 billion gallons, in recent years, as regulators restricted groundwater pumping and surface water allocations evaporated with the drought.

The Central Valley Water Board, which oversees Cawelo and other water districts, approved two applications to expand the use of produced water for irrigation in 2019 and is currently reviewing another application.

More than 14 billion gallons of produced water from Chevron and a handful of other Kern County oil companies now saturate nearly 100,000 acres, about 11 percent of the county’s irrigated farmland.

Irrigation districts that supply the region’s multibillion dollar agricultural industry view produced water as a way to cope with its perpetual water woes. Public interest groups, in contrast, have pressured the state to stop growing food with produced water, citing concerns about potential risks to people, wildlife and the environment.

The Central Valley Water Board responded to the public concern by launching a Food Safety Project in 2015, and retained a firm is described as a “neutral third party” to study potential risks of the practice. In fact, the firm, GSI Environmental, had a long history of working for the oil industry, including Chevron, the largest provider of produced water for farmers.

The board’s review of GSI’s studies noted that chemicals in produced water used for irrigation had the potential to accumulate in crops and soil, said Clay Rodgers, who oversaw the Food Safety Project. Although the studies did not yield “significant differences” that could be attributed to produced water in the crops that were tested, he said, “There is an unknown potential that chemicals from produced water and other environmental sources may be accumulating in the soil.”

The water board is not proposing additional studies to close these data gaps, Rodgers said, “as funding is not available.”

USGS scientists are studying the prospects of reusing industrial waste like produced waters, particularly in drought-prone regions, said Madalyn Blondes, a research geologist with the agency. “If we can do it safely, then we should look into those options.”

She added, “But it’s important to look at what potential impacts are and actually analyze where there might be certain unintended effects.”

“It’s not just a matter of saying everything’s fine, let’s do it,” Blondes said.

Drone footage of a “surface expression,” or spill, in Chevron’s Cymric Oil Field. When oil companies inject high-pressure steam into wells to extract oil, crude and water can erupt through fissures in the ground and reach the surface. California didn’t ban these inland spills until April 2019. (Credit: Tom Frantz)

Unintended Consequences

For decades, San Joaquin Valley farmers enjoyed unfettered access to the state’s aquifers, severely depleting groundwater supplies to cope with droughts.

Former state Sen. Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills) put an end to unregulated pumping in 2014, when she helped pass California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, or SGMA.

But now, Kern water districts are promoting the wastewater of an industry that has contaminated the state’s dwindling groundwater reserves as a resource that instead conserves them.

For Pavley, who also authored the first law requiring oil companies to report how much water they use and what chemicals they add to fracked wells, this approach perverts the intent of the law.

California’s water is in critically short supply, said Pavley, now the environmental policy director for the University of Southern California’s Schwarzenegger Institute. “We need to make sure we’re not contaminating the water we have and affecting the health and safety of people and the agricultural crops people digest.”

Water districts typically blend produced water with ground and surface water before sending it to farmers for irrigation. Kern County is one of the few regions in the country where produced water has low enough saline levels that even lightly blended water doesn’t kill crops outright. That’s partly because seasonal runoff from melting Sierra snowpack recharges the groundwater and dilutes toxic salts.

But climate models suggest that salinity in Kern County produced waters is likely to rise as the planet warms. That’s because county aquifers will see less seasonal influx of freshwater from the mountains as rising global temperatures evaporate more water and keep Sierra snowpack levels low.

Rodgers said the harmful effects on plants and soils that studies outside of California have linked to oil field wastewater are primarily related to salinity, which is not an issue in Kern.

However, recent studies have shown that salt compounds are not the only contaminants that affect plant and soil health.

In 2019, researchers reported the first evidence that produced water can impair plant defenses against pathogens in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

The researchers suspected that it wasn’t salinity that was primarily responsible for weakening the immune responses of wheat plants, but possibly boron and petroleum hydrocarbons. Both contaminants are common in Kern County’s produced water.

And though California still has lower salinity than other groundwater basins USGS scientists have studied, said Blondes, “that doesn’t mean it can’t have high concentrations of other compounds.”

Even when compounds are present at low levels, she added, if you have enough compounds from a similar class, they could combine to prove harmful.

And it’s naturally occurring toxic elements like cancer-causing radium and arsenic left behind in groundwater and surface water by oil extraction that are most concerning to Blondes. “Everyone talks about the risks of fracking fluids,” she said. “But there are lots of naturally occurring chemicals that aren’t additives that have all kinds of environmental and health impacts.”

The Kern River once supported diverse species and vegetation along its banks before thousands of pump jacks claimed its floodplains. (Credit: Liza Gross)

Drowning in Oil Waste

The oil-drilling techniques that generate produced water for irrigation pose serious risks to wildlife and the environment.

To coax Kern’s heavy crude to the surface, oil companies inject high-pressure steam and water into wells. This technique uses so much pressure that, in the county’s highly developed oil fields, it can accidentally force oil and wastewater to burst out through fissures in the earth, causing above-ground spills called “surface expressions.”

Surface expressions weren’t explicitly banned in California until April 2019.

About a month after the state regulated these inland spills, oil and wastewater escaped from wells at Chevron’s Cymric Oil Field, some 140 miles north of Los Angeles. More than 1.3 million gallons of hot oil and water, including 400,000 gallons of crude, gushed up from the earth over four months, turning a dry streambed into a river of oily wastewater.

Wildlife officials found four birds covered in oil but could not save them. Chevron, meanwhile, stood to make nearly $400,000 from selling oil recovered from the spill, state records show.

California fined Chevron more than $2.7 million for numerous violations, noting that the spills caused “significant threat of harm to human health and the environment.”

Crews had barely cleaned up the spill, one of the largest in California history, when hundreds of thousands of gallons of oily water oozed through the ground in another section of the same oil field. More than 5 million gallons of gooey wastewater from these eruptions have reached the surface at an adjacent site since May 13, according to state records.

These types of practices endanger people and wildlife, said Hollin Kretzmann, senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, “but the company hasn’t paid a dime of that $2.7 million fine.”

Chevron representatives said they’ve been working with regulators to resolve the issue.

Sean Comey, senior communications advisor with Chevron’s San Joaquin Valley division, said in an email that Chevron had submitted reports of soil studies and remediation activities to the Central Valley Water Board. “The parties are making progress and continue to engage in good-faith efforts to reach a resolution,” he said.

CalGEM, the agency that regulates oil and gas, did not respond to repeated requests for comment about how the state planned to resolve Chevron’s case.

In 2020, Aera Energy, jointly owned by ExxonMobil and Shell, applied for a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service permit under the Endangered Species Act that exempts companies from prosecution if their operations harm or kill protected species. Aera’s application for an “incidental take” permit seeks protection if current or expanded oil operations over the next 35 years harm any of five protected species: the San Joaquin kit fox, blunt-nosed leopard lizard, San Joaquin antelope squirrel and giant kangaroo rat.

The Center for Biological Diversity has filed comments with USFWS opposing Aera’s application, which is still under review, arguing that climate change is already increasing species extinction risk by disrupting ecosystems. “Any expanded oil operations are inherently incompatible to species protection,” the group said.

“Kern County is smack dab in the middle of a really biodiverse San Joaquin Valley,” said Kretzmann. Aera’s application “is essentially an admission that, ‘Yeah, our oil and gas operations are going to affect these species.’”

Aera did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Intensive oil development has denuded the Kern County valleys where lakes, wetlands, grasslands and saltbush scrublands once dominated the landscape.

An ecological risk assessment is warranted, said Andrew Gordus, a California Department of Fish and Wildlife toxicologist who served on the water board’s expert panel. “But someone has to come up with the funding to do such a study.”

The water board study of wastewater irrigation, said Gordus, who retired last year, had a much narrower focus: “Is the edible part of the plant safe to eat?”

At least 20 threatened or endangered species live within about a mile of a Kern County oil field, where pump jacks suck up oil around the clock. Yet relatively few peer-reviewed studies have investigated the ecological impacts of these oil operations, let alone how intentionally spreading produced water across fields affects native flora and fauna.

Many imperiled species have met their demise in oil waste. Over the years, scientists have found endangered blunt-nosed leopard lizards, San Joaquin kit foxes and giant kangaroo rats, one of the foxes’ primary prey, drowned in oil spills and oil wastewater. All three species are found only in California.

So far, no independent studies have revealed how native plants and wildlife are coping with millions of gallons of hot water and oil inundating their habitat.

Bay Area high school rescues 4,000 endangered salmon from the drought – they’ll grow up on campus

News Agency nabakhabar — Wed, 29 Sep 2021 16:39:58 +0000

During the fifth period at Petaluma’s Casa Grande High School last week, students scooped tiny, wriggling fish out of a tank.

They weren’t dealing with classroom pets. Instead, the 17-year-olds were taking care of some of the state’s last remaining coho salmon at a fish hatchery right on the school’s campus. Last month, wildlife officials moved around 4,000 endangered cohos to the school’s cool, indoor tanks after conditions at a hatchery in nearby Lake Sonoma became unhealthy because of the drought. The high school will receive an additional 650 endangered coho trucked in from Santa Cruz in the coming weeks.

Casa Grande students usually raise steelhead trout native to the local watershed, donated by other hatcheries as a learning experience. But this unprecedented drought year is the first time the school has ever rescued a federally endangered species with nowhere else to go.

“We have this opportunity to save coho salmon, to see that we can do it, if people put their minds to it,” said Cathryn Carlson, 17, president of a nonprofit called United Anglers of Casa Grande, which runs the hatchery. Carlson, who goes by Kate, had just put on boots and waders before hopping into one tank’s chest-deep water to scrub its windows.

In some ways, the timing couldn’t be better for students starved for in-person instruction after being away from the classroom for almost 17 months.

“One of the training we did as educators were how do we deal with students as far as coming off of this distant learning model and being so heavily impacted,” said Dan Hubacker, a science teacher at Casa Grande who runs the hatchery. “These kids are able to bury themselves in something that they can instantly see the reward for and know that it’s right here. It’s tangible.”

Built-in 1993, the classroom and attached hatchery, a slightly larger room with an A-frame roof and blue lights to avoid disturbing the fish, look like a park visitor center, with murals of mountaintop watersheds, and taxidermy grizzly and polar bears flanking the chalkboard. In addition to class, students often come in during free periods and on weekends, since the fish need their sprinkle of fish meal, enhanced with vitamins and minerals, daily. But to get near the tanks, the students first must take a prerequisite class on conservation and biology, and then ace two safety tests.

David Shabo measures young coho salmon being cared for by a group of 

high school students.
Photos by Jessica Christian/The Chronicle

Many already plan to go into the environmental field. Carlson wants to work on the political side of conservation, and student Yessenia Oceguera, 17, hopes to get into the Wildlife, Fish and Conservation Biology Department at UC Davis after community college.

“Working with animals is something that’s always interested me,” said Oceguera, using a plastic pipe fashioned into a vacuum to suction fish poop from the bottom of a tank.

“I like being a part of something and feeling like I’m helping,” said Delaney Ortiz, 17. “I worry a lot about the climate.”

The fish at Casa Grande are juveniles from several genetically distinct groups of the endangered Central California Coast coho salmon that state and federal wildlife agencies are charged with keeping alive — including from the Navarro and Garcia rivers in Mendocino County, the Russian River in Sonoma County and Scott Creek in Santa Cruz County. Smaller in size than king salmon, coho used to run in the tens of thousands through Bay Area rivers and streams, but the population has dropped to the triple or double digits in many habitats.

The fish at the high school are broodstock, which is artificially spawned at hatcheries to produce babies and keep the genetic line intact. Warm Springs Hatchery at Lake Sonoma typically houses coho broodstock — fish not released into the wild — throughout their three-year life cycle and releases the young salmon they produce into Russian River tributaries like Dry Creek. But as the drought lowered the lake to unprecedented levels this summer, the water got dangerously warm, which can cause disease and lower reproduction rates.

“Water temperatures at the hatchery reached a point in June that we had never seen before,” said Manfred Kittel of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The department and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers operate the hatchery with input from National Marine Fisheries Service. “We all collectively agreed we were going to take action.”

The group decided that they’d need to move the broodstock when the water reached 63 degrees. But other government-run hatcheries were dealing with the same temperature issues or were too far away. So they visited the Casa Grande. The facility has several raceways, or long rectangular tanks, and a few round ones that collectively hold 32,000 gallons of water. Because it’s indoors, uses groundwater and has a cooling system, it can be kept at the optimal 53 degrees.

Hubacker “oversees the program in a way that does not expose these fish to any undue risk,” said Kittel, who said the coho will likely be returned to Warm Springs later this year. “We were all very impressed with his professionalism and with the quality of the program, including the students.”

Built-in 1993 with $500,000 in grants, donations and fundraisers, the hatchery might be the only one of its kind at a high school. It was spearheaded by a teacher who had started a local chapter of United Anglers at the school in 1983. Those students spent years restoring several miles of river habitat along Adobe Creek in Petaluma, which then attracted native steelhead trout after years of absence.

“These fish are iconic, critically important symbols,” said Grant Davis, general manager of the Sonoma County Water Agency, a supporter of the program that has also joined the Army Corps is spending $50 million over the past decade on native fish habitat conservation programs in Dry Creek. “Not only is their life history so compelling, in some ways you’re talking about our own survival in the way we’re protecting these watersheds.”

The nonprofit group Monterey Bay Salmon and Trout Project will soon deliver another 650 coho salmon from the Santa Cruz area. The fish’s hatchery was badly damaged in last year’s CZU Lightning Complex fires. The remaining fish there need to be moved before winter because if it rains heavily, debris from denuded river banks of Big Creek and other tributaries near Davenport could form a thick muck that would block the hatchery’s water supply, said Ben Harris, the organization’s executive director. The Santa Cruz fish could stay at Casa Grande through May or June.

United Anglers has a $100,000 annual budget to run the hatchery, with $75,000 from Jackson Family Wines and $25,000 from Sonoma County Water. Students also hold bake sales, and the program does not receive school funding, nor has it received federal or state financial support for hosting the endangered coho. Kittel said wildlife agencies are working on a way to compensate the school program.

Hubacker sees a parallel between taking care of the young fish in order to keep the larger population of endangered coho salmon going to that of maintaining the welfare of his students during such a difficult period for humankind.

“If we want to know what the future holds, what about the kids? How are the children?” he said. And, he added, “If we can inspire just a handful of these kids, look at the impact that’s going to have.”

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‘Once in 100 years’ drought seen affecting Argentine grains exports into next year

News Agency nabakhabar — Thu, 12 Aug 2021 20:47:46 +0000

A once-a-century drought has lowered the water level of Argentina’s main grains transport river, reducing farm exports and boosting logistics costs in a trend that meteorologists said will likely continue into next year.

The South American grains powerhouse is the world’s No. 3 corn supplier and No. 1 exporter of soymeal livestock feed, used to fatten hogs and poultry from Europe to Southeast Asia. Farm exports are Argentina’s main source of hard currency needed to bolster central bank reserves sapped by a three-year recession.

Southern Brazil, the source of the Parana River, has been hit by severe dryness for three years. This has reduced water levels in the hub of the Argentine port of Rosario, Santa Fe province, where about 80% of the country’s agricultural exports are loaded.

“This is about a once-in-a-hundred-years event. That’s the type of frequency we are looking at,” said Isaac Hankes, a weather analyst at Refinitiv, financial and risk business of Thomson Reuters.

On Monday the United Nations climate panel’s report found that climate change is making extreme weather events more common. One meteorologist told Reuters the situation could “even get worse after the rainy season” set to start in late September.

Ships sailing from Rosario are loading 18% to 25% less cargo than normal due to the shallow water, said Guillermo Wade, manager of Argentina’s Chamber of Port and Maritime Activities.

Logistics costs are rising as more soy and corn must be trucked to the Atlantic ports of Bahia Blanca and Necochea, in southern Buenos Aires province, where ships make a final stop to be topped off with cargo before heading out to sea.

The Parana at Rosario was at 0.06 meters on Thursday versus a median 2.92 meters over the last 24 years, according to Argentina Coast Guard data. The measurement is a reference used by ship captains rather than an actual gauge of water depth.

The drying trend in Brazil started in 2019. The next year was drier and 2021 has been the driest of the three years, Hankes said. The effect on the river is cumulative.

Over the last 12 months, the Parana River basin has gotten only 50% to 75% of normal rainfall.

“We would need something like 130% of normal rainfall between now and February to replenish river levels. Anything less than 100% would be bad news for the river basin, and between now and February we expect maybe 80% of normal rainfall,” Hankes said.

“We do expect to see a wetter trend once we get into October-November, which you would typically see in the wet season anyway. But after that our best indications right now are that we could see a similar pattern to last year,” Hankes added.

The usually rainy Southern Hemisphere spring starts in September and ends in December. But the coming increase in water is expected to only temporarily help refresh the Parana.

“It could even get worse after the rainy season,” said German Heinzenknecht, a meteorologist at consultancy Applied Climatology.

“This shallow level of the waterway is historic, and it is hard to predict when it could be reversed,” Heinzenknecht added.

A top Argentine oilseeds executive with an international exporter with a major crushing operation in Rosario agreed that the Parana crisis will probably continue next year. The executive asked not to be named, as per company policy.

“The situation will remain critical until October, improving in the late fourth quarter and first quarter. But from April onward, when Argentina’s soy and corn harvest starts, and the biggest number of cargo vessels are expected, the river at Rosario will be back to a scenario similar to 2021,” the executive said.

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Wildfires rage as US West grapples with heat wave, drought

News Agency nabakhabar — Mon, 12 Jul 2021 18:41:58 +0000

Firefighters were working in extreme temperatures across the U.S. West and struggling to contain wildfires, the largest burning in California and Oregon, as another heatwave baked the region, straining power grids.

The largest wildfire of the year in California — the Beckwourth Complex — was raging along the Nevada state line and has burned about 134 square miles (348 square kilometers) as state regulators asked consumers to voluntarily “conserve as much electricity as possible” to avoid any outages starting Monday afternoon.

In Oregon, the Bootleg Fire exploded to 224 square miles (580 square kilometers) as it raced through heavy timber in the Fremont-Winema National Forest, near the Klamath County town of Sprague River. The fire disrupted service on three transmission lines providing up to 5,500 megawatts of electricity to neighboring California.

A wildfire in southeast Washington grew to almost 60 square miles while in Idaho, Gov. Brad Little has mobilized the National Guard to help fight fires sparked after lightning storms swept across the drought-stricken region.

The blazes come as the West is in the midst of a second extreme heatwave within just a few weeks and as the entire region is suffering from one of the worst droughts in recent history. Extreme heat warnings in California were finally expected to expire Monday night.

On Sunday, firefighters working in temperatures that topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) were able to gain some ground on the Beckwourth Complex, doubling containment to 20%.

Late Saturday, flames jumped U.S. 395, which was closed near the small town of Doyle in California’s Lassen County. The lanes reopened Sunday, and officials urged motorists to use caution and keep moving along the key north-south route where flames were still active.

“Do not stop and take pictures,” said the fire’s Operations Section Chief Jake Cagle. “You are going to impede our operations if you stop and look at what’s going on.”

Cagle said structures had burned in Doyle, but he didn’t have an exact number. Bob Prary, who manages the Buck-Inn Bar in the town of about 600 people, said he saw at least six houses destroyed after Saturday’s flareup. The fire was smoldering Sunday in and around Doyle, but he feared some remote ranch properties were still in danger.

“It seems like the worst is over in town, but back on the mountainside the fire’s still going strong,” Prary said.

A new fire broke out Sunday afternoon in the Sierra Nevada south of Yosemite National Park and by evening covered more than 6 square miles (15.5 square kilometers), triggering evacuations in areas of two counties. Containment was just 5% but the highway leading to the southern entrance of the park remained open early Monday.

In Arizona, a small plane crashed Saturday during a survey of a wildfire in rural Mohave County, killing both crew members.

The Beech C-90 aircraft was helping perform reconnaissance over the lightning-caused Cedar Basin Fire, near the tiny community of Wikieup northwest of Phoenix.

Officials on Sunday identified the victims as Air Tactical Group Supervisor Jeff Piechura, 62, a retired Tucson-area fire chief who was working for the Coronado National Forest, and Matthew Miller, 48, a pilot with Falcon Executive Aviation contracted by the U.S. Forest Service. The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the crash.

A wildfire in southeast Washington had burned almost 60 square miles (155 square kilometers) as it blackened grass and timber while it moved into the Umatilla National Forest.

In Idaho, Gov. Brad Little declared a wildfire emergency Friday and mobilized the state’s National Guard to help fight fires sparked after lightning storms swept across the drought-stricken region.

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Drought, fire and flood devastate Australians in the bush

News Agency nabakhabar — Mon, 29 Mar 2021 20:21:38 +0000

Robert Costigan thought the worst was behind him when he saved two family properties from bushfires a summer ago.

This year, they floated away.

The homes of the Australian cattle farmer and his father-in-law Brian Watt, who lives next door, were swept off their foundations this month when heavy rains caused rivers to reach their highest levels in half a century, submerging bridges and buildings. Watt’s house slammed into a telegraph pole.

“If it wasn’t for bad luck I’d probably have none at all,” Costigan told Reuters at his 100-acre property at Hollisdale, 400km (249 miles) north of Sydney.

Days after the floods, the property was strewn with upended farm equipment, trees and debris.

“I don’t know whether it’s just someone testing me or what, but it is what it is I guess. You get through it,” he added, fighting back tears.

Costigan’s ordeal is familiar to thousands living outside cities on Australia’s densely populated east coast.

After years of drought devastated crops and livestock, they battled the country’s worst wildfires in a generation in the Southern hemisphere summer of 2019-20, only to face flooding amid a La Nina wet weather event this year.

The same river system Costigan pumped water from to save his house from the bushfires has returned to destroy it with flood.

Water levels have subsided but insurers have written off the building, with structural timber torn loose, tin roofs crushed and everyday objects – a mattress, a fluffy child’s toy – reduced to a sodden mess.

When the fires hit, the family kept safe in town as Costigan remained at the property in an effort to protect it. Now they are all staying with neighbours, homeless and heartbroken.

Two days before the house was swept away, Costigan’s daughter Eva had to cancel her 11th birthday party due to the flood.

“She was upset about that and then we had to tell her that she lost her house Saturday morning. All the presents that she got Thursday are gone,” Costigan said.

Still, the 39-year-old farmer, who also works for the local council, vowed to rebuild.

“I’ve worked too hard to just walk away from it,” he said.

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Lesotho: Tens of thousands ‘one step away from famine’ as drought impacts harvests and UN launches flash appeal

News Agency nabakhabar — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 12:59:26 +0000

The $34 million flash appeal will support more than 260,000 people “with lifesaving interventions” until April next year, Jens Laerke from the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told journalists in Geneva.

“Most of the food insecure people are in rural areas and we estimate that at the peak of the lean season, which runs from January to March, some 71,000 people will face emergency conditions in rural districts. That is IPC phase 4 – one step away from famine,” the spokesperson added.

Ten districts in the small landlocked southern African nation are already “severely food insecure”, according to OCHA, with rural smallholders worst-hit.

Increasingly, women and girls “have reportedly left their rural homes to urban areas or South Africa in search of work, mostly as domestic workers trading sex for money or food” it warned.

One worry linked to this migration is that Lesotho has the second highest HIV prevalence rate in the world, at more than one in four people.

“It makes particularly women and children, girls in particular, very vulnerable to sexual exploitation and abuse,” Mr. Laerke said.

Citing the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification food security assessments, often referred to by the acronym IPC, the spokesperson explained that the 2018/2019 planting season had been badly affected by late rains and scorching temperatures.

And with forecasts indicating that Lesotho will receive below-average rainfall during the current 2019/2020 season – October to March – communities now face three back-to-back failed harvests.

The most vulnerable are in Leribe and Maseru districts.

More than 25% of the country severely food insecure

Today, “a total of half a million people – that’s more than a quarter of the population of Lesotho…are facing severe food insecurity because of severe drought which has gripped the country at the same time as people are approaching the peak of the lean season”, Mr. Laerke said.

According to OCHA, food insecurity levels are 64 per cent higher than last year, when the number of food insecure people was around 309,000 (257,283 in rural areas, 51,683 in urban zones).

Highlighting the catastrophic impact of the extreme weather on harvests, Mr. Laerke said that overall cereal production had decreased by more than 60 per cent compared to 2018.

Individual crops have suffered even greater losses, such as maize and sorghum, which respectively saw reductions of 78 and 93 per cent.

“The Government of Lesotho on 30 October declared a national disaster and issued a drought response and resilience plan,” he said. “Our flash appeal will support that plan.”

The UN appeal aims to conduct awareness-raising sessions and distribute life-saving information materials about risks of irregular migration, gender-based violence, violence against children, child marriage, trafficking in persons and how to report abuse.

Lesotho’s $83 million Drought Response and Resilience Plan aims to help more than 508,000 people, including 68,250 children.

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