On Nov. 30, the Orange County Water District will turn on what industry experts say is the world’s largest plant devoted to purifying sewer water to increase drinking water supplies. The San Diego City Council approved a pilot plan in October to bolster a drinking water reservoir with recycled sewer water. The mayor vetoed the proposal as costly and unlikely to win public acceptance, but the Council will consider overriding it in early December. Water officials in the San Jose area announced a study of the issue in September, water managers in South Florida approved a plan in November calling for abundant use of recycled wastewater in the coming years in part to help restock drinking water supplies, and planners in Texas are giving it serious consideration. NY Times 11/27/07
Southern California's major water wholesaler announced plans to buy billions of gallons of water from farmers in the state to make up for a shortfall left by drought and restrictions on pumping out of the Delta. Central Valley farmers on the state grid calculate they can make more selling their water allotment than by using it to grow crops. District board members on Tuesday authorized the agency to seek as much as 200,000 acre-feet of water -- about 65.2 billion gallons -- from farmers in the state. Contra Costa Times 11/22/07
Illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries are 50% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to use hospital emergency rooms in California, according to a study published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine. Illegal immigrants, who often work at jobs that don't offer health insurance, are commonly seen as driving both the closures and the crowding of emergency rooms. But the study found that while illegal immigrants are indeed less likely to be insured, they are also less likely to visit a doctor, clinic or emergency room. LA Times 11/27/07
State and federal officials on Monday said they were investigating the death of thousands of game fish in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta after a federal agency drained the water around a protected island during a levee repair. Masses of fish could be seen floating in shallow water on Prospect Island, a 1,253-acre plot next to Sacramento's Deep Water Ship Channel that is administered by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The California Department of Fish and Game launched its own investigation Monday, focusing on how and why the fish died. 11/26/07
The Bay Area’s nine-county pollution agency said Monday it has revamped a proposed charbroiler pollution rule so emission controls would be required only at restaurants that cook large amounts of beef. The California Restaurant Association still opposes the rule even though the group is less upset now that the revamped proposal would exempt places that charbroil chicken and fish or only small amounts of beef. Steakhouses and other restaurants would have to install pollution control devices by Jan. 1, 2013. Contra Costa Times 11/27/07
There were no signs of any deals on Monday on sweeping health care reform and water proposals as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders tried to salvage something from the special legislative sessions called in September. SJ Mercury 11/27/07
The U.S. government is considering listing loggerhead sea turtles that live along California's coast and off Hawaii as an endangered species and further protecting their habitat. CBS News 11/17/07
A pharmacy in San Jose is starting a program to help people dispose of unwanted prescription drugs. Consumers once were advised to flush medicines down the toilet to keep them away from children and pets, but medicines eventually found their way into the nation's rivers, streams and bays, potentially harming people and wildlife. The drugs cannot be filtered out by water treatment plants. Contra Costa Times 11/24/07
Four boats, believed to be from Oregon and Washington, unloaded their hauls of crab Monday and Tuesday at Monterey and Santa Cruz harbors and headed back out to trap a second load, harbor officials and fishers said, causing frustration in Bay Area fishers. Fishers in San Francisco, Half Moon Bay and Bodega Bay have declined to fish until the state Department of Fish and Game confirms the crabs were not contaminated by a Nov. 7 oil spill in San Francisco Bay. The fishers say the crabs are perfectly safe because they were trapped more than 30 miles off the coast, far from the no-fishing zone. Contra Costa Times 11/22/07
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