Federal officials announce: No surface water
The Central Valley will receive no federal river water for farmlands this year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced Friday. The decision leaves thousands of farmers to rely on groundwater aquifers for a second straight year.
Barring a miracle set of storms in the next two months, this marks another historic year of zero allocated surface water from the federal Central Valley Project, which in normal seasons irrigates around 3 million acres or a third of California’s agricultural land.
Last year the reclamation bureau made the same announcement for the first time since the project’s creation in 1933.
David Murillo, mid-Pacific regional director for the bureau, said federal officials are doing everything they can to increase water deliveries in what will likely be the state’s fourth straight year of drought...