The Fish and Wildlife Service also offered the broad scientific explanation for the pond’s color: “It’s natural. Tiny microscopic organisms specialized to live in very salty water live here, including the microscopic algae known as Dunaliella salina and halobacterium.”

Meanwhile, Santa Clara County Parks explains on its website that a nearby levee project could be making A12’s water pinker than usual: “In 2021, Valley Water, the State Coastal Conservancy and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) began construction of the South San Francisco Bay Shoreline Project (Phase I) between the Alviso Slough/Guadalupe River and Coyote Creek. The levee construction requires very low water levels, therefore we did not replenish water into these ponds as they naturally evaporate throughout the summer. As a consequence, Pond A12 got saltier and pinker.”

ACAPULCO, Mexico — During the first minutes of Oct. 25 when Hurricane Otis roared into Acapulco Bay with 165 mph winds, sailor Ruben Torres recorded a 10-second audio message from a yacht called the Sereno.

“All things considered I’m alright, but it’s really horrible, it’s really horrible, it’s really horrible,” he said over the howling wind and the boat’s beeping alarms. “Family, I don’t want to exaggerate, but pray for us because it’s really awful out here.”

The Sereno was one of 614 boats — yachts, ferries, fishing boats — that according to Mexico’s Navy were in the bay that night and ended up damaged or on the ocean floor. Of those aboard the Sereno, one person survived, while Torres and the boat’s captain remain missing.

Otis killed at least 48 people officially, most drowned, and some 26 are missing. Sailors, fishermen and their families believe there are many more.

Sailors in the region typically board their boats during a storm rather than stay on land where they’d be safe, so that they can bring the boats to sheltered parts of Acapulco Bay instead of leaving them where a storm could slam them against docks and do damage.

But Otis was no normal storm. When sailors went to sea that day no one expected that the tropical storm would strengthen to a Category 5 hurricane in 12 hours and make a direct hit on Acapulco, leaving no part of the bay safe.

Susana Ramos, the wife of Ruben Torres, heard her husband’s message only days later.

Torres’ family knew his routine when a hurricane approached: He went aboard to help care for the boat and the crew sailed it near the naval base in an area more protected by mountains that ring the bay. Ramos prepared dry clothing for his return.

Around 7 p.m. Oct. 24, Torres spoke to his oldest son, now 14. Ramos overheard him describe how it looked then with whole hillsides in Acapulco going dark as the power started to fail. But Torres said he had his lifejacket at the ready and the engines going in case.

Hours later, the family’s home began to flood. Buckets of water were entering. “The walls were like they were crying,” Ramos said. But the really scary part was “the penetrating hissing of the air” like the screeching of a tire over their heads and the creaking of the house.

She remembered that her husband always said don’t fear the water, fear the wind.

When Torres recorded that last message asking his family to pray for him, a dozen members were huddled inside the concrete house.

Otis’ damage on land was evident at first light. The city awoke isolated, without power, phone signal or water. Tens of thousands of homes were destroyed, entire neighborhoods flooded, luxury hotels were hollowed out without walls or windows. Trees, power poles and debris were everywhere.

Details of the situation at sea have trickled in more slowly.

Alejandro Martínez Sidney, a business leader and member of a fishing cooperative, has been hearing the accounts of surviving sailors. He said they were caught by surprise at the storm’s sudden strength. An alert went out about 10 p.m. on the night before Otis made landfall, telling sailors to beach their boats.

“It was too late,” Martínez Sidney said.

Many, like Torres, had already sailed to what were believed to be more protected parts of the bay. Others, who didn’t want to damage their boats by beaching them, followed suit but ended up trapped in a whirlpool in the middle of bay, he said survivors told him.

It was like a “mega tornado” that devoured them, Martínez Sidney said.

Ramos was worried. The next day she crossed 8 miles of devastated cityscape – walking through mud, riding a motorcycle, and hitching rides on trucks — to reach the Sereno’s dock.
Seeing boats aground on Acapulco’s waterfront boulevard shook her. Looking out to the bay, the boats looked like old, wrecked toys, she said.

Shouting her husband’s name, she pushed through other families looking for their loved ones. She was taken to see six bodies that had been recovered. None was from the Sereno.

Then she started to check hospitals, lists of dead and missing that began to circulate. She went to the naval base, the morgue. There she had just enough battery on her phone to show them a photo of Torres.

She said that when she heard an official say that if they confirmed anything they would call her, she understood that she would have to be the one to look for him.

Several days later, when power and a phone signal began to return sporadically in some areas, she finally got her husband’s message. It made her feel powerless.

“It’s so heartbreaking for me to have that last message,” she said.

Sailors and fishermen immediately started searching in whatever craft remained seaworthy. Sometimes they had to siphon gasoline from parked cars for their motors.

Some yacht owners, like that of the Sereno, rented boats and small planes to search while also getting necessities to crew members’ families who had lost everything.

Ramos and her brother-in-law crisscrossed Acapulco on a motorcycle, chasing rumors of survivors. A crew member from the Sereno was found alive on an island in the bay.

The sailor told Ramos through tears how they had all jumped into the water with their lifejackets on, but that he had managed to cling to a floating marine fender, a bumper-like device from the boat that saved him.

Families have protested that authorities should lead the search because they have better equipment.

Enrique Andrade, a teacher searching for his younger sister Abigail who was aboard a ship called the Litos, said he has accompanied the Navy, divers and agents from the state prosecutor’s office on searches. Of the Litos, they’ve only found “a little door,” he said.

Andrade said authorities did not do enough to warn crew members. “The Navy knew what was coming, the sea terminals knew too and they still didn’t share the information” soon enough, Andrade said.

The Navy has recovered 67 small boats, but there are more than 500 more longer than 40 feet, according to Alejandro Alexandres González, a captain who spoke to reporters during one search effort.

Ramos’ life now consists of a daily visit to the morgue, where samples of her children’s DNA have been taken, and perching her cell phone at a window of her home where there sometimes is a signal, in case of news about her husband’s whereabouts.

Sleeping in her mother’s embrace and thinking of her children has given her strength.

The small grocery she had rented to help her husband pay off their debts and live in a neighborhood with less violence was one of the thousands of businesses cleared out by desperate residents after Otis. She tries to convince herself she will be able to start over.

Showing photos of the 10th birthday of their youngest daughter they had celebrated a week earlier, Ramos said the girl had kept her eyes on the door hoping her father would return.
Ramos hopes that on Nov. 17, when her husband would turn 33, they will have news.

“It would be really great if they told me, at least, there he is; a miracle if they would tell me, he’s hospitalized there, come … and I would carry him back.”

AP videojournalist Fernanda Pesce contributed to this report.

A major U.S. government report published today describes how intensifying climate change is disrupting lives and businesses nationwide, even as communities in every state ramp up their response to the crisis.

Over some 2,000 pages, the Fifth National Climate Assessment provides a climate-themed tour of the country, identifying the impacts plaguing every region, how communities are increasingly protecting themselves and how much more action is needed to ensure a safer future. Mandated by Congress and led by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, hundreds of climate experts, from both inside and outside of government, contributed to this assessment. The fifth edition of the report follows the fourth edition, which was published in phases in 2017 and 2018; the first assessment appeared in 2000.

Here are the report’s five main takeaways:

1. Climate impacts are here, getting worse and costing a lot of money.

The first sentence of Chapter 1 summarizes the nation’s sobering reality: “The effects of human-caused climate change are already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States.” A small taste of what that means: Warming is happening everywhere, and nighttime temperatures are rising faster than daytime temperatures in most places, notably reducing crop yields in the Southeast.

Warming isn’t just playing out on land. Hot oceans are shifting the distribution of certain marine species, pushing some fisheries to the brink of collapse. Minor and moderate coastal flooding is also on the rise along most Atlantic and Gulf coastlines, a combination of rising seas impacting flooding from high tides and big storms. Meanwhile, warmer winters are contributing to declining snowpack levels in the Northwest, affecting water supplies and recreation industries.

But the most devastating way people experience climate change is in the form of major disasters, which are not only knocking out power and bringing daily life to a standstill but also destroying homes and claiming lives. Between 2018 and 2022, the country experienced 89 disasters that each cost at least $1 billion in damages — a mix of droughts, floods, severe storms, tropical cyclones, wildfires and winter storms. During that time, Texas alone experienced $375 billion in disaster damages.

2. Certain communities are at higher risk.

3. Climate solutions are already being deployed nationwide.

The burning of fossil fuels is the primary driver of greenhouse gas releases into the atmosphere, which are causing the planet to warm. Knowing the source of the problem means we also know how to stop it: by cutting emissions, which can be achieved by transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner forms of energy, and possibly by using a mix of natural and manmade processes to pull carbon dioxide and other emissions directly out of the air.

In the U.S., efforts are already well underway to do this. “Annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions fell 12% between 2005 and 2019,” largely due to natural gas replacing coal for some electricity generation, the report states. Between roughly 2010 and 2022, cumulative onshore wind capacity, utility-scale solar and EV sales have all gone up nationwide as costs associated with these low-carbon technologies have dropped.

Moreover, since 2018, the number of city- and state-level adaptation plans and related actions around the U.S. increased by nearly a third. There was also a smaller increase in new state-level efforts to rein in emissions during that time.

Take the city of Pittsburgh, which committed in 2021 to be carbon neutral by 2050 and in 2022 started requiring new developments to plan for heavier rainfall. Then there’s Phoenix’s adoption of a climate action plan in 2021, committing the city to net zero emissions by 2050.

4. Today’s efforts aren’t nearly enough to halt global warming.

Back in 2015, the U.S. joined the Paris Agreement, agreeing to limit future global warming to well below 2C, ideally to 1.5C, compared to preindustrial levels. President Joe Biden then set a national target for the U.S. to cut its emissions by at least 50% by 2030 compared to 2005 levels. Now the reality check: The world is on track to warm above 2C, in part because the US, the second biggest current emitter and largest historical emitter, is not on pace to meet its goals.

U.S. net emissions would have to fall by more than 6% each year on average to meet existing targets, according to the report. In contrast, U.S. emissions fell by less than 1% per year, on average, between 2005 and 2019.

5. What now? It depends on us.

The science is clear: The more warming there is, the worse the impacts will be. In a world where the increase in global average temperatures reaches 2C, compared to the preindustrial era, the average increase in U.S. temperatures will very likely be even higher, between 2.4C and 3.1C. Science can’t tell us exactly how hot the planet will get because that depends on what we — society as a whole but especially our political leaders — decide to do. In the U.S., and elsewhere in the world, people have a choice right now to do more to cut their carbon footprint and prevent much worse warming.

“How much more the world warms depends on the choices societies make today,” states the report. “The future is in human hands.”

___

©2023 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Several companies blamed the weather at least in part for disappointing financial results in 2023. Following a rainy spring, smoke from Canadian wildfires and the brutal heat of summer, enough people stayed home that the parks noticed their absence on their bottom lines.

Not every park suffered, however. The new Super Nintendo World pushed Universal Studios Hollywood to record attendance numbers this year, while the Disney100 celebrations and new attractions helped Disneyland put even more distance between itself and other local rivals. The success that Disney and Universal enjoyed this year showed that it is possible to build attractions whose popularity is resistant to outside challenges, including the weather.

Companies such SeaWorld and the soon-to-be combined Six Flags and Cedar Fair might hope that investors see this year’s bad weather as an unusual circumstance. But anyone who has been following the news about climate change has reason to fear that this year’s wild weather is more likely a step toward a new, harsher normal than some kind of one-off.

Even Disney and Universal are not immune from the weather. In Florida, the traditional afternoon thunderstorms failed to materialize for much of the summer this year, leaving visitors melting in brutal heat and humidity. In both Florida and Southern California, summer has lost its former status as the “high season” for theme parks, as more and more visitors choose instead to visit in the more temperate spring or fall.

So how can parks better weatherproof themselves? SeaWorld has introduced a weather guarantee that includes extreme heat for its parks. But that only helps visitors whose trips are interrupted by variable weather — it rains one day, but the sun comes out the next; it’s hot one day, but then turns pleasant. When the temperature blows past 95 degrees every day, without relief, a weather guarantee provides no comfort to tourists who must go home at the end of the week.

Parks will need capital design changes to provide the comfort that visitors need as once-pleasant destinations become hotter and harsher. Yet the answer is not to encase parks entirely indoors, as we are seeing the Middle East. People have biological and emotional needs for sunshine, especially when on vacation.

The next generation’s theme parks will need to minimize the walking space between attractions. That space will need to be filled with shady trees and cooling landscaping, not cheap concrete and tarmac. Waiting, dining and shopping areas will need to be indoors, or at least covered and cooled, but with natural light shining in, where thematically appropriate.

Most of all, rides and show will need to be so compelling — and comfortable — that people will be willing to come out and experience them. Bad weather is not an excuse for theme parks to dismiss. Bad weather is the design challenge that will determine the industry’s future.

The director of the California Mountain Lion Project at UC Davis’ Wildlife Health Center, Vickers, 68, is one of the most experienced cougar experts in the U.S. He raves about his close encounters with the majestic predators.

“When you handle them, oh my gosh, look at their claws and those teeth! They weigh about the same as me,” the tall and trim, gray-haired researcher says with playful envy in his voice, “but holy smokes, unlike me, they’re all muscle!”

The UC Davis project, which has worked with mountain lions in Southern California for more than two decades, uses cameras and tracking collars to look at questions of habitat, health and human interaction, as the border between wilderness and development grows increasingly porous.

Northern California has a similar organization, the Santa Cruz Puma Project, which was founded by wildlife biologist Chris Wilmers in 2008. The partnership between UC Santa Cruz and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife focuses on Bay Area mountain lions, using collars and cameras to track them, and projects such as the wildlife underpass completed in January that provides safe passage beneath Highway 17 at the Laurel Curve.

The underpass, a collaboration with the Land Trust of Santa Cruz, benefits a variety of wildlife, not just mountain lions, Wilmers says. Within hours of its cameras going live, there was already evidence of squirrels, deer, wood rats and gray foxes using the underpass. Researchers are just now starting to get focused data on how well it works.

Vickers’ and Wilmers’ research focus has a common impetus: In both the Santa Monica and Santa Cruz mountains, California mountain lions’ survival is threatened by inbreeding, human interference and car crashes.

In Southern California, “cars and roads, in a nutshell, are the main cause of their deaths,” says Vickers,

In the Bay Area, Wilmers says, traffic accidents are second only to humans seeking revenge against mountain lions that kill livestock and pets.

Rodenticides can be harmful to mountain lions, although it rarely is their primary cause of death, he adds. Mountain lions are an apex predator, and they feed on larger animals. But rodenticides can lead to a weakened immune system in mountain lions, making them more susceptible to illness and possible death.

“Every (dead) mountain lion we find has some amount of rodenticide in its system,” Wilmers says. “It is very widespread.”

Urban development and the vast networks of highways and interstates create another sort of threat for the animals, one that most people don’t even think about. The barriers prevent free movement by the mountain lions. The result is populations that suffer from inbreeding. Vickers has seen it firsthand: mountain lions reaching a freeway, sitting for hours as cars and trucks speed past and then turning around, because they don’t dare cross.

The lack of genetic diversity in an inbred population, if not addressed, could doom the estimated 5,000 mountain lions that reside in the state. Already, scientists are seeing newborns with deformities such as kinked tails. Vickers was instrumental in a recent study which discovered that 93 percent of the male mountain lions have abnormal sperm.

“There’s a race to the bottom,” he says.

Along with other experts, he estimates that mountain lions will be locally extinct by 2050, if the state does not take drastic measures to help them survive.

Vickers grew up on a cattle farm in the Ozarks, the son of a country vet. “We treated every creature, small and large, from cats to cows,” he says.

He describes himself as an outdoorsy kid, “always fishing and hunting and canoeing.” He vowed not to follow in his father’s footsteps but after a few semesters of studying engineering, the call of the wild was too strong, and he switched to veterinary medicine after all.

“What my dad really gave me was appreciation for animals and caring about their welfare,” he says.

Vickers became a vegetarian when he started to work as a veterinarian, “because I couldn’t really see the value of working so hard to save the life of one cow only to then kill it for a steak.”

He worked as a regular vet in Arkansas and California for nearly two decades, while also accepting every chance to treat wildlife. His fascination with big cats led him all the way to Nepal to study snow leopards. A second degree in epidemiology at UC Davis inspired him to join the Mountain Lion Project there in 2002. At the time, the vets there had started out researching endangered bighorn sheep in Anza Borrego State Park and considered mountain lions a threat to them.

“We were soon shocked to find that the mountain lions had an unusually high mortality rate,” Vickers remembers. So the researchers started tracking mountain lions, accumulating 20 years of detailed knowledge about the reclusive animals. The data on the big cats’ important habitats and corridors has become key for conservation efforts.

Vickers is among those calling for wildlife crossings over major freeways so local mountain lions can mix and mate with peers from neighboring habitats. In the Santa Monica Mountains, Caltrans recently broke ground on the world’s biggest wildlife overpass, dubbed the Liberty Crossing over busy 101. The new bridge, which is expected to open in 2025, will cost $88 million, a sum that sounds outrageous until one considers the alternative: In the last three years, wildlife crashes in California have cost more than $1 billion.

The crossings help wildlife of all sorts. In Utah, wildlife crossings have reduced fatal deer collisions by 98.5 percent, and Colorado has seen a drop of nearly 90 percent. Apex predators such as pumas also act as “ecological brokers,” a recent study found, and play “an outsize role” for the health and biodiversity of their territories.

Another overpass is being planned for Highway 101 near the border of Santa Clara and San Benito counties. The nonprofit Land Trust of San Cruz County purchased a 2,600-acre slice of land near San Juan Bautista in December, spending $17 million. Now the trust is working with Caltrans to build a 120- to 160-foot wide wildlife crossing, which will provide mountain lions, deer, bobcats, badgers, foxes and other animals safe passage over the highway.

Providing safer routes for animals to navigate their territories is important, but it’s not the only thing that can be done to ensure the survival of mountain lions.

“No. 1 is stop the sprawl of development,” Wilmers says. “Build in existing cities. Secondarily, a lot of mountain lions die when they kill someone’s goats. People often have their goats in pens at night, which helps them keep track of the goats but doesn’t provide any protection against predators. If they can, they should have their goats in a fully enclosed structure with a roof.”

Acknowledging that “it’s hard to get people to change their behavior and spend money to build a barn or a secure cage for their animals at night,” Vickers focuses on young people. “Educating the young when they’re at the formative stage on how to protect animals, hopefully, that’s a long-term solution.”

When asked what fascinates him the most about the charismatic cougars, he raves about their resilience.

“Despite dramatic persecution, they have been the most successful of the big carnivores to persist,” he says, with awe in his raspy voice. “You just have to admire their ability to continue to exist against all odds.”

Long hidden in a dark hangar at Moffett Field, the remarkable Pathfinder 1 — a gigantic white cigar-shaped airship — was rolled out into the bright Bay Area sunshine for some quick exercise last week, then rolled back in.

The behemoth aircraft, the brainchild of Google co-founder Sergey Brin and aviation innovator Alan Weston, behaved exactly as intended.

It didn’t float, because it was securely tethered by ropes held by ground crew. That’s planned for next time, probably within several weeks. Its initial maneuvers will be around Moffett Field, which Google leases from NASA Ames. Over the next year, it will fly several FAA-approved missions at an altitude below 1500 feet over the waters of the South Bay, including the Dumbarton Bridge.

But, as hoped, Pathfinder “superheated” when its skin was warmed by the sun, causing it to expand and lighten. When propelled by small electric motors, it swung one direction, then another.

“It performed really well,” said Weston, chief executive officer of maker LTA Research and former director of programs at NASA’s Ames Research Center, where he led more than 50 spacecraft, rocket, interceptor and air vehicle missions that revolutionized space science.

The Pathfinder is not a blimp, like the familiar balloons that drift over football stadiums. Blimps have no internal structure so can lose their shape, and deflate. The Pathfinder is an dirigible, with a rigid framework of 10,000 carbon-fiber reinforced tubes and 3,000 titanium hubs to form a protective skeleton around the gas cells, surrounded by a lightweight synthetic Tedlar skin.

The airship is about 400 feet long. By comparison, the traditional Goodyear blimp is 250 feet long.

Pathfinder 1 will be the largest aircraft to take to the skies since the ill-fated Hindenburg dirigible of the 1930s, a major air disaster that was broadcast to people all over the world.

A towering example of technological prowess, the Hindenburg was nearing the end of a three-day voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from Germany when flames erupted from its skin. In one horrifying minute, 36 people died.

But unlike the Hindenburg, Pathfinder is not filled with flammable hydrogen. Instead it is filled with stable helium, which is much safer — and creates lift without burning fuel. The helium is held in 13 giant rip-stop nylon cells and monitored by lidar laser systems.

The goal of this week’s Pathfinder outing was to study how the vehicle’s internal helium and polymer skin responded to sunshine, and whether its propeller motors, four on each side, could redirect its weathervane-like tendencies.

“Everybody’s super happy with the data we gathered” from the airship’s first outing in daylight, Weston said. “We gained an understanding of ‘how does it work?’ ”

Until now, Pathfinder has undergone only in-hangar testing. Three months ago, it was wheeled out in darkness to see how it handled the world outside, without the influence of the hot sun.

For most of aviation history, lighter-than-air vehicles (or LTAs) have never been particularly popular, because they’re big and comparatively slow

But technological advancements such as improved motors, solar cells, fly-by-wire controls and lidar sensing could help make such air travel feasible — and someday, perhaps, commercially viable.

LTA, which stands for “Lighter Than Air,” was founded in 2016 but has operated largely under the radar. It now has 250 employees.

The company devised a rotisserie system, called “the roller coaster,” where the entire airship sits in a cradle and rolls, so fabrication and assembly teams can work at ground level.

“Initially, it was just a crazy idea. Now it’s not a crazy idea — it’s a revolutionary idea,” boosting accuracy and speeding up the manufacturing process by ten-fold, said Weston, “It’s faster, better, cheaper, safer.”

Pathfinder’s outing has offered a vision of what aviation could look like years from now — one in which aircraft don’t emit dangerous greenhouse gases.

“I believe that airships can perform a complementary function,” in addition to other efforts, “to provide humanitarian aid and disaster relief,” said Weston.

Brin, worth an estimated $105 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, also funds a disaster charity called Global Support and Development,  which provides rapid response aid after volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and storms.

Airships could also play a role in the reduction of carbon footprint of transportation, said Weston.

“They’re not going to eliminate airplanes,” he added.  “But I see a path to decarbonisation.”

LTA is one of many companies working on electric aviation. A French company called Flying Whales is building an airship, also lifted by helium, that could carry up to 60 tons of cargo. Hybrid Air Vehicles, a British company, has developed a helium-based “Airlander 10” aircraft to transport people in rural regions. The New Mexico startup Sceye is making a helium-powered aircraft that could hover high in the stratosphere, perhaps offering a new tool for telecommunications.

Pathfinder 1 is just the first in what could be a family of airships, according to Weston.

Even as this prototype learns how to reliably fly in real-world conditions, LTA is starting construction of another and much larger airship, called Pathfinder 3, in the same Akron, Ohio, hangar where Goodyear built the U.S. Navy’s rigid airships of the 1930s.

That aircraft, one-third bigger than Pathfinder 1, could be ready for flight later this year.

So, kudos to Gov. Gavin Newsom for deciding that it’s finally time to put this tardy project on the fast track.

Fast track means there’ll be limited time for any opponent to contest the project in court on environmental grounds.

Newsom used a new law he pushed through the Legislature in June aimed at making it easier to build transportation, clean energy and water infrastructure by expediting lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Sites is the first project to be fast-tracked.

It will also be the first major dam constructed since 1999 when the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California finished Diamond Valley in Riverside County.

Much of the public — especially agriculture interests and Republican politicians — has complained for years about California not building more dams. Now, it looks like a sizable new reservoir will actually be built.

Sites, located on present grazing land in Colusa and Glenn counties 70 miles north of Sacramento, could hold 1.5 million acre-feet of water, enough to annually serve 3 million homes. It will be California’s eighth-largest reservoir.

This will be an off-stream reservoir, siphoning water off the nearby Sacramento River.

The idea is to take the water during high river flows — particularly during flood threats — and hold it until river water is low. Then the diverted water will be released back into the river and end up in southbound aqueducts out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. It’ll be delivered to farmers and city folks.

Few good locations

But it’s a bum rap to blame the state government for not building more dams in California.

We’ve got a boatload of reservoirs — nearly 1,500. Roughly 1,000 are major.

Virtually every river worth damming already has been. We’ve about run out of feasible locations. There’s a safety problem: The state is riddled with earthquake faults.

We’re also a lot more concerned today about environmental damage than we were during our dam-building binge in the mid-20th century.

And many northerners have had it with Southland cities and corporate agriculture trying to tap into more north state water. That’s especially true around the Delta, where salmon runs have declined dramatically in recent decades because of water being pumped south.

So, Sites probably will be the last reservoir of its size — or anywhere near it — built in California.

Conservation needed

We need to continue cutting back on water use. That means, among other things, fallowing between 500,000 and 900,000 acres of San Joaquin Valley cropland during the next two decades, experts say. Agriculture uses 80% of California’s developed water and exports much of its crops overseas.

Plant solar panels instead.

Also sorely needed is more groundwater cleanup and recharge, urban stormwater capture and recycling. Governments at all levels have been spending billions on those endeavors.

Sites, however, looks like a worthy project.

As an off-stream reservoir, it won’t block salmon trying to spawn upriver as do many big dams such as Shasta, Oroville and Folsom.

Besides supplying irrigation water during summer, it will provide flood control in winter. If run right, it can help manage flows for migrating salmon.

There’ll be boating, fishing and camping.

Environmentalists object

But some environmental groups object. They mainly just don’t like dams.

“Building new dams and reservoirs is an idea of the past,” says Erin Woolley, senior policy strategist for the Sierra Club. “California should be permitting other projects that do not have environmental costs.”

For one thing, Woolley fears that releasing stagnant water back into the Sacramento River after it has been stored in a warm summer pool will raise river temperatures. That would be bad for fish and add to toxicity and algae in the delta, she says.

Woolley also points to recent research showing that reservoirs emit substantial amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. “Sites would have significant greenhouse gas emissions,” she says.

OK, too bad! We need water for drinking, bathing and growing food. It’s a necessary tradeoff. Fossil fuel is the big greenhouse gas culprit, not reservoir water.

Anyway, the project intends to minimize emissions, says Sites executive director Jerry Brown — no relation to the former governor who lives nearby on his family’s ancestral ranch.

There’s some public confusion about whose project this is. It’s not the state’s. The state originally planned a much larger reservoir but dropped the idea. It was picked up and downsized by local water districts and counties.

The projected cost is $4.5 billion, most of it to be paid by water users, including Angelenos. Southern California’s MWD plans to buy 20% of the water.

The state has committed $875 million for “public benefits” — environmental protection, flood control and recreation. It comes from a $7.5-billion water bond — $2.7 billion of it for water storage — crafted by Gov. Brown and passed by voters in 2014.

The feds also are kicking in big money.

Project director Brown expects that, in the next two years, state and federal regulatory agencies will grant the necessary permits and construction will begin in 2026 with completion in 2032.

Under fast-tracking, the goal is to wrap up any environmental lawsuits in 270 days — at least within a year. That’s expected to cut years off project development and save hundreds of millions of dollars.

Whatever. It’s bound to be faster than 70 years.

George Skelton is a Los Angeles Times columnist. ©2023 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.

“It’s very disturbing,” said John Varela, chairman of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, a government agency based in San Jose that owns the dam and is is overseeing the project.

“The cost escalations are just absurd,” he added. “It’s like a taxi cab when you go inside for a cup of coffee and the meter keeps running and your $5 fare goes to $10 and you say ‘Wait a minute.'”

In 2020, federal dam safety officials ordered the reservoir along Highway 101 between San Jose and Morgan Hill drained and its dam rebuilt to modern seismic standards. They feared its 240-foot-high earthen dam, built in 1950, could collapse in a major earthquake on the nearby Calaveras Fault, putting the lives of thousands of residents at risk.

Two years ago, district engineers said the project would cost $648 million. In January 2022, they said the cost had jumped to $1.2 billion.

Now as the design approaches 90% completion, they said Monday that the new $2.3 billion price tag includes $1.9 billion for the new dam, and another $400 million for a new outlet tunnel and other associated projects. Construction on the outlet tunnel is underway now. Work on the dam isn’t expect to begin until 2026, with a completion date of 2032.

Water district board members are scheduled to discuss the price jump at their meeting Tuesday.

The board is likely to consider higher water rates in the coming months to make up the cost to repair the massive dam, a linchpin of Silicon Valley’s water supply.

“Costs are escalating,” Varela said. “We have no way to slow it down. Do we pause our projects, put them on hold, until costs go down? We have to move forward.”

Board members also are in early discussions about potentially putting a water bond on next November’s ballot in Santa Clara County to pay for Anderson repairs and other projects. Such a bond could also include funding for recycled water projects, and a controversial plan to build a $2.78 billion new dam at Pacheco Pass.

On Monday, engineers in charge of the Anderson project pointed to two factors for the jump in cost: First, they said, state and federal officials overseeing their work from the state Division of Safety of Dams, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, are requiring the concrete spillway to be longer and deeper than their original proposal, which will add about $75 million.

Second, labor costs and the cost of materials — from concrete to steel — have been rising worldwide, driving up most of the cost increase.

“When we look at what’s happened in the last two years it’s been a contractors market,” said Ryan McCarter, deputy operating officer of the water district who is overseeing the Anderson project. “Their markup, materials and labor have all gone up.”

The trend of higher construction costs is happening on other public works projects around the Bay Area. The price tag to bring BART to San Jose has tripled in price in recent years to $12.2 billion — some of which planners attribute to rising construction materials and labor costs.

In the East Bay, the price tag to expand Los Vaqueros Reservoir in Contra Costa County jumped from $980 million last year to $1.4 billion now. The Contra Costa Water District says much of that cost is due to labor and materials increases.

Think of it as a hangover from the worldwide COVID pandemic, one expert said Monday.

During COVID, much of the world economy slowed dramatically. When a vaccine was developed and society re-opened, there was a huge backlog of demand for building materials and projects — from highways to hospitals to kitchen remodels, said K.N. Gunalan, a civil engineer in Salt Lake City, and past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

“Labor rates have gone up,” he said. “Engineering costs have gone up. Demand is higher. People are vying for limited resources.”

Lots of engineers and construction workers retired during COVID or took new careers, Gunalan added.

“The demand is still greater than the supply. It will probably be at least another year or so before it levels off,” he said. “But finding skilled labor is going to be a challenge for a long time.”

One way to help the water district raise money for Anderson would be to kill the $2.5 billion Pacheco project, said Katja Irvin, with the Loma Prieta chapter of the Sierra Club. Environmentalists and ranchers oppose that proposal, saying it would be too expensive and flood sensitive land around Henry Coe State Park.

Taxpayer groups said Monday that the water district needs more independent oversight, and new candidates running for its open seats next year.

“Taxpayers should rise up and demand reform,” said Mark Hinkle, president of the Silicon Valley Taxpayers Association. “The board needs more competition. Incumbency has led to waste, delays and corruption. Not good.”

Varela, the board chairman, said the Anderson project must be finished.

“It’s unfortunate. It’s a sign of our times,” he said. “We have to bite the bullet and stay on the project, on the time scale. We have to do it. Anderson is the single largest dam in our system.”

The National Weather Service’s latest forecast predicts rain to start around midnight on Tuesday morning, with nearly an inch of water expected to fall on San Jose, a storm that is being described as a “typical winter” system as opposed to the atmospheric rivers that barreled through the region this past winter.

Even so, San Jose’s Mayor Matt Mahan and Valley Water CEO Rick Callender on Tuesday said agencies were preparing for the worst by ordering outreach teams to make contact with homeless residents who reside along the area’s rivers and closely watching the most flood-prone parts of the city.

Officials are also making plans for what is expected to be a very wet winter, the second straight year of rain-filled weather for the Bay Area.

“It looks like we have El Niño conditions,” said Mayor Mahan at a press conference on Tuesday. “We could be hit with a series of atmospheric rivers once again.”

Most at risk for flooding in the coming months are Coyote, Ross and Penetencia creeks, along with the Guadalupe River, officials said, though no immediate evacuation announcements have been made at this time.

Officials are still waiting to determine whether an order would be made to clear San Jose’s homeless residents by the rivers, which the city did previously through an emergency proclamation in January amid heavy rainfall. Hundreds were moved to emergency shelters run by the American Red Cross.

Many of the city’s homeless have already been cleared out of the creeks and rivers because of construction projects that are flood-proofing San Jose’s waterways, said Assistant City Manager Lee Wilcox. The federally mandated flood protection project will bring 6,000 feet of walls from Old Oakland Road to Interstate 280 with an expected completion date of December 2024.

This week’s rain is expected to fall across a five-day period, with areas in Oakland in San Francisco expected to take the brunt of the storm.

Alexander Gordon, who works in Valley Water’s emergency, safety and security division, said that he expects this week’s stormwater to likely be absorbed by the ground, since its been months since the region has seen intense rainfall.

“I think you’ll see this week a lot of absorption of the water coming into the ground,” he said in an interview. “Not so much water runoff into the creeks. But in the subsequent storms, it just starts to run off.”

Last winter’s storms saw a concerted effort by city officials to warn residents in advance of the incoming storms – with hopes that a repeat of a series of 2017 storms that caused lawsuits and criticisms over government response wouldn’t happen again.

On Tuesday, standing before Valley Water’s flood protection construction site project near Coyote Creek, officials maintained that they had learned the mistakes of year’s past and were covering their bases.

“Remember, we’re all partners to prepare for flood prevention,” said Valley Water Director Richard Santos. “And you, the public, please be our ears and eyes. Give us a call with any concerns you have.”

What was an itsy-bitsy spider spinning webs a few months ago is now a large, fully-grown exterminator helping keep the pest population under control.

Is it peak spider season? Not necessarily, because there are usually more spiders in the spring after they hatch their eggs. By September to November they are fully grown, easier to find and make larger webs.

Some spidey facts

Almost all are venomous but only a few can harm you. According to the Burke Museum in Seattle, only 25 have venom that can cause harm to humans. So just 1/20 of 1% of spiders are dangerous to humans.

According to the University of Kentucky, spiders don’t have a jaw and teeth like many animals, they have chelicerae – external structures that work somewhat like a jaw. Spiders use their chelicerae to hold prey in place while they inject it with venom.

Instead of chewing their food with mandibles, spiders will first spit enzymes either on or in their prey to liquefy it. They then eat the prey by sucking in the juices created by the enzymes with their mouth parts, according to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources.

They all make silk, but they don’t all make webs. About half the species catch prey with silky webs, while the others use it to make nests, cocoons or egg sacs.

Many spiders replace their entire web every day. According to science.org a study was conducted in 2018 that discovered that certain spiders’ webs are stronger than steel and if human-size, would be tough enough to snag a jetliner.

UC Irvine has a web page with photos of all the spiders, ticks and mites in Orange County here.

Keeping them out

Even though spiders may help control insect populations, many people have some form of arachnophobia or simply don’t want them inside their homes. As the days cool, spiders might be looking for warmer places to winter.

A few tips

Seal potential entry points like cracks and gaps along the building’s foundation.Keep doors, windows and screens sealed.

Prevent other insects from inhabiting the area by keeping a clean home.

Reduce clutter to limit hiding places.

Use a botanical repellent. Spiders don’t like the scent of lavender.

Source: Hebets Lab, Burke Museum, reconnectwithnature.org, National Space Society, University of Kentucky, earthkind.com, The National Pest Management Association Illustrations by KURT SNIBBE and staff artists