By Caleigh Wells for KCRW.
Broadcast version by Suzanne Potter for California News Service reporting for the Solutions Journalism Network-Public News Service Collaboration

Hours after another storm soaked Southern California, LA County’s principal stormwater engineer Sterling Klippel stands at the base of the San Gabriel Dam, looking like a kid in a candy store. He gazes in awe at the thousands of gallons of stormwater rushing through this dam every second.

“Just this October, this facility was completely drained,” he says.

This dam is almost 300 feet deep in the middle, and it went from empty to full in less than six months. And it’s just one of more than a dozen dams in the county.

Soggy Southern California has gotten more than two feet of rain this season – so far, about double an average year, making it one of the top 10 wettest years on record.

“It's amazing to see it when it's here, and every drop is precious. So we do our best to capture every drop of it,” says Klippel. 

Los Angeles County is on track to capture enough stormwater this year to quench the year-round water needs of more than a quarter of the county’s residents. It’s good news, but there is still a lot of work to do to meet local water use goals.

'A good job of for the infrastructure we have'

“We're making strides, and we just need to make sure that we don't let our foot off the gas,” says Bruce Reznik. He leads the nonprofit LA Waterkeeper, which is the city’s self-proclaimed water watchdog. “We have done a good job, for the infrastructure we have.”

That’s thanks to nearly century-old infrastructure that’s still working. 

Trickling waterfalls in the San Gabriel Mountains typically drain into giant dams like the San Gabriel Dam, which was built in the 1930s. When they get full, public works officials open the floodgates at the bottom of the dams to send the water downstream.

“From there, we release it and we send it down to our spreading grounds, which are these large basins,” says Klippel. “The water then will percolate through this kind of sandy gravelly geology here and recharge these local aquifers where later it's pumped out for local municipal water use.”

'A century worth of poor planning'

Klippel says LA County gets about a third of its water from those aquifers while the rest is imported either from Northern California or from the Colorado River.

But the City of LA’s goal is to flip that equation by 2035, using two-thirds local water and cutting Southern California's dependence on imported water. Reznik says the local infrastructure is just not set up for that yet.

“A lot of that is because … so much of LA is channelized and concretized and urbanized, that we're not letting Mother Nature do its job of capturing the stormwater, letting it recharge our groundwater,” he says. “We are trying to undo a century worth of poor planning around water, and it's going to take us a while.”

LA is so developed and has such high flood risk that for decades the county has focused on funneling water as quickly and safely as possible straight to the ocean. 

In big storms like we’ve seen this winter, that’s happening no matter how hard Klippel tries to stop it. “With so much water in the system at this point, there is some water that's still making its way to the ocean.”

Infrastructure woes can get solved with big investments, but Californians decided years ago that two-thirds of voters need to approve new taxes for stormwater capture. That’s an extremely high bar.

“Unfortunately, it's actually very hard to fund stormwater projects,” says Resnik. “There has been a decade's long lack of funding for stormwater infrastructure.”

Which is why people like Reznik were so thrilled when county voters passed Measure W five years ago that devotes $280 million each year to water projects. 

But as the climate crisis worsens, more money has to go toward maintaining current infrastructure. For example, wildfire burn scars result in more loose soil falling into the dams and leaving less space for water.

Officials anticipate it’ll take several billion dollars to hit that 2035 goal to use mostly local water.

“Which seems pretty ambitious to me,” says USC Assistant Professor of civil and environmental engineering Dan McCurry. He says stormwater capture is actually one of the best tools we’ve got for cutting down our reliance on imported water.

“We're not talking about complicated, energy-intensive, expensive engineering treatment processes like we have to do for wastewater reuse. So in some sense, stormwater capture – when it's available – is low-hanging fruit.”


Caleigh Wells wrote this article for KCRW.


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Minnesota is credited for having strong wetland protections. But the research community warns the growing presence of factory farms in the Midwest makes it harder to shield these natural resources.

A new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists says 30 million acres of wetlands in the Upper Midwest are at risk of destruction by industrial agriculture and other heavy industries.

The authors said the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision to strip some federal protections from wetlands accelerates the potential loss.

The Research Director for the Union's Food & Environment program Stacy Woods said because of the role wetlands play in flood mitigation, states in this region are likely to have a harder time limiting damage from a major rain event.

"We know that flooding is a significant issue," said Woods. "It's expensive, and it's getting worse as the climate warms."

While Minnesota's laws might help offset some of the federal impact, the report says neighboring states like South Dakota and Iowa are more vulnerable to wetland loss.

It says priorities of the incoming Trump administration could further complicate protections - but if lawmakers can agree, there could be opportunities in the Farm Bill debate to bolster existing conservation programs.

Wetlands can capture and slow flood waters that threaten homes, but Woods pointed out they do so much more.

"They're often called nature's kidneys, because they provide such a service in cleaning our waterways," said Woods. "But when we dump so much pesticide and fertilizer, and other pollutants onto our fields, that can run off into these wetlands and really impact the wetlands' ability to clean our water."

Meanwhile, researchers say one acre of wetlands provides $745 of flood mitigation benefits to residential homes.

Without wetlands, they say homeowners and taxpayers absorb those costs through the National Flood Insurance Program.




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The most current study from the Environmental Protection Agency estimated more than 143 million Americans are at risk of drinking water tainted with PFAS chemicals, including in Texas.

Water utility companies across the country tested their drinking water for 29 different PFAS compounds. They are known as "forever chemicals," because they do not break down easily in the environment or the body.

Neil Carman, clean air program director of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club, said the man-made chemicals are found in everyday products.

"Nonstick pans like Teflon, also stain-resistant fabrics, like Gore-Tex and waterproof clothing," Carman outlined. "The biggest source is probably from the firefighting foam."

He pointed out when firefighters use the foam to extinguish a fire, it is left on the ground and seeps into nearby water sources.

Some supporters of President-elect Donald Trump have said they want to revoke or weaken water standards for six PFAS chemicals. According to the Environmental Working Group, it would leave nearly 46 million Americans with no protections.

The EPA said its data is not yet complete but it has already identified PFAS contamination at almost 8,900 sites nationwide, including more than 100 in Texas. Carman noted the chemicals have been linked to multiple health problems.

"They could cause cancer, they disrupt the immune system, they could interfere with pregnancies, they can cause all kinds of health effects," Carman explained. "We're still learning about them but they're not good."

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is the state agency charged with PFAS enforcement. Carman added a home water filtration system is one option for curbing some toxic chemicals.

A delegation of New Mexico lawmakers is asking the federal government to quickly resolve long-standing litigation affecting water users in the Rio Grande Basin.

In a 2013 lawsuit, Texas alleged New Mexico farmers were using groundwater previously allocated to Texas. Then in 2022, the two states reached an out-of-court agreement. But the federal government objected and a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court ruling said government consent was needed first.

Andrew Mergen, visiting assistant clinical professor of environmental law at Harvard University, said a lot has changed since the original water compact was signed in 1939.

"This is, in some ways, about growth in New Mexico that has accelerated groundwater pumping in the Rio Grande," Mergen pointed out. "How are you going to manage that groundwater pumping in a way that the compact terms are met?"

New Mexico's U.S. Senators and Representatives have sent a letter to the Departments of Interior and Justice asking for resolution by year's end. Bergen believes it is unlikely but without it, the states and federal government must argue their case at a trial in federal court.

Mergen noted decades-old water allocations in the West were based on what was known at the time. Parties could only guess about population growth and could not anticipate the advent of more oil and gas drilling, increased groundwater crop irrigation and sustained periods of drought, all amid climate change.

"That's what makes this profoundly difficult," Mergen observed. "That's what the rub of this case is, that the compact was negotiated a long time ago. Things change. How do you account for change?"

The Rio Grande Basin is critical to agriculture, industry and the environment, providing irrigation water for nearly 2 million acres of crop and pasture land, supporting the outdoor recreation economy and providing habitat for fish and wildlife.


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