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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Missouri's duck-hunting season runs through January, and many enthusiasts are concerned about how plentiful their future quarry will be because of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

It's been six months since the high court removed protections for most wetlands in the nation.

Zack Morris is the president of the Conservation Federation of Missouri and said the Sackett vs EPA case dealt with identifying which waters are protected under the federal Clean Water Act.

This affects the quality of upcoming duck hunts. Morris said without thriving wetlands, the sport won't be able to carry on.

"It's hard to say how many of those unprotected wetlands are going to be plowed under or how fast," said Morris, "but that's certainly, I think, a reality that we'll face is significant wetland loss over the next 10 years or so and declining duck numbers as a result. "

Wetlands are also the primary habitat for 200 at-risk plants and animals in the state.

Morris said most of the ducks that migrate through the Midwest on the central or Mississippi flyways hatch in small pothole wetlands in North and South Dakota, Iowa and Canada.

Duck habitat is expected to decline for the U.S. portion.

Conservation groups in Missouri say protecting the wetlands is now up to state agencies.

Dana Ripper is co-founder and executive director of the Missouri River Bird Observatory and said wetlands are critical to Missouri's way of life and Missourians need to reach out to their legislators to gain protections.

Ripper said wetlands protect us from flooding and provide us with clean drinking water. They are key for fish and the millions of ducks and shorebirds that migrate through the state annually.

"They are some of our most biodiverse ecosystems here in Missouri - all throughout the Midwest," said Ripper. "They also provide water filtration. We have had devastating floods just in the last 15 years or so. And our wetlands are really important for helping to mitigate the effects of flooding. "

As many as 127 million acres of wetlands existed when settlers arrived on this continent. Today, more than 50% of those wetlands are gone - and without protection, thousands of acres will be
lost each year in the United States.

Of the original 2.4 million wild acres of forested lowlands in southeast Missouri, less than 60,000 acres, or 2%, remain today.




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States like Illinois are dealing with the fallout of a Supreme Court decision made earlier this year.

In May, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively removed federal protections for over half of the wetlands across the country. The case, Sackett v. EPA, dealt with which waters are protected under the federal Clean Water Act. Conservation groups said in Illinois, protecting the wetlands is now up to state agencies.

Paul Botts, president and executive director of the Chicago-based Wetlands Initiative, said the problem needs a congressional fix, but it is unlikely to happen soon.

"Congress, of course, is completely melted down and dysfunctional now, and this issue just simply is not going to rise to the top and cut through the partisan divide that we have," Botts acknowledged. "The chances of the Clean Water Act being updated are just pretty close to nil."

As Botts put it, the Clean Water Act is the reason Illinois waters are no longer on fire or used as open sewers. The landowners from the original case call the ruling a "victory for property rights."

Botts contended both of the state agencies dealing with wetlands in Illinois have a poor track record. He fears many of the state's pristine waterways will return to the poor condition they were in 50 years ago.

"We have an Illinois EPA, and then of course, we have our state Department of Natural Resources," Botts outlined. "Both of those agencies are starved for staffing resources, frankly, to carry out programs and to do things like issue permits in a prompt manner so that landowners can get an answer."

For almost 30 years, the rule the high court overturned served as the underpinning of the Clean Water Act. Along with investments made in wastewater treatment, Botts noted the safeguards afforded by the law resulted in enormous benefits for people and communities. Today, he fears conservation groups will be unable to keep up with the decline of waterways.

"Audubon estimates that tens of millions of acres have been made newly open to development by the Sackett ruling," Botts stressed. "It's just an estimate; it would be years of work to try to go around and use state wetlands inventories to figure out an exact figure."


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An Arizona water expert said the state faces a challenging situation with the Colorado River being overallocated, compounded with what she calls a historic drought.

Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said Arizona's water system is in distress.

She explained access to water from the Colorado River depends on what she called a "hierarchy of water rights." Certain Native American communities and farmers enjoy "senior rights," while other towns and cities have to get by with less.

Sorensen noted Arizona is blessed to have significant groundwater aquifers, so management of these aquifers is paramount.

"The water was laid down over tens of thousands of years, and it isn't annually renewed at any significant rate," Sorensen pointed out. "If you pump too much of it, you're basically 'mining' that groundwater and depleting it, meaning that there will be less available for future generations."

While Arizona has taken significant steps to conserve water, Sorensen said the work and innovation must continue, from improving use of reclaimed water to finding ways to augment water supplies. In a poll earlier this year, Arizonans said they believe the state should be doing more to regulate groundwater consumption, as well as prioritizing conservation and restoration projects.

As Arizona continues to grow, Sorensen stressed water demands are much more closely related to land use than to population growth, with the agricultural sector using about 70% of the state's water. She said some crops require as much as six acre-feet of water per acre of farmland. An acre-foot of water equates to about 326,000 gallons.

"Whereas urban developments actually use much less water, probably more like one to two acre-feet per acre," Sorensen stated. "So ironically, as our population has grown and we have converted what used to be farmland into urban uses, there has been a sort of natural water savings."

She added in the future, experts predict Arizona will be hotter and drier, so it is important to understand land use choices are meaningful and will have a direct impact on water availability.


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