Desalination plant arrives in Fort Bragg, state passes prescribed burn legislation
10/13/21 — Recent rainfall and the arrival of a desalination system are allowing Fort Bragg to reduce the city’s drought emergency from a Stage 4 water crisis to a Stage 2 water alert. Also ,last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom passed the last of three bills that
KZYX News · KZYX News Department
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Show Notes
For Mendocino County Public Broadcasting, this is the KZYX News for Friday, Oct. 15. I’m Sonia Waraich.
It’s a Wednesday afternoon in late September and technicians from San Diego are installing a desalination unit at the Fort Bragg water plant.
Heath Daniels works for the city and will be responsible for operating the desalination system when the Noyo River’s water becomes too salty. The river water can become salty during king tides, which happen when the moon’s gravitational pull causes water levels to rise several inches. That’s been an issue because the river hasn’t provided enough fresh water to dilute the saltwater that gets into it during those events, which prevented the city from being able to pump water from the river.
For the moment, the rain’s eliminated the need for the city to use the desalination system.
Daniels says the desalination system is standing ready for when the streamflow in the Noyo does get too low again. City Manager Tabatha Miller told the Fort Bragg City Council on Tuesday that they did end up using it recently for a few days.
The rain and the arrival of the desalination system have left the city in a secure enough position to downgrade its drought emergency from a Stage 4 water crisis to a Stage 2 water alert.
Miller says the drought isn’t over yet, but people in the city don’t have to conserve as much as they were during the summertime.
There’s no need to get water trucked in from Ukiah anymore either. The city put a stop to that last week.
On top of all of that, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting Mendocino County has a pretty good chance of getting its usual amount of rainfall through the rest of the year.
The impacts of the drought might be less severe for the moment, but catastrophic wildfires are still raging across the state. Scientists say the solution is to fight fire with fire and now the state agrees.
Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law the last of three bills that are going to make it easier to conduct a prescribed burn on private land.
Lenya Quinn Davidson is with the UC Cooperative Extension and an authority on prescribed fires.
Experts recognize we need more of these fires on the landscape in California, so the state decided to make it easier for tribes and private landowners to conduct burns without having to worry about paying the firefighting costs if the fire got out of control.
Twenty million dollars was also set aside in the state wildfire budget for a prescribed fire claims fund.
Quinn-Davidson says the fact that you couldn’t get insurance made it really difficult to do a prescribed burn even with increased investment from the state. But she says the benefits of conducting prescribed fires can’t be overstated.
A prescribed fire project in Sequoia National Park was able to change the behavior of the wildfire there and protect the General Sherman Tree, which is the largest tree on Earth.
For KZYX News, I’m Sonia Waraich, a Report For America corps member. For all our local coverage, with photos and more, visit KZYX.org. You can also subscribe to the KZYX News podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.