Welcome to the New SCWC Water Blog

By: Richard Atwater
SCWC Executive Director

In Southern California, you’d be hard-pressed to find a tougher, more critical challenge than working together to ensure the reliability of our water supply. This is what has driven SCWC since our founding back in 1984.

Almost 30 years later, thanks to countless and invaluable contributions from our members and friends, SCWC is larger, stronger and better prepared than it’s ever been to tackle our state’s toughest and most critical water issues head on.

Now, we’re taking one step further into the Digital Age with the new SCWC Water Blog. This blog will give our members and stakeholders the information, analysis and commentary they need, when they need it – as it happens.

In the next few weeks and months, you’ll see blog posts covering the Delta, water quality, stormwater capture and a variety of other issues from SCWC leadership, and other leaders across Southern California who work with the issues every day. As this organization’s executive director, I am excited to be the SCWC Water Blog’s first contributor.

This Thursday, SCWC will host its third 2011 Quarterly Meeting in the City of Industry (If you haven’t had a chance to RSVP, I strongly encourage you to reserve your seat now). During the meeting, we’ll hear a compelling presentation on the Delta Plan from Delta Stewardship Council Chair Phil Isenberg. We’ll also hear from USGS seismologist Dr. Lucy Jones about what may be greatest and most immediate threat to our water supply – the vulnerability of the Delta to earthquakes and flooding.

The Delta – an essential water source for Southern California – is utterly defenseless against the breakdown of the Sacramento levees that would occur as a result of a major earthquake. That breakdown would cause the saltwater from the San Francisco Bay to contaminate the freshwater from the Delta, rendering this water undrinkable and unusable. The results would be nothing short of complete cataclysm – an insurmountable water shortage.

The good news is that we can avert this disaster before it happens, by pushing forward with plans to fix the Delta, like the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. If we want to give our children and grandchildren a reliable water future, there’s only one way to do it – by staying engaged in the dialogue together.

SCWC has been an active participant in that dialogue for as long as we’ve been around. We hope you’ll join us at Thursday’s Quarterly Meeting for the next chapter.