California Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing a $1 billion emergency relief plan to deal with California’s water shortage caused by four years of drought conditions.
This comes just as new predictions about the state’s water supply are painting a dire picture. In an op-ed published in the LA Times last week, Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at NASA, predicted the state is nearing the bottom of its water storage.
“We have a year of surface water. After that, we’ll rely more heavily on underground water,” Famiglietti told José Díaz-Balart on msnbc Thursday.
Famiglietti explained that, currently, about 80% of the water used by the state comes from the ground, meaning that once the surface water disappears, California will rely entirely on ground water to supply its 320 million residents–a problem because ground water is not easily replaceable.
Last November, voters in California approved the state legislature’s $7.5 million water bond measure for water and flood projects to try to tackle the state’s drought.
Nicole Acevedo
I am a bilingual national reporter specializing in issues affecting Latino communities in the U.S., the Caribbean and Latin America. Experience I have produced hundreds of stories across digital, radio and broadcast platforms throughout my career — reporting on everything from elections, natural disasters and immigration to pop culture trends, social justice issues and breaking news. I'm best known for my coverage of the crises affecting Puerto Rico, including its reconstruction process after Hurricane Maria, the island’s financial crisis and more. After graduating from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University with a bachelor's degree in broadcast and digital journalism in 2016, I joined the inaugural cohort of students who helped launch the Spanish-language bilingual journalism master’s program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Awards I was a 2024 finalist for the NAHJ/University of Florida award in investigative journalism for my reporting uncovering the challenges Puerto Rican families face in caring for their elders, given that the island’s population is aging faster than most places on Earth and fragmented by migration. I served as the lead reporter and writer of NBC News' 2022 Hispanic Heritage Month project “Who’s Latino? Amid growing numbers the definition is expanding,” which was awarded an NAHJ Ñ Award for best Latino issues story for print/digital.