Across the United States this week, water has been at the center of both extreme weather and policy debates. In the Pacific Northwest, NASA reports that a powerful atmospheric river funneled deep Pacific moisture into western Washington, dumping intense rain that swelled the Skagit and Snohomish rivers to record or near record flood levels on December eleventh. River flooding and mudslides closed major roads, including eastbound lanes of Interstate ninety out of western Washington, and NASA’s Disasters Response Coordination System was activated to support state emergency managers with satellite based flood maps and data.

Farther south, Circle of Blue’s Federal Water Tap notes that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation finalized a new operating plan for California’s Central Valley Project, the massive federal canal system that moves water from the Sacramento San Joaquin Delta to farms in the Central Valley. The plan is intended to maximize deliveries to agriculture following a presidential directive, even as California continues to balance irrigation demands with environmental protections and the growing influence of climate driven drought.

On the U.S. Mexico border, members of Congress are pressing the administration to fold water issues into North American trade talks. According to Circle of Blue, lawmakers want chronic sewage and pollution in the Tijuana River, which repeatedly fouls beaches in southern California, and overdue Rio Grande water deliveries from Mexico, raised formally in discussions over the United States Mexico Canada Agreement.

At the national scale, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has published a new online dashboard compiling local inventories of lead service lines. Public water systems were required to submit these data last year, and EPA now estimates about four million lead pipes still carry drinking water to homes around the country, sharpening the focus on replacement funding and timelines.

Regulatory battles are also intensifying. An opinion column in the Knoxville News Sentinel warns that an Environmental Protection Agency proposal to narrow which wetlands and small streams are covered by the Clean Water Act could remove protections from up to eighty percent of wetlands and millions of miles of streams nationwide, raising alarms in states like North Carolina about drinking water and habitat.

Globally, these developments land in the same week that water experts and policymakers gather in Marrakech, Morocco, for the nineteenth World Water Congress, organized by the International Water Resources Association and the Moroccan Ministry of Equipment and Water, to discuss how innovation can help countries adapt to floods, droughts, and mounting water stress.

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