CA: 12 Month Pilot Approved for Offshore Floating Desalination System

[PeteS in CA]

CA: 12 Month Pilot Approved for Offshore Floating Desalination System

https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2026/01/16/ca-12-month-pilot-approved-for-offshore-floating-desalination-system-n3810947

Fort Bragg and Mendocino County in general have been in a boom-and-bust cycle, from too much rain to severe drought over the past decade or so. Being California, no one in state government has done a thing to alleviate any of that distress by building the reservoirs they need or implementing the plans they've had on the books for decades to capture the runoff they do get in copious amounts when it comes. This system sounded worth pursuing.

Fort Bragg Public Works Director John Smith told the gathering, “Obviously, we are here for water. It has been a challenge for us in the 1970s. [Then] 2014 was the first wake-up call for us, pretty much we had no water in the river and only one reservoir. 2021 was also a bad year for us, extreme drought, and if you were living in town, you knew what the consequences of that were.”

So it seems locals are thinking outside the box, and a Canadian company called 'Oneka' (their site here) has been testing its desalination buoys off the coasts of places like Chile and Nova Scotia for almost 10 years now.
...
The pilot project was awarded a $1.5M grant from the state to secure the go-ahead. The buoy, which will be stationed a half a mile offshore, requires no fuel or power other than wave action.

For the terminally curious, yes, Fort Bragg is named for Braxton Bragg, who served in the Mexica-American War that resulted in California and other SW states becoming US territory.

Take the snark about failure to build dams on nearby waterways with a block of salt. ConservaMedia are often not any more aware of local geography than are MSM. The Noyo River and Pudding Creek (which border Fort Bragg) watersheds are not large, and are somewhat mountainous. IOW, possibly no suitable spaces for water storage and not large supplies of water.

WRT desalination, @#$% well about time! Israel has been doing it successfully for decades.

[libertybele]

 

[Hoodat]

Why not simply capture the rainwater that falls on California instead of rushing it to the ocean?

[Wingnut]

Why not simply capture the rainwater that falls on California instead of rushing it to the ocean?

I an sure there is a reason.  Not a good one.  But a reason

[PeteS in CA]

1. Try reading what I posted about the geography around and the river and creek near Fort Bragg.

2. California does not "rush" rain and snow water "to the ocean". California has numerous reservoirs, 11 holding more than 1 million acre-feet, Lake Shasta being the 8th largest in the US. The amount of water that flows through the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta is controlled by a court decision that effectively mandates a certain minimum waterflow from those river systems into San Francisco Bay and out to the Pacific Ocean, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_smelt#Court_protection .