Local rain doesn’t fill our pipes. Of the three main sources that do, Lake Mead, the Colorado River storage reservoir serving Southern California, shrank in July to its lowest level since 1956. Last month, the State Water Resources Control Board concluded that the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is overdrawn by 50%.

Californians need to take significantly less water from the state's single largest supply, according to a state report that could lay the foundation for more limits on water shipments to the Southland.

After an exhausting political fight to put an $11.1-billion plan for shoring up the state's water supply before voters, Gov.

Farmers in California's vast agricultural valley will have no problem growing much of the nation's fall lettuce crop thanks to late-season storms that freed up more water to nurture their fields. The massive farms dotting the arid southwestern part of the Central Valley will get 45 percent of the water they sought from federal pipes and canals, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Monday.

Water agencies and others filed a lawsuit Thursday accusing California officials of backing a deal that allows private companies to control and profit from a massive reservoir built with public funds to store water for use during dry spells.

Central California farmers won more water for their parched fields Tuesday when a federal judge temporarily loosened pumping limits meant to protect native salmon.

More water may be headed to the Southland and the San Joaquin Valley after a judge concluded Tuesday that a federal agency acted arbitrarily when it imposed pumping limits to protect migrating salmon and steelhead. The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Oliver W.

Federal water managers are boosting deliveries to cities and farms throughout California's Central Valley. The announcement Thursday by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar comes after a series of spring storms grew the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada. Contractors north of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta will get 100 percent of their total allocations. That's double than what they were expecting.

Los Angeles has grown by about a million people in the last three decades, but you wouldn't know it from the way water has been trickling out of taps and sprinklers. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power reported Monday that water usage in the city reached a 31-year low for the month of February, dropping more than 20% compared with the same period in 2007.

A blue-ribbon panel of scientists said Tuesday that the high-volume water main breaks that bedeviled Los Angeles last summer and fall were caused in part by the city's restrictions on lawn watering, and their findings could force the city to remake its strict water conservation policy.