Rain was falling in Sacramento and snow was causing travel troubles in the Sierra Nevada on Friday as a fairly cold winter storm swept into Northern California. By Christmas Eve, snowfall will become insignificant in the mountains, according to the National Weather Service. And in Sacramento, the rain will clear the night before Christmas. But before then, travel to the high country will be challenging with car chains most likely to be as common as ugly Christmas sweaters. The snow level is expected to be around 4,000 feet during the daylight hours, dropping to 2,500 feet Friday night.

It’s gone. The so-called Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, also known as The Blob, once perched off the Northwest coast blocking all storms like a football team’s defensive line, has dissipated, said Bill Patzert, climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge. Many climatologists believed this was the main reason for the lack of rainfall in Southern California, making the past five years the driest in Southern California history as measured from downtown Los Angeles.

After years of planning, officials have finalized all 97,000 pages of environmental documents to support Gov. Jerry Brown’s controversial plan to build two massive tunnels through the heart of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. In spite of a recent call for a scaled-down version of the project from a prominent nonpartisan California water think-tank, state officials are moving forward with the original plan for what they call California WaterFix. The $15.5 billion project would tunnel two pipes 40 feet in diameter for 35 miles under the fragile ecosystem that serves as the hub of the state’s water-delivery network.

 

Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to build two giant tunnels to send Northern California water southward moved a step closer Thursday to final state and federal decisions, with the state’s release of a 90,000-page environmental review supporting the $15.7 billion project. Brown’s administration is pushing for final federal and state approval of the 35-mile-long, 40-foot-wide tunnels, touted to ensure more reliable water deliveries to city and farm water agencies in Central and Southern California.

We’ve made no secret of our objections to Gov. Jerry Brown’s plumbing project — drilling two enormous tunnels, each one 40 feet in diameter and 35 miles long, to divert water to Southern California cities and Central Valley growers. Brown’s plan looks even worse with President Barack Obama’s acquiescence to congressional legislation guaranteeing more water for irrigation at the expense of endangered salmon and the environmentally fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.