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In the weeks and months to come, investigators will no-doubt probe many potential reasons for the near-catastrophic failures at Oroville Dam in February. Those will range from decisions made more than 50 years ago, to the truly extraordinary weather of 2017. But for the moment, the emergency at Oroville Dam has largely passed. The 180,000 people who were evacuated from their homes last month have returned, and construction crews continue to put millions of tons of rocks and concrete across a badly eroded hillside under the emergency spillway.

Marysville, Calif., farmer Brad Foster stood at the eroded edge of the Feather River recently and contemplated how he was going to pull his water pumps out of the soggy, collapsed river bank. “We’ll have to recover them somehow,” said Foster, 58, who owns about 500 acres of walnut orchards in Yuba County. “Those are stationary pumps. They’ve been there 50 years.” In all his years of farming, Foster said he’d never seen such severe and widespread erosion along the winding waterway. “This is not normal,” he said.

Following five years of severe drought conditions, California is now in the midst of one of the wettest winters in recorded history – the effects of which can been seen locally in the Tuolumne River Watershed. So far in the 2017 precipitation year, which began in September, several months have already exceeded their historical averages, and last month proved to be no exception with over 15 inches of rainfall in the Tuolumne River Watershed. This amount is nearly 10 inches more than monthly historical average of 5.99 inches for February. Last year, the Tuolumne River Watershed only received 1.59 inches of precipitation during the same time period.