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Over the last 18 months, California has experienced one of the driest, wettest and wildest rides in its recorded water history. As the 2015-16 water year opened in October 2015, drought had driven the state’s reservoir and groundwater levels to all-time lows. Entire towns were left without water. Reports of lakes turned to puddles, of wells running dry by the thousands, and of the cracked ground above depleted aquifers sinking several feet a year dominated state headlines.

The latest Drought Monitor map was made public to begin March and shows a significant improvement in the very dry conditions experienced for months in the west, but a very different story for portions of the southern plains, the southeast and the northeast US.

For three generations, Phillip Filter’s family has tended orchards that grow on a shelf of floodplain above the Feather River. Because the trees stand between the river and a major flood-protection levee, Filter’s family is no stranger to floods that sometimes spill over the river banks, inundate the orchards and then recede back into the channel below. But Filter has never seen damage to the riverbanks like what happened last week after the state suddenly shut down flows from Oroville Dam’s badly damaged spillway upstream.

In the wake of the Oroville dam near-disaster, a question floating around Capitol corridors now is:  Given the amount of money needed for what everyone agrees must be an expensive revamping of the state’s water infrastructure, is there room now for Gov. Jerry Brown’s heart’s desire — the $15.5 billion twin tunnels project? “This project has been subjected to 10 years of detailed analysis and more environmental review than any other project in the history of the world. It is absolutely essential if California is to maintain a reliable water supply,” Brown declared in a formal statement issued on Dec. 22, 2016.