It may not be raining much anymore, but all that water is still doing a number on some growers of California peaches, walnuts and almonds. Exactly how big of a number is still unknown. Janine Hasey, a University of California Cooperative Extension farm advisor in Yuba, Sutter and Colusa counties, said that her area was seeing two separate issues. One involved river bottom orchards inside the levees, which flooded several times this year. “The growers actually know that there’s that risk involved,” Hasey said. “It’s just that this year, the rivers ran high for a long time.”

With the most pressing part of the Oroville spillway emergency over, the state Department of Water Resources now turns its attention to another juggling act. The challenge is keeping the lake low enough so the spillway doesn’t need to be used again until winter, yet high enough so that tourists still come to the lake for recreation — and hopefully spend money in an area that’s already taken a huge hit to its economy and its image. Another challenge is what to do if the tourists do come, because the largest boat ramp on the lake is inaccessible.

In the latest skirmish over transparency at the troubled Oroville Dam, a Northern California activist group has sued state officials alleging they’re illegally withholding information about potentially toxic asbestos. AquAlliance, a Chico-based advocacy group focused on Sacramento Valley water issues, filed a lawsuit in Sacramento Superior Court on Tuesday alleging the Department of Water Resources broke state records laws when it denied the group’s request for emails containing information about the asbestos at the dam. The state did release nine documents, the group said, but not the relevant emails.

Deep in the eastern Mojave Desert, rainwater trickles off limestone and granite mountains and collects in the crusted sponge of the desert’s ancient soil. The moisture feeds ephemeral lakes and seeps that bubble up in winter storms; it sustains springs that nurse wildlife through punishing summers. When it percolates beneath the surface, it replenishes aquifers whose contents date back thousands, even millions, of years. Scott Slater, the CEO of Cadiz, Inc., thinks that water is going to waste.

This is the third installment in our series Contaminated, in which we explore the 300 California communities that lack access to clean drinking water. When we began the series, we introduced you to the community of Lanare, which has arsenic-tainted water while a treatment plant in the center of town sits idle. Today, we return to Lanare to learn why infrastructure projects aren’t always enough, and how Sacramento is trying to ensure Lanare never happens again.