The cause of one of the year’s most memorable weather disasters is getting the boom this month — the spillway on the Lake Oroville Dam in California. In February, the spillway failed spectacularly, to the tune of 200,000 people evacuated from their homes. After torrential winter storms, water poured over the lake’s spillways. The main spillway, which was ostensibly designed to bear the weight, crumbled on one side and allowed a torrent to flow out of the spillway onto the wall of the dam itself. That’s problematic because this area of the dam is literally just a hill.

Californians are in deep water — dirty water, to be more precise. Over half a million residents are neglected the same basic access to clean drinking water enjoyed by the rest of the state. Hardest hit are children (a quarter of California schools fail to meet water provision standards) and farmworkers in the Central Valley, particularly low-income Latino communities. The toxic groundwater in these communities often features lovely chemicals such as arsenic, pesticides, uranium, bacteria, nitrates and even carcinogens.

Pieces of the Feather River Fish Hatchery have been patched back together in time for the return of spring-run chinook salmon. However, the shoveling, shifting and trucking will continue for a while until its smooth swimming for the important fish-rearing station on Table Mountain Boulevard. This week, staff has begun to trap spring-run fish that will be tagged before being released back to the river. “They’re coming in really slow,” said Penny Crawshaw, a fish hatchery manager. High volume releases of water from the dam continued until recently, which encouraged fish to hold lower in the river, she explained.