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The flooding that displaced residents in 90 homes along the Kings River in the Central Valley over the weekend was more than a week in the making. For eight consecutive days last week, temperatures from Fresno to Bakersfield exceeded 100, according to the National Weather Service. Wildfires burned, utility providers warned of possible blackouts because of a surge in demand, and thousands of feet up in the Sierra Nevada — far from where humans and their scientific tools could reach — California’s historic snowpack continued to melt.

In a win for a monumental water plan that would re-plumb the largest estuary on the West Coast, federal fisheries officials on Monday approved California’s decades-old delta tunnels project. The officials based their approval on a 1267-page biological opinion for the project prepared by Californian and federal officials. In a decision watched closely by proponent Gov. Jerry Brown and opposing environmental groups, federal regulators agreed that the $15.7-billion proposed makeover of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta could be completed without devastating impacts to native salmon and other endangered fish species.

The Delta tunnels got a crucial green light from two federal agencies Monday when scientists said the controversial project can co-exist with the endangered fish that inhabit the waters of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. In a pair of long-awaited decisions, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service said the tunnels, known as California WaterFix, aren’t likely to jeopardize the continued existence of the Delta smelt, Chinook salmon, steelhead and other imperiled species.

 

Federal wildlife officials say they’re set to issue the crucial first rulings on Gov. Jerry Brown’s decades-old ambitions to re-engineer California’s water system with the $16 billion construction of giant water tunnels from the Sacramento River. The National Marine Fisheries Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service say they’ll announce their findings later Monday on the environmental impacts of the proposed tunnels, which would be California’s biggest water project in decades.