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Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s third effort to address California’s drought by expanding the water supply through dams, recycling, desalination and other methods, as well as tinkering with protections for endangered fish, received the go-ahead Tuesday from the federal Bureau of Reclamation at a Senate hearing.

Estevan Lopez, a bureau commissioner, called Feinstein’s bill, S2533, a “measured approach” that would “improve the water supply situation in California” while protecting the environment and endangered salmon. The bureau manages California’s Central Valley Project, a giant plumbing system of dams and canals that moves water from the state’s wet north to the dry

Five years into California’s latest drought, a major water bill compromise can seem as far away as ever.

The perennial conflict, often summed up as fish vs. farms, subtly surfaced again Tuesday at a key Senate hearing. A Western growers’ advocate pleaded for relief, a Trout Unlimited leader urged caution and lawmakers insisted on optimism while conceding the tough road ahead. “This bill is the product of two years of work (and) 28 drafts,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., adding that her legislation “can produce real water in a manner consistent with the Endangered Species Act.”

The last few years has shown that California is getting serious about policies to combat drought. And now it is getting serious about the role of data in that fight. In 2013 Gov. Jerry Brown mandated that urban water suppliers report monthly average gallons per capita per day to track water conservation. And last week the governor further enshrined that data collection effort in a new executive order.

This information, available online to anyone, is useful. But only to a degree.

Dams and reservoirs are an obsolete technology and the shouting for more dams can exacerbate hard water times. Bullet trains make sense; bullet dams do not. In the December issue of Science, researches expounded on the mishandling of numbers; the estimates of how much water evaporates from watersheds around the world missed their mark by a fifth. Reservoirs and flood or furrow irrigation throw most of the precious stuff back into the atmosphere, contributinig to more losses than we had planned for.