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Weather experts spent much of this winter cautiously optimistic. There were still weeks to go in the wet season and the reservoirs were full, thanks to last winter’s near record-breaking rain and snow. Now, even the professionals are getting more than a little nervous. There have been weeks of hardly any rain. The Sierra Nevada has received record-low amounts of snow. Meanwhile, the calendar is flipping ever closer to California’s blast furnace dry season. “The outlook isn’t good,” said David Rizzardo, chief of snow surveys with the Department of Water Resources.

There’s been a lot of talk about drought recently across Arizona and the West – especially with the relatively dry winter we’ve been having. But my next guest wishes we didn’t use the “d” word as much as we do. Tom Philp is strategic communications and policy adviser for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and he’s written about how we may need a new lexicon to talk about our current water situation. Philp joins me.

In 2014, I asked you to support Proposition 1, $7.5 billion water bond written during one of the worst droughts in the state’s modern history. It certainly wasn’t perfect. I would have preferred significantly more than the $2.7 billion it provided for water storage, while others would have eliminated water storage funding entirely. But Prop 1 was a product of compromise and negotiation – something we need a lot more of in today’s political climate. In typical Sacramento fashion, we had ignored a problem until it became so large that we could not possibly ignore it anymore.

The failure of the spillway wasn’t just a scary experience for Oroville, but also a costly one for a city that was already struggling financially. Right now, costs are up by millions of dollars, but it’s crucial to repair the dam which provides water for more than 25 million Californians. Kiewit construction crews continue to be hard at work making repairs on the Oroville Dam Spillway. Construction is being done in two phases, with the first completed in November.

Atmospheric conditions that helped create the recent multiyear California drought have returned, leaving the state dry and exceptionally warm this winter and its residents wondering if another long dry spell is on the way. A ridge of high-pressure air off the West Coast has persisted for much of the past three months, blocking many Pacific storms from reaching California and weakening others that do get through. Normally such ridges tend to come and go, but they also lingered during the 2012-16 drought, the worst in the state’s history.