Floods likely will surge more often across northern California, as wintertime temperatures rise in the Sierra Nevada and snow shifts to rain, scientists predict. When precipitation falls as snow, the water stays longer on the mountain as snowpack, then slowly flows out as snowmelt over the spring and summer. The ground has more time to absorb it, said Nevada Irrigation District Watershed Resources Planner Neysa King.
Seven years into Jerry Brown’s final tour as governor, his promise to create a reliable water delivery system that protects the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is in shambles. His twin-tunnel fixation was ill-conceived and, for Northern California at least, unacceptable, and he is not giving up.
They gathered this week at Sacramento’s federal building on Capitol Mall, carrying protest signs and vowing to resist the Trump administration’s plan to pump more of Northern California’s water through the Delta to the southern half of the state. The government “wants to suck our lifeblood dry,” said Noah Oppenheim, leader of a group representing commercial fishermen. An ally hoisted a sign that said, “Don’t pump the Delta to extinction.”
Oroville Dam’s battered flood-control spillways have been largely rebuilt, but the cost of last February’s near-disaster keeps rising. On Friday, state officials put the total price tag at $870 million. The latest figure from the California Department of Water Resources represents a 32 percent increase from DWR’s estimate in October, when the cost was pegged at approximately $660 million.
Los Angeles is a grand American urban experiment. It brings emerging ideas into the mainstream, sometimes for better, and sometimes for worse. In the early 20th century, it seemed fanciful to build a metropolis in a region receiving limited seasonal rainfall. But L.A. adopted the ideas of the time at grand scales. It built pipelines over hundreds of miles of rugged terrain to import water from the Owens Valley (1913), Colorado River (1939) and Northern California (1972). In a quest for growth, L.A. has always adopted new ideas to keep ahead.
Already facing a lawsuit claiming decades of state mismanagement of the Oroville dam and a “culture of corruption” that fostered harassment, the California Department of Water Resources drew a new legal challenge from Sacramento County—one that accuses its employees of improper communications around the twin tunnels project.The latest DWR drama was triggered January 15, when attorneys for Sacramento and San Joaquin counties, and the city of Antioch, filed a motion demanding that the State Water Resources Control Board halt the phase-two public hearings for WaterFix, better known as “the twin tunnels” project.
Months of behind the scenes talks have failed to drum up enough money to pay the full costs of replumbing the center of California’s sprawling waterworks with two giant water tunnels. That has left the state with little choice but to scale down a roughly $17-billion water delivery project to fit a funding pot of less than $10 billion. State officials are expected to soon announce exactly what form a revised California WaterFix would take.
The Bureau of Reclamation came to Chico Thursday to take input on a proposal to maximize water deliveries from the Central Valley Project, and for two hours a succession of speakers told them it was a bad idea. The meeting was nominally to get comments just on what the environmental studies for the proposal should look at, but most of the speakers objected to the basic idea of taking more water from the north to deliver to the San Joaquin Valley for what more than one speaker called “desert agriculture.”
The state Department of Water Resources now says there were “many redundant systems” to ensure the Oroville Dam spillway radial gates had power during February’s crisis. This comes after environmental groups voiced concern in an article published in this newspaper Wednesday about, seemingly, a lack of backup generators that would allow the department to control the gates even if crucial power lines went down. Radial gates at the top of the spillway allow for water releases.
