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With the first phase of repairs to the Oroville Dam spillway completed, residents downstream can breathe a little easier. Hundreds of engineers and laborers worked around the clock to fortify the nation’s tallest dam before winter rains, and the Department of Water Resources should be congratulated for expediting this enormous task. But there is a key part of this repair that is still to be done to ensure that California’s water system is ready to withstand the challenges of extreme weather events predicted for the future.

Who owns the water pipes beneath your street? Increasingly, it is a private company, a shift from the mostly public ownership of the systems used to provide drinking water and remove waste that has prevailed in the U.S. since the early 1900s.

More rain is on the way. A lot more rain. “That’s really the theme now,” said National Weather Service Eureka meteorologist William Iwasko on Sunday. “… Nice sunny skies probably are not going to happen this week.” So much rain is expected, a flood watch was issued by the weather service for parts of Humboldt, Trinity and Del Norte counties on Sunday.

The storms that blew through Northern California this week raised the water level of Lake Oroville about 4 feet, but it’s a long way from where the spillways might need to be used. The lake started rising about noon on Wednesday, according to the Department of Water Resources website, and in the next 48 hours climbed to about 695.5 feet above sea level by noon Friday. That’s 118 feet below the gates that would allow the repaired main spillway to be used, and 206 feet below the lip of the emergency spillway, where repair work is continuing.

 

A storm system tapping an atmospheric river of moisture is bringing heavy rain to portions of California, including some burn areas through Thursday as heavy snow potentially snarls travel in the Sierra Nevada. The stream of moisture piping its way toward the West Coast from the Pacific Ocean can be seen in the yellow and orange shadings in this satellite image. An atmospheric river is a thin and long plume of moisture that stretches from the tropics or subtropics into higher latitudes.