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The main California agency promoting Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed $16 billion water tunnels gave its expected approval to the project Friday. The move by the Department of Water Resources, which is helping shepherd Brown’s tunnels project over the regulatory and financial hurdles it must clear to break ground, endorsed the tunnels as a sound step environmentally. The Democratic governor wants to remake the state’s water system by tapping two 35-mile tunnels, both of them four-stories high, into Northern California’s Sacramento River, augmenting aging pumps to the south.

California Gov. Jerry Brown last week appointed Grant Davis as director of the state’s Department of Water Resources. Davis, 54, general manager of the Sonoma County Water Agency, brings an unusual resume to the job. With a degree in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, he had never worked for a water utility until joining the Sonoma County agency in 2007 as assistant general manager. Previously, he spent a decade as executive director of The Bay Institute in Novato.

At one point, the U.S. Drought Monitor map showed the presence of “exceptional drought”, the worst category designated by researchers, across much of California and a large portion of the areas of northern Texas and Oklahoma. A look at the map today shows neither of those areas has a drought problem at all. “Exceptional drought” has become a rarity across the country. The current U.S. Drought Monitor map shows relatively small areas of “exceptional drought” in a part of North Dakota and a tiny sliver of northeast Montana.

The engineers who scrambled to prevent Delta farms from flooding this year have long insisted that the levees surrounding those low-lying islands are not as fragile as they’re sometimes portrayed to be. Now, after seven months of high water without a single major island flooding, those engineers feel validated. “We hear so many bad things about the levees,” said engineer Gilbert Cosio, who works for a number of the rural reclamation districts run by farmers. “But we’ve been doing a lot of good the last 30 years. This kind of proves it. This was not the disaster it could have been.”

Even after a decade of studies and tens of thousands of pages of analysis, no one can say precisely what Gov. Jerry Brown’s twin tunnels will do to the Delta. Pushing forward with the $17 billion project despite the uncertainty, backers are promising to evaluate the impacts of the tunnels after they’re built, and potentially change how they are operated as new information comes to light.