You are now in California and the U.S. category.

Sixty years ago, California Gov. Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown built the biggest waterworks the world had ever seen. The State Water Project transformed California, moving billions of gallons of water from the wet north to the dry south using dozens of dams, pumping stations and a 400-mile-long man-made river. It serves 25 million people and irrigates hundreds of thousands of acres of cropland. But spectacular as it was, the project was flawed.

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives this week is expected to approve H.R. 23, the so-called “Gaining Responsibility on Water Act” that is written by Hanford Republican Davis Valadao. Unless blocked in the Senate, the bill is expected to sail to final approval within weeks. But before then, it might run into some stormy opposition from California Senators Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris. “California’s Central Valley helps feed the world. It deserves sensible and responsible water solutions—this measure doesn’t even come close to meeting that test,” they say in a joint statement.

A period of historic drought in the West might be over for now, but the war over water never is. From Colorado to California, a snowy late spring finally broke through what was left of the drought’s fierce grip. Soil is saturated again, reservoirs are full and water worries have temporarily receded as farms return to their full productive capability. Even so, wrestling over water during the recent shortages was a wake-up call for agricultural leaders who are now putting heightened importance on developing better outreach to the public while still pushing long-term resource planning.

Drone video footage released Friday shows how construction progressed on the Lake Oroville main spillway from July 1 through July 6, 2017. The reconstruction of Oroville Dam’s flood-control spillways began in May, more than three months after a near disaster forced the emergency evacuation of thousands of downstream residents. Kiewit Corp. of Omaha, Neb., which was awarded a $275.4 million contract to fix the dam’s two spillways, has more than 200 employees on the site, a workforce that will balloon to 500 by August.

• Texas struggled through its driest year in history in 2011. Four years later was its wettest ever. The Mississippi River rose to all-time-high flood levels in 2011. In 2012, its second-lowest. After a six-year drought that made agricultural irrigation a political hot potato, Northern California experienced nearly double the normal rainfall this year, beating the old mark set in 1983. As the planet warms, a less ballyhooed new normal is emerging in weather extremes. With deluge following dust, the record book is becoming increasingly difficult to rely on for those who study the weather.