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California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea, is an accident. It was created in 1905 when a levee broke on an irrigation canal, flooding a giant desert playa. Today it has become a sticking point in negotiations between three states over the future of the Colorado River. The three states – California, Arizona and Nevada – are in the midst of negotiating a drought contingency plan (DCP).  It would commit each state to reducing diversions from the Colorado River in order to prevent Lake Mead from shrinking to disastrously low levels.

The drought is officially over in California, but our water crisis is not. Eyewitness News investigates the proposed solutions to help our water supply for the long haul. “What’s interesting from last year is we were simultaneously in a drought emergency and we were in a flood emergency, and so it was kind of an interesting thing for Californians to try to wrap their head around,” Harry Starkey, district manager for the West Kern Water District said. Starkey said California will always have its dry years, and then we are going to have some wet years.

For the past two years we’ve covered water issues throughout California. With this focus we strove to bring a new kind of journalistic rigor and depth to the coverage of the state’s drought, floods, environmental issues, innovation and more. We can’t thank this community enough and we are excited to let you know that we are expanding our coverage. Beginning now, Water Deeply is bringing that same rigor and depth of coverage to water issues across the American West. Water doesn’t obey state lines, and neither should its coverage.

America’s tallest dam was built from earth, stone and concrete – and the towering ambition of Gov. Pat Brown. Sixty years before a crisis at Oroville Dam sent thousands fleeing for their lives in February, the late governor brought an almost evangelical zeal to erecting the structure that would hold back the Feather River to deliver water to the parched southern half of the state. Hundreds of pages of state archives, oral history interviews and other documents reveal a portrait of a man hell-bent on building Oroville and the rest of the State Water Project.

While the levees in the Delta are currently holding, heavy rains accompanied by increased temperatures in the spring and early summer could cause further damage. Over the winter, there were numerous levee breaks and breaches throughout the system. This year’s record-breaking precipitation levels have caused millions of dollars in damages in the lower basins of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley and Delta.