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Water transfers are an important way to share a limited resource, especially to help fish and habitats that were historically left with scraps when water rights were parceled out around the West. The water for such transfers usually comes from farmers, who free up water through some kind of conservation measure. By transferring the saved water, a farmer can help imperiled fish and make some money. Such arrangements are especially important on the Colorado River, which is oversubscribed to serve human demands and also feeds a vast international ecosystem.

According to informal surveys following the February evacuations ordered in response to the Oroville Dam crisis, a large segment of the local population said they stayed at home rather than leave for higher ground. From the looks of an inundation map created by graduate students at the UC Irvine Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, those residents who stayed behind might have wanted to rethink things. The recent study conducted by the graduate program forecasts the potential destruction that could have followed a complete failure of the emergency spillway at Lake Oroville.

Seems like California is not the only land mass to benefit from a surplus of water these days. The moon of Saturn, Enceladus, is swimming in warm liquid water, enough to create plumes of hydrogen gas erupting from the subsurface of the ocean floor, NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists reported Thursday. In both California and Enceladus, water means life. On Saturn’s moon, the possibility of a food source dissolved in waters is just that, a possibility, as is the outside chance of finding life on the cold, icy moon.

Blowing past state officials’ financial projections, three construction contractors submitted bids for the Oroville Dam repairs that begin at $275 million, the Department of Water Resources said Saturday. DWR, in a brief announcement, said its engineers had estimated the repairs to the two damaged spillways would come in at $220 million. The low bid was $275.4 million from a subsidiary of Kiewit Corp. of Omaha, Neb.; followed by an affiliate of Barnard Construction Co. of Bozeman, Mont., at $277 million. The high bid was made by Oroville Dam Constructors, a joint venture between Sacramento’s Teichert Construction and Granite Construction of Watsonville, at $344.1 million.

The California Drought has created a race to the top. Amid all the social, economic and environmental havoc, there is a quiet competition underway to see who will emerge as the leader in water innovation. Which community will be drought-resilient? Who will provide their community with reliable, inexpensive water, even during a crisis? There is no silver bullet to becoming drought-resilient, but direct potable reuse provides communities with considerable security in an uncertain hydrologic future.