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In recognition of National Dam Safety Awareness Day on May 31, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) urges those living or working below dams to recognize the signs of a potential dam breach and to have or update an evacuation plan. PG&E’s  97 storage reservoirs are used primarily for generating hydropower and are generally far smaller than state and federal multi-year water storage reservoirs like Lake Oroville and Shasta Lake. In February, damage to the Oroville Dam spillway led to evacuations in Butte, Yuba and Sutter counties.

A new irrigation enhancement project has seen positive results for farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. The project, which took three years to be designed and funded, and only months to be built, cuts down on water usage from the South San Joaquin Valley Irrigation District that backs up in the Stanislaus River. “This grew out of an idea I had,” said Sam Bologna, Engineering Department manager of the South San Joaquin Valley Irrigation District and developer of the project, who was recently in Monterey attending an Association of California Water Agencies conference. “We needed to find a way to serve farmers and also conserve water.”

During California’s epic five-year drought, most of the state’s irrigation districts didn’t comply with a 2007 law that requires them to account for how much water they’re delivering directly to farmers, a Bee investigation has found. State regulators are largely powerless to stop them, but they don’t seem too bothered by it. They say they’d rather switch to a different form of reporting. Farm-advocacy groups say irrigation districts have been bombarded with a confusing slew of state and federal laws and regulations that often have overlapping reporting requirements, so it’s no wonder their compliance rates are low.

The Department of Water Resources ramped down the Oroville Dam flood control spillway flows from 20,000 cubic feet per second to zero cfs on Friday. With no more water gushing down the spillway, contractors working for DWR will start working full-time to shore up the badly damaged spillway before next winter. Flows to the Feather River were gradually reduced over multiple days, water officials said. The Lake Oroville water level was at 829.49 feet at the time the spillway gates were closed. The maximum water level is 901 feet.

The effects of rising oceans on coastal flooding may be even worse than we thought. Scientists have found that a mere 10 to 20 centimeters of sea-level rise — which is expected by 2050 — will more than double the frequency of serious flooding events in many parts of the globe, including along the California coastline.The findings, described in Scientific Reports, highlight the environmental and economic impacts of sea-level rise on coastal areas, and the need to properly predict and prepare for these effects.