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

A case in point is how the state Department of Water Resources has handled Lake Oroville for years. It continues despite considerable public and political pressure since the spillway collapse. Two developments last week perfectly illustrate the point. One involves awarding a nine-figure bid to a company to fix the spillway without any detail about what the company is actually doing. The other involves an independent review of what went wrong, which takes on added weight because the promised review by the government is nonexistent so far.

A new nationwide study has unearthed the huge hidden potential of tapping into salty aquifers as a way to relieve the growing pressure on freshwater supplies across the United States. Digging into data from the country’s 60 major aquifers, the U.S. Geological Survey reports that the amount of brackish – or slightly salty – groundwater is more than 35 times the amount of fresh groundwater used in the United States each year.

Hoping to boost water supplies during future droughts, Silicon Valley’s largest water provider is working on a plan to build a new $800 million dam and reservoir in the remote hills of eastern Santa Clara County, just off Pacheco Pass. The idea, still in the early stages, could result in the construction of one of the largest reservoirs in the Bay Area — a lake that would be twice the size of Crystal Springs Reservoir along Interstate 280 in San Mateo County — and the first new reservoir built in Santa Clara County since 1957, when Uvas Reservoir near Morgan Hill opened.

As one of the wettest California winters in memory nears its end, the state’s major reservoirs are all essentially full or well above their historical average levels. It’s good news for everyone and everything that depends on water, especially after several years of reduced allocations for farmers and huge losses for salmon, which were frequently unable to spawn successfully for lack of cold water. In spite of their replenished supplies, the glass is still half empty for many farmers and urban water districts.

The snowpack in California’s Tuolumne River Basin in the Sierra Nevada is currently larger than the previous four years combined, according to new NASA data. The 2017 California snowpack is near the largest on record, NASA’s data showed. Airborne Snow Observatory (ASO) mapping showed the Tuolumne Basin’s snowpack is twice as large as last year’s and 21 times the volume of 2015, which was the lowest on record.The combined April 1 snow-water equivalent from 2013-2016 adds up to only 92 percent of this year’s April 1 measurement, NASA added.