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Since the beginning of the year, enough water has spilled out of California’s rain-swollen Lake Oroville to meet the demands of roughly 14 million people for a year. With no place to store the excess, much of it ended up flowing out to sea. It wasn’t just last month’s dramatic near-disaster at Lake Oroville’s dam that is to blame for the water loss. After years of drought, months of rains are exposing a major weakness in California’s water system: lack of storage.

 

In the late 1980s, a Japanese scientist named Koji Minoura stumbled on a medieval poem that described a tsunami so large it had swept away a castle and killed 1,000 people. Intrigued, Minoura and his team began looking for paleontological evidence of the tsunami beneath rice paddies, and discovered not one but three massive, earthquake-triggered waves that had wracked the Sendai coast over the past 3,000 years. In a 2001 paper, Minoura concluded that the possibility of another tsunami was significant.

The Hyatt Powerhouse under Oroville Dam went back online Friday after removal of debris from the bottom of the main Oroville Dam spillway allowed the level of the Diversion Pool to be reduced. Acting Department of Water Resources Director Bill Croyle said in a press conference at noon Friday that two of the six turbines were in operation and that the power plant would be ramped up as the day went along. Croyle said one of the six turbines is under maintenance.

 

More than four inches of rain pounded the red-tiled roofs of this coastal enclave one day last month. Waves damaged a scenic pier. Historic pine trees fell, crashing into vehicles. The airport closed. The county jail relocated 200 inmates. Residents evacuated three apartment buildings. Six vacation cabins and 15 vehicles were swept down a river in a nearby canyon. And yet, Santa Barbara remains one of the last, and perhaps worst, remnants of California’s historic drought.

As California labored under a severe drought for more than five years, industry and media debated the pros and cons of desalination coming to the rescue of the drought-stricken state. About a dozen or so desalination plants have been planned or proposed up and down the Golden State’s coast, with the 50 million gallon (189m liter) per day Carlsbad desalination plant opened in December 2015 and Santa Barbara’s smaller desalination facility set to open this spring.