A series of lows are forecast to track across the Northwest through the rest of the week, bringing yet more snow to the mountains and potentially flooding rains to lower elevations. The most potent system is expected Friday into Saturday which could bring heavy precipitation, especially in northern California, the Sierra and western Nevada. Here’s a quick breakdown of what to expect.
Ask the residents of San Jose’s drying-out Rock Springs neighborhood and other nearby areas if it pays to ignore warnings about future disasters that seem in normal times to be nothing more than distant, negative fantasies. During the heavy rains of February, when a crisis caused by a poorly-built spillway at the Oroville Dam drew worldwide headlines, the San Jose neighborhood and areas around it suffered at least $50 million of avoidable damage to private property and about $23 million in public property damage. Some estimates of the total toll come to more than $100 million.
Californians are still conserving substantial amounts of water even as Gov. Jerry Brown appears ready to rescind or relax his drought declaration. The State Water Resources Board announced Tuesday that urban Californians reduced water usage by 25.1 percent in February, compared with the state’s baseline year of 2013. The February conservation results were substantially better than a year ago, when mandatory restrictions were in place for much of California but the savings rate was only 11.9 percent.
The Trump administration has removed a major roadblock to plans by a Santa Monica company to pump ancient groundwater from below the Mojave Desert and sell it to urban areas of Southern California. The federal Bureau of Land Management has rescinded a 2015 administrative finding that Cadiz, Inc. needed to obtain a federal right of way permit and thus had to complete comprehensive environmental studies before it could build a water pipeline within 43 miles of railroad right of way owned by the Arizona & California Railroad.
The National Weather Service says a series of storms is supposed to hit California from Thursday through Saturday. Cindy Mathews is with the weather service. She says this will not be a repeat of the rain and runoff that we had in early February. “The term ‘atmospheric river’ is being applied to this weekend’s storm, but it is not one of the extreme ones,” says Mathews. “Snow levels will start out at pass levels and fall to below 5,000 feet by Saturday. So, it’s a moderate-type atmospheric river.” She also says a second storm could arrive Tuesday.
Three years after Democratic Governor Jerry Brown stood on a dry, brown mountainside and declared a drought emergency, state water scientists trekked to the same spot near Sacramento on Thursday to measure nearly four feet of snow – about twice as much as is normal for March and April at that location. “California enters the snowmelt season with a large snowpack that will result in high water in many rivers through the spring,” State Climatologist Michael Anderson said in a statement.
President Donald Trump announced Sunday more than a half-billion dollars would be coming to California to help cover the damage from the winter storms, including $274 million for repairs to the Oroville Dam spillway. The fulfillment of the fourth presidential declaration for damage from the winter storms totals an estimated $540 million. Gov. Jerry Brown appealed for financial assistance last month in Washington. Brown met with Robert Fenton, acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as part of the Democratic governor’s outreach to the new administration and congressional Republicans who control federal spending.
Is California about to formally declare an end to its five-year drought? After abundant winter rainfall and snow accumulation, state officials plan an announcement about California’s “drought status” within the next week, said Doug Carlson, spokesman for the state Department of Water Resources. Exactly when the statement will come is still unknown, as is when and if the State Water Project will increase its current allocation of 60 percent of its 29 member water agencies’ requested supplies, Carlson said.
In these elevated locations, the prefrontal winds lifted the low-level subtropical moisture over California’s mountain ranges and cooled it approximately 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit for each 1,000 feet of elevation. This process is called the saturated adiabatic lapse rate, which wrings out the moisture from the heavens like squeezing a wet sponge or mop — in other words, orthographic enhancement. Rainfall amounts in the Santa Lucia Mountains have been breathtaking. Rocky Butte has logged 79 inches; typically this station receives about 40 inches a year.
Citing potential security risks, state and federal officials are blocking the public’s ability to review documents that could shed light on repair plans and safety issues at crippled Oroville Dam. One of the secret reports is a memo from an independent panel of experts brought in to guide state officials’ repair plans. Another confidential document is labeled a “Project Safety Compliance Report.” The secrecy on the part of state dam operators prompted state Sen. Jim Nielsen to call for an immediate oversight hearing.
