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For decades, San Francisco has been blissfully removed from California’s water wars. The city’s pristine reservoirs in and around Yosemite National Park have been not only plentiful but also largely outside the reach of regulators. But plans by the state to mandate an increase in the amount of water flowing down rivers between the Sierra and San Francisco Bay — a bid to prevent the collapse of some of California’s most precious wetlands — has drawn the city into the fray.

For decades, San Francisco has been blissfully removed from California’s water wars. The city’s pristine reservoirs in and around Yosemite National Park have been not only plentiful but also largely outside the reach of regulators. But plans by the state to mandate an increase in the amount of water flowing down rivers between the Sierra and San Francisco Bay — a bid to prevent the collapse of some of California’s most precious wetlands — has drawn the city into the fray.

Mitch Brown jammed the blade of his loader into a two-story pile of snow outside Donner Ski Shop, the sports rental store he runs in Soda Springs. From there, Old Highway 40 toward bustling ski resorts was lined with walls of snow more than 20 feet high. “It snowed nearly 24 feet in 12 days,” Brown said recently. “We’ve been working 18-hour days to clear it.”

In the weeks and months to come, investigators will no-doubt probe many potential reasons for the near-catastrophic failures at Oroville Dam in February. Those will range from decisions made more than 50 years ago, to the truly extraordinary weather of 2017. But for the moment, the emergency at Oroville Dam has largely passed. The 180,000 people who were evacuated from their homes last month have returned, and construction crews continue to put millions of tons of rocks and concrete across a badly eroded hillside under the emergency spillway.

Marysville, Calif., farmer Brad Foster stood at the eroded edge of the Feather River recently and contemplated how he was going to pull his water pumps out of the soggy, collapsed river bank. “We’ll have to recover them somehow,” said Foster, 58, who owns about 500 acres of walnut orchards in Yuba County. “Those are stationary pumps. They’ve been there 50 years.” In all his years of farming, Foster said he’d never seen such severe and widespread erosion along the winding waterway. “This is not normal,” he said.