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

In a region that has seen so much drought over the last decade, the prospect of moisture would be a welcome one.  But right now, not so much.  The state of California has seen more moisture in the last few weeks than it typically gets in a year and this could actually turn into their wettest “wet season” on record.  Several more inches of rain looks likely for northern and central parts of the state with the highest elevations getting several more feet of snow.

Oroville Dam’s badly damaged main spillway is still deteriorating from an onslaught of fast-paced water, but state officials insist that it is “stable” as they make repairs. State officials expected the concrete main spillway to erode last week when they opened its gates, betting that it was a safer option than the dam’s little-used emergency spillway.

 

The early settlers snatched up the rich, loamy land along the Feather River to grow grapes and orchards. Edward Mathews, an Irishman who fled the potato famine, was peddling vegetables and didn’t have the cash for that kind of soil. During heavy rains, the Yuba River would flow so hard into the Feather at Marysville, it pushed the Feather back north into Jack Slough, named for a freed slave who in 1861 sold Mathews 200 acres of its poor red soil.

The dam burst on a warm afternoon, unleashing nearly 300 million gallons of muddy water on a Los Angeles neighborhood. Five people died and dozens of homes were swept off their foundations and destroyed. In the aftermath of the 1963 Baldwin Hills Dam catastrophe, the state strengthened inspection regulations, helping establish California as a modern leader in dam safety.

No disaster is entirely natural in our re-engineered state and valley. Owing to our hubris, we humans have a direct hand in them all. We have built cities on earthquake faults, balanced mansions on hillsides that burn in one season and slide into the ocean in the next, and moor boats in marinas where tsunamis are known to strike. Having dammed almost all major rivers in California and many tributaries and creeks, we have constructed entire cities in what a century or 150 years ago was swamp, and made islands of rocks piled on peat.