From the 188,000 Oroville residents who were evacuated two weeks ago, to the 14,000 in San Jose who had to be rescued from contaminated water, no Californian has been unaffected by the historic storms beating down on our state. Sometimes it feels like it will never end, reminding us of past floods and the challenges that result from so much water coming in such a short period.
Recent rains have not washed away the growing threat of water scarcity in the San Joaquin Valley, California’s largest agricultural region. Over time it could bring disruptive changes not only to the region’s farmers but also to rural communities, the local economy, and the state as a whole. Resolving this problem will take creativity and cooperation.
After 1,892 days, the drought is over in San Joaquin County. That’s the conclusion of the federal government, which Thursday morning issued new maps showing the entire county — and indeed, 79 percent of the state — free from any kind of drought designation. For San Joaquin, it is the first time since Dec. 27, 2011. Portions of San Joaquin had still been considered “abnormally dry” heading into this week, but the U.S. Drought Monitor lifted that finding Thursday, citing an improvement in groundwater levels across the San Joaquin Valley.
In a development that would ease pressure on Oroville Dam’s badly damaged concrete spillway, state officials say the dam’s power plant may be operational by midday Friday. The Hyatt Power Plant stopped functioning as a massive mound of concrete, earth and debris formed in the channel below the 3,000-foot concrete spillway, which fractured Feb. 7.
What does water that once came from a toilet taste like? Pretty bland, actually. “Our water goes through five different treatment steps, so it essentially purifies it,” says Brent Eidson, deputy director of external affairs at San Diego’s Public Utilities Department. “It almost strips the water of everything, so there’s not a whole lot of taste or anything left in it.”
Even as dam spillways are put to the test and parts of Northern California flood, there’s a silver lining to all the rain, beyond ending the drought. It gives California more hydroelectric power. “In the thick of the drought last year and previous years, the dam levels all over the Northwest actually were low. And so we didn’t have as much hydropower available, dispatchable, as we normally would want or expect,” said California Energy Commissioner Andrew McAllister.
Bakersfield received ten inches of rainfall for the water year already. With all the added water, it could lead to a whole lot more bugs and mosquitoes. I find out what this means for the West Nile Virus and how to protect yourself this spring. We had ten inches of rain in only a few months. This created a greener Kern County already with lush plants and vegetation, but this also created more standing water than normal which attracts an annoying pest called mosquitoes.
As you are probably aware, on Sunday, Feb. 12, the Oroville Dam’s emergency spillway almost eroded away. This caused more than 180,000 people to evacuate the area immediately. If the wall above the emergency spillway failed, it would have been catastrophic and could have caused many to lose their lives. Fortunately, this did not happen.
Water managers will once again manually measure California’s snowpack, saying the state is on track for one of the wettest winters on record after five years of drought. The California Department of Water Resources will do the survey Wednesday in the Sierra Nevada. The snowpack is vital because it provides one-third of the state’s water to homes and farms when it melts.
The chances of an abundant water supply for California growers this summer keep improving as the water content in snowpack remains far above normal. The state Department of Water Resources third manual snow survey of the season found a snow-water equivalent of 43.4 inches on March 1 — well above the average of 24.3 inches for the date. “It’s not the record, the record being 56.4 (inches), but it’s still a pretty phenomenal snowpack,” state snow survey chief Frank Gehrke told reporters after the survey at Phillips Station, about 90 miles east of Sacramento.
