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There is a cycle to the conversation about infrastructure and how to pay for it. And it goes like this in California: A few politicians say that infrastructure — roads, bridges, tunnels, railways, dams and more — are the lifeblood of economic prosperity. Editorial boards point out that Gov. Pat Brown and the Legislature of his era helped make California an economic power by investing in the massive California State Water Project and highways, and by making the University of California system the best in the world.

 

A helicopter tour over Oroville Dam and the Feather River on Wednesday, March 1, 2017, reveals the dramatic extent of damage suffered by the spillway, the adjacent hillside scoured down to bedrock and the streambed of the Feather River piled with rock and other debris by dangerous high flows that nearly caused catastrophe beginning on Feb. 12. A series of storms filled Lake Oroville and taxed the dam’s main and emergency spillways, while causing widespread flooding and evacuations downstream.

Could the torrents of rain that have recently soaked California trigger an earthquake? The science is mixed. Heavy rainfall can spark earthquakes, according to one scientist, and with a winter marked by moisture-packed storms, California should be prepared. “If water enters a fault, especially under high pressure, it lubricates the fault and can push it open and make it easier for it to move, causing an earthquake,” said Gillian Foulger, a professor of geophysics at Durham University in the United Kingdom.

California faces an estimated $50 billion price tag for roads, dams and other infrastructure threatened by floods such as the one that severely damaged Oroville Dam last month, the state’s natural resources secretary said Wednesday. Nearly 200,000 people living near the country’s tallest dam were evacuated three weeks ago amid fears of a catastrophic flood after a chunk of concrete tore out the main spillway following heavy rains.

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 a thousand 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 three thousand years. In a 2001 paper, Minoura concluded that the possibility of another tsunami was significant.