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

A state Initiative would establish in the California Constitution that the highest priorities of beneficial water use are: first, domestic use, and second, irrigation use. The California State Water Resources Control Board is now the greatest threat facing water users in the state, a threat that can best be overcome by returning power to the People of California. The Board claims that double the current environmental flows from the San Joaquin River and tributaries must be taken for fish. The Board, with complete indifference, calls the resultant community and economic devastation an “unavoidable impact.”

California water managers say Sierra Nevada snow drifts are at a drought-busting 173 percent of average, with the most snow recorded since 1995. State water managers poked rods into drifts as high as tree branches Thursday to measure the snowpack. The overall snowpack is vital to the state, providing a third of water supplies year-round. This year’s bountiful snowpack came thanks to one of the stormiest Januarys in decades. The storms brought three-fourths of the state’s normal yearly precipitation in just a few weeks.

Our urban areas have lost their ability to naturally recycle stormwater due to the impervious nature of infrastructure engineering over the past 100 years. We have been building roadways and streets to capture the runoff and send it somewhere else, usually to the river or ocean. For decades in California, controlling stormwater was the main goal but today, with more water scarcity, we are beginning to see this same water more as an asset and less as a liability.

The pros in charge of California’s water system were exultant Thursday after precise measurements in the Sierra Nevada confirmed what everyone can see — heaping mounds of frozen water known as snow. The Sierra snowpack, otherwise known as the state’s frozen water supply, came in at 173 percent of normal for this point in the season. For the first time in a long time, the California water system might be able to make both farmers and environmentalists happy.

After five years of drought, could California really have so much rain and snow there’s no room to store all the water?The answer – as the state’s water picture careens from bust to boom – is yes. One month into an exceptionally stormy 2017, river flows though the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta have been so powerful that the massive pumps that ship north-state water to Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley have roared at full throttle for weeks.