As if we don’t have enough trouble from flooding, extreme amounts of rain caused by back-to-back storms systems in the state could create enough pressure in the groundwater system to trigger earthquakes along California’s faults, a new report says. California has received record amounts of rain this winter, causing everything from dam failures to widespread flooding and mudslides.
This winter’s record-breaking storms have proven a fierce test of our state and its infrastructure. It has has been particularly frightening for people in and around the city of Oroville. We’d first like to say how glad we are that hundreds of thousands of people were able to safely evacuate and the emergency spillway helped provide the necessary time to do so. And we share their relief at being able to return to their homes. Now that the immediate danger is passed, we can take a more thoughtful look at what happened.
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.
In 2014, California voters approved a $7.5 billion bond that would go to several water projects. So far, only 2 percent of the money has been used, and the rest has been sitting in a fund, untapped. In light of the Oroville Dam scare in early February, lawmakers are looking to focus their attention on flood management projects, such as fixing old dams and maybe building new ones. However, some are hoping lawmakers will look over the lowest-priority projects and instead focus on water storage with all the recent precipitation.
The impacts of California’s catastrophic floods will not end when the water subsides. Even as drought conditions disappear it’s a safe bet that the politics of water won’t wane. The pictures are out there to be seen on the web. Flooded farmland as far as the eye can see; homes and businesses under water; and, the damage done to the spillway and hillside at Oroville Dam are amazing but predictable.
Water stopped cascading down Oroville Dam’s fractured main spillway Monday, revealing a gaping wound from a beating that lasted nearly three weeks. Dam operators gradually scaled back water releases to zero over a six-hour period, providing breathing room for construction crews trying to clear debris from a badly choked Feather River channel and restart the dam’s critically needed hydroelectric plant. The shutdown is expected to last about a week, which the state Department of Water Resources hopes will be enough time to bring the plant back into operation.
Operators of Oroville Dam – the nation’s highest – shut down its main spillway Monday so that debris could be cleared and the dam’s hydroelectric turbines could be restarted. It was merely the latest of many operational adjustments state and federal officials have made this year to cope with an unprecedented series of rain and snow storms that swept through the state, putting maximum pressure on its complex system of dams, reservoirs, river channels, canals, bypasses, weirs and other man-made water-control devices. By necessity, they operated on the fly as conditions changed, often suddenly, with Oroville being the centerpiece.
Some technologies just seem to make sense. But everything has to line up correctly for a technology to move forward. When I was in Switzerland five or six years ago, the Swiss were considering putting in pumped storage so that low-cost wind from the north and low-cost solar from the south could be stored and then delivered to the rest of the continent at peak times. In 2016, the 1000-MW Linthal pumped storage hydro power plant was successfully synchronized to the Swiss grid bringing this vision to pass.
Although California’s five-year drought has come to an end, how has it affected the state’s giant sequoia trees? In this video, we meet a scientist who is seeking to understand these seemingly indestructible giants. Although though the skies have finally opened and the rains have started to fall on California, more than 100 million trees died during the state’s historic five-year drought. Such a monumental loss of trees — trees are amongst the best, most consistent “living sponges” that sequester CO2 from the Earth’s atmosphere — accelerates global warming.
Good politicians like Jerry Brown know not to waste a good crisis. And so last week he urged that lawmakers spend $437 million for flood control. It is a modest request, though not nearly enough, as he readily acknowledged by displaying charts showing that upgrading California’s water infrastructure, including 1,500 dams and thousands of miles of levees, would cost $50 billion. If we Californians are to live and prosper in our re-engineered state, we will need to pay for it, or, as Brown said, “belly up to the bar.”
