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

Last week I was a guest on an “inspection” trip of the Colorado River Aqueduct, the engineering marvel that delivers up to 1 billion gallons (3.8 billion liters) of water daily to Southern California from the Colorado River hundreds of miles to the east. Organized by the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) of Southern California, these inspections are a relic of an old piece of administrative code. Today they’ve become a well-choreographed public relations effort – right down to the framed MWD mission statement on the walls of the bedrooms provided to guests.

For the second day in a row, a torrent of water on Sunday flowed over the Anderson Reservoir spillway, marking a phenomenon that hadn’t happened for 11 years until this weekend. The Morgan Hill reservoir hovered around 101.4 percent of its maximum capacity as of Sunday afternoon, but that number could rise as an impending storm barrels toward the Bay Area.

 

By now we have all seen the spectacular images of volumes of water crashing down the Oroville Dam spillway in California and blasting upward into the air as they hit an enormous crater in the spillway floor, flooding down the adjacent hillside, threatening people in towns below. Those images reveal a big mistake: failure to update infrastructure to defend against climate change.

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.