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Water managers in a California community say they’re taking advantage of a break in storms to draw down water from behind a dam that is full, causing a creek to overflow and flood parts of San Jose. Jim Fiedler of the Santa Clara Valley Water District said Wednesday that Anderson Dam is full. Releases over its spillway have flooded neighborhoods in San Jose. The district is required to keep the dam 68 percent of capacity after inspections found that it could fail in a major earthquake.

As a kid growing up in the Southland, I got my weather tips on the television from a mustached meteorologist named Dr. George. He would get quite excited when a big rainstorm was heading our way, breathlessly drawing pressure gradients and furiously waving a wand as if commanding a symphony. It felt like something epic and rare was about to happen. I still find myself mesmerized by meteorologists and wonder if new insights into atmospheric rivers will move the needle with key California water decisions.

After six years of drought and a few months of flooding, California’s decades-long political commitment to ideology of being either for the environment or against progress has endangered the state’s water supply system and is threatening public safety, environmental health and economic stability. Rather than upgrade California’s water collection and delivery systems, for 50 years state bureaucrats, political appointees and many elected officials focused their priorities on an onslaught of environmental standards, regulations, projects and programs committed to their rose-colored-glasses vision of California.

Creeks and rivers topped their banks, hundreds of homes were evacuated and several thousand people found themselves trapped in a rural hamlet as Northern California emerged Tuesday from yet another winter storm. The atmospheric river of moisture that has saturated drought-parched ground with a series of drenching storms in recent weeks returned with a vengeance to the north on Monday after briefly focusing its fury on Southern California. The downpours swelled watercourses that already teetered near or above flood levels and left about half the state under flood, wind and snow advisories.

The state water board has egg—or should I say mud—all over its collective face. Earlier this month, board members refused to lift the drought restrictions on Californians. By keeping them in place until the traditional review time in April, they ignored pleas from water agencies to eliminate the restrictions now. Board members refused to lift the restrictions despite January rains and snows at near record levels. This month’s deluges pushed levels to records.