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

The strongest of this week’s drenching storms moved ashore Thursday in Northern California, raising the risk of flooding and mudslides in the region of already soggy hillsides and swollen rivers. Flood and wind warnings were in place again north of San Francisco, where residents along the Russian River stacked sandbags to protect their properties. The river overtopped its banks in some areas and flooded streets Wednesday, but began to drop later in the day. The wine region community never dried out after damaging flooding during storms last month.

 

Gov. Jerry Brown devoted most of last month’s State of the State address to excoriating Donald Trump, who had been president for just four days. “We have seen the bald assertion of alternative facts,” Brown complained. “We have heard the blatant attacks on science. Familiar signposts of our democracy – truth, civility, working together – have been obscured or swept aside.” However, buried in Brown’s anti-Trump screed were two paragraphs of semi-cordiality:

 

Until Donald Trump won the presidency, prospects looked bleak for Cadiz, a California company that has struggled for years to secure federal permits to transform Mojave Desert groundwater into liquid gold. With the change of administration, a new day is dawning. In December, the National Governors Association circulated a preliminary list of infrastructure projects provided by the Trump transition team, and Cadiz’s was on the list. The company’s stock price rose on that news, part of a trend that has seen Cadiz’s valuation more than double – to roughly $14 a share – since the election.

The Bay Area is gripped by an historic housing shortage and affordability crisis. A plan being circulated now by state water officials will only make it worse. The State Water Resources Control Board wants to cut water supplies to 2.6 million Bay Area residents in San Francisco, Silicon Valley and the East Bay by up to 50 percent at the first sign of any future drought. The proposed cuts will dramatically reduce our ability to build the new housing we so badly need, even as we struggle to close a massive housing deficit that has been decades in the making.

Officials are working to find ways to repair the Oroville Dam spillway, which has concrete erosion.