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California’s mammoth snow drifts, a welcome sight following five years of harsh drought, have killed off dozens of endangered bighorn sheep, lengthened hibernation for bears and should cause some hikers to think twice before seeking high Sierra adventures, officials say. Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program, heads out Monday for the final manual measurement of the wet season, which is expected to set a record. “We’ve gone from flat-out dry conditions to just an overabundance of moisture,” said Doug Carlson, a spokesman for the California Department of Water Resources. “

“The emergency spillway worked.” That, the latest tone-deaf utterance from the leader of the state Department of Water Resources, is the type of comment we’ve come to dreadfully expect from the Department of Denial. To hear that remark at a legislative hearing in Sacramento only compounded the shock. The Senate Natural Resources and Water Committee was the first to get to ask questions about the Oroville spillway fiasco, nearly three months after the structure started falling apart and the hill got forever scarred.

 

Deep in the Trinity Alps, 130 miles northwest of the troubled Oroville Dam, local officials are raising alarms about another earthen dam with documented weaknesses and limited capacity for releasing the water that has poured in from storms and melting snow. Trinity Lake, the state’s third-largest reservoir, was filled to 97 percent of its storage capacity Tuesday, and a snowpack estimated at 150 percent of normal still looms over the watershed. If the reservoir were to overtop the dam, the results would be catastrophic, said Keith Groves, a Trinity County supervisor representing the district that includes Trinity Dam.

 

The San Diego County Water Authority board of directors on Thursday authorized the Water Authority, in conjunction with the city of San Diego, to begin seeking detailed proposals for a potential energy storage facility at San Vicente Reservoir. The project could help ease pressure on power grids by producing locally generated renewable energy on demand, and also lessen upward pressure on water rates by providing a new source of revenue.