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Repairing The Oroville Dam Spillways Could Cost Southern California Plenty

/in /by /Orange County Breezeby Shelley Henderson

According to the Municipal Water District of Orange County (MWDOC), together the State Water Project (SWP) and the Colorado River Aqueduct (CRA) supply about half of the water needed for Orange County. According to scpr.org, Oroville Lake, created by Oroville Dam, is the largest reservoir in the SWP. It stores water collected over the rainy season, then releases it gradually over the dry season. Over the course of more than four hundred miles, that water irrigates farms and provides drinking water before entering Lake Perris. MWDOC draws from Lake Perris to supply the needs of the County.

 

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Jerry Brown Wants To Spend Nearly $450 Million On Flood Control Following Dam Emergency

/in /by /The Sacramento Beeby Christopher Cadelago and Jim Miller

After successfully appealing to the Trump administration for help with the Oroville Dam emergency, Gov. Jerry Brown announced Friday that he wants to accelerate state spending to reduce flood risks as he asked Washington to expedite federal environmental reviews on several projects, including repairs to the dam’s spillway. The Democratic governor’s flood protection plan combines $50 million in existing general fund money with $387 million from the $7.5 billion water bond approved by voters in 2014.

 

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Gov. Jerry Brown Proposes Speeding Up Water And Flood-Protection Projects After The Winter’s Big Storms

/in /by /Los Angeles Timesby John Myers

Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday unveiled a $437-million plan for shoring up some of California’s most pressing water and flood-control needs, saying the storms of January and February have made clear the state has substantial needs that have gone unmet for years. “We have our aging infrastructure and it’s maxed out,” Brown said during a news conference at the state Capitol.

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OPINION: Oroville Dam Shows Urgent Need For Climate Adaptation

/in /by /The Sacramento Beeby Alex Hall and Mark Gold

The crisis at Oroville Dam should be a wake-up call to those making infrastructure decisions today that will affect Californians for many years to come. A centerpiece of the massive State Water Project, which provides water to 25 million Californians, has proved highly vulnerable to the kind of heavy winter rains we’ll see more often under climate change. Long a leader on action to curb climate change, California must now confront the inevitable impacts to which global greenhouse gas emissions have committed us.

 

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Super-Soaking Storms Cut Severe Drought To 4 Percent Of California

/in /by /NBC San Diegoby Jonathan Lloyd

More than 80 percent of California is no longer in drought after a series of winter storms, including last week’s hourslong soaker in Southern California. About 17 percent of the state remains in drought, according to this week’s U.S. Drought Monitor report, the first since last Friday’s powerful storm. That’s a dramatic turnaround from one year ago when 94 percent of the state was in drought during an historic five-year dry spell.

 

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Drought Monitor Shows Bakersfield Has Recovered From The Drought

/in /by /23ABC (Bakersfield)by Elaina Rusk

Big news this morning as Bakersfield and most of Kern County has officially “recovered” from the drought! However the Frazier Park area, while also seeing an improvement as of this morning’s weekly Drought Monitor Report, remains on the line between “Moderate Drought” and the lowest ranking of “Abnormally dry”. This doesn’t mean the drought has ended however, since much of the Central Coast and Southern California remains in rankings of Abnormally Dry (D0) to Severe drought (D2).

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California Expects Surge In Hydropower But That Could Be Bad News For These Power Companies

/in /by /CNBC (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.)by Jeff Daniels

The huge winter storms in California and out West produced a significant snowpack across the region and increased lake levels, setting the stage for major hydropower generation this year. Yet analysts say the boom in hydroelectricity could further depress power prices, which might be good news for rate payers but bad news ultimately for independent power producers, or IPPs. “The more hydro generation you have the less [natural] gas generation you should have,” Citi analyst Anthony Yuen told CNBC in an interview.

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OPINON: Too Much Water? Where Do We Go From Here

/in /by /San Clemente Times

Our recent torrential rains both here and throughout California bring the subject of drought to light. The most dramatic and publicized element of this recent deluge has been the Oroville Dam and Feather River catastrophes of the recent few weeks. I was fortunate in my Orange County Grand Jury term to spend a full day at Oroville in 2004 and explore all aspects of its role in the state’s water supply. In light of these overflow disasters, I distinctly remember that Lake Oroville was at 74 percent of capacity and the snowpack was almost nonexistent.

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West’s Challenge Is Still Water Scarcity, Wet Winter Or Not

/in /by /The Christian Science Monitor (Boston, Mass.)by Zack Colman

The number of “For Sale” signs compete with “Open” in the storefronts along the main street in this hilly town, where fortunes evaporated with the silver and zinc mines that created it. There’s no bank or grocery store. Mining has mostly vacated the area, leaving a clutch of retirees, some county workers, and not too many others. But this part of Nevada still has one resource that residents to the south in glitzy Las Vegas desperately want and need – water.

 

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Skiing On July 4. More Rain Than Seattle. Yes, California’s Drought Is Receding

/in /by /The Sacramento Beeby Dale Kasler and Brad Branan

How much precipitation has fallen on Northern California this winter? So much that Squaw Valley expects to be open for skiing July 4. So much that Sacramento’s rainfall has surpassed that of traditional rainy meccas like Seattle and Portland, Ore. So much that the U.S. Drought Monitor, a study produced weekly by scientists from multiple federal agencies, reported Thursday that only 17 percent of California is still gripped by drought.

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