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

As California waited Monday night to see if President Donald Trump would grant Gov. Jerry Brown’s request for emergency funding for 10,000 evacuees who lived in the shadow of the Oroville Dam, FEMA began preparing for the worse. The federal disaster-management agency’s Region 9, which oversees California and other Western states, has mobilized a 24-hour task force to coordinate its response with state and local agencies, said Mary Simms, a spokeswoman.

The area around a huge dam at California’s second-largest reservoir is in a state of emergency, with some 180,000 residents ordered to evacuate the area Sunday out of fears that part of Oroville Dam could fail. A glimmer of hope arrived late Sunday night, when officials said water had finally stopped pouring over the dam’s emergency spillway. The secondary spillway was in use because the main spillway had developed a huge hole, stressed by the need to release water accumulated from California’s wet winter — and brought to a new crisis point by last week’s heavy rains.

Few people realize how outdated our systems for water information are. Because of data limitations, real-time, transparent decisions about drought management, flood response and groundwater protection have eluded the state for the past century. Without basic numbers on where, when and how much water is available and being used, we can’t improve how we manage our most precious water and natural resources.

It wasn’t so long ago that residents here had to drag their houseboats into a dusty field from the barren banks of Lake Oroville, which had almost no water left to keep them afloat. Now after weeks of rain, that dusty field is swelling with water and nearly 200,000 people had to evacuate the area when the state’s second-largest reservoir developed a hole in its auxiliary spillway and threatened to catastrophically flood nearby towns.