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California Gov. Jerry Brown asked President Trump on Friday to declare a major disaster in the state because of damage from a month of storms as more rain hit the south. Brown’s letter said a powerful series of January storms brought “relentless” rain and high winds that caused flooding, mudslides, evacuations, erosion, power outages and at least eight deaths. Northern California was hardest hit. Brown said the storm system was so severe and widespread that state and local governments need federal assistance to continue dealing with the problems it created.

For the first time since Oroville Dam was completed in 1968, water from its storm-swollen reservoir overtopped the emergency spillway Saturday, sending sheets of water down a forested hillside and adding to the murk and debris churning in the Feather River below. State officials said they did not expect the flows to cause flooding in Oroville or other communities downstream, but the emergency releases underscored the perilous situation confronting the operators of California’s second-largest reservoir for the rest of this extraordinarily rainy winter.

Officials in California prepared to implement a never-used emergency plan to release millions of cubic feet of water building up behind the Oroville Dam after a gaping hole formed in its spillway. Bill Croyle, deputy director of the California Department of Water Resources, said the dam itself remains in no danger of breaching, however due to unprecedented amounts of storm water flowing into the reservoir after torrential rain in the region, the water level is now 14 feet away from rising over the dam.

U.S. weather forecasters said Thursday the cool flip side to the climate phenomenon El Niño has faded away. The La Niña episode lasted only four months and was among the weakest and shortest on record, coming on the heels of one of the strongest El Niños, said Mike Halpert of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center. La Niña, a cooling of parts of the equatorial Pacific that changes weather patterns worldwide, often lasts a year or more, longer than El Niños. La Niña conditions were first detected in October and disappeared in January.