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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of the worst storms in a decade pounded the Santa Ynez Valley and surrounding areas Friday, dumping more than 4 inches of wind-lashed rain, downing trees and power lines, sending mud and water into homes, flooding roadways, and contributing to a slew of vehicle crashes, highway closures, flash flood watches and evacuation warnings. The Valley was expected to get a brief respite from rain midweek, but forecasters said a low pressure area could drop down from the north Saturday, bringing another round of high winds and heavy rain.
Stubborn New Melones Lake finally decided to join the party. New Melones this week topped 100 percent of normal, the last of California’s major reservoirs to climb out of the deep drought hole. The giant reservoir is about 63 percent full, which is perfectly normal for this time of year with more storms possibly to come, and plenty of mountain snow that should melt later this spring. Just 14 months ago, New Melones was 11 percent full, or 20 percent of normal.
