Snowpack and reservoir levels continued to increase in California, marking another week of improvement for drought conditions across the state. Last week, 47 percent of the state was in drought, but that figure plummeted to 24 percent this week, according to the Drought Monitor report issued Thursday. At this time last year, 94 percent of California was in drought.
The utterly avoidable, terrifying and still potentially catastrophic failures of the spillways of North America’s highest dam – California’s 170 foot, earth-filled Oroville – could, with the right national leadership, awaken America to the urgency of investing in our physical safety and future – our infrastructure.
To live beneath the Oroville Dam requires a certain measure of faith — faith in the engineers who designed the nation’s tallest dam and the construction workers who built it more than a half century ago, and faith in the government agencies that maintain and operate it.
Jeffrey Mount, a leading expert on California water policy, remembers the last time a crisis at the Oroville Dam seemed likely to prompt reform. It was 1997 and the lake risked overflowing, while levees further downstream failed and several people died. “If this doesn’t galvanize action, I don’t know what will,” Mount said he thought at the time. But spring came, the waters receded and no changes came to pass.
The state’s second largest school district will conduct testing on its drinking water after another local district uncovered high levels of lead, copper and bacteria in water from school fountains. San Diego Unified School District joins Cajon Valley, Chula Vista Elementary, National Elementary and Sweetwater Union school districts in taking part in a free program to conduct lead testing on school drinking water. High levels of lead were found in drinking fountains at La Mirada Elementary in the San Ysidro School District.
A pacific storm that drew energy from the subtropics unleashed ferocious winds and intense rain across San Diego County on Friday, causing fatal accidents, power outages affecting thousands of residents and damage to homes when uprooted trees fell on them. The precipitation was part of a broad, fast-moving system that generated even wilder winds and heavier rainfall across other parts of Southern California, including a 72 mph gust in the Long Beach Harbor area.
Communities just downstream of California’s Lake Oroville dam would not receive adequate warning or time for evacuations if the 770-foot-tall dam itself — rather than its spillways — were to abruptly fail, the state water agency that operates the nation’s tallest dam repeatedly advised federal regulators a half-decade ago. The state Department of Water Resources informed federal dam regulators that local emergency officials “do not believe there is enough time to perform evacuations in the communities immediately downstream of the dam during a sudden failure,” according to a Feb. 8, 2011, letter reviewed by The Associated Press.
Starved of freshwater inflow from the Central Valley rivers that feed it, the San Francisco Bay-Delta is on the verge of collapse. This iconic estuary, which defines our region, has been neglected for too long. Fortunately, the state Water Board is poised to provide relief by updating the Bay Delta Water Quality Control Plan. Phase 1 of the plan calls for requiring 40 percent of unimpaired flow (what would occur in the absence of dams and diversions) between February and June on the lower San Joaquin River and its three major tributaries.
In fall of 2013, Protect Our Water Rights (POWR), a group of North County landowners, united to, “protect its members’ legally predominant rights to reasonably use the water beneath their lands.” After three years of litigation, the window for landowners to join the lawsuit as part of the POWR group is closing.
These three graphs show key California reservoir conditions and river stages for the upper and lower Sacramento Valley. The images are from the California Department of Water Resources’ Data Exchange Center and the National Weather Service.
