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That’s not Police Chief Martin Brody of Amity Islands from the 1975 movie Jaws. Wrong coast. Wrong century. Curt Schmutte, a consultant to the Metropolitan Municipal Water District of Southern California, recently saw a shark warning on a sign at a bait shop along the Sacramento River – easily a good 30 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. Wait. What? “If the governor builds those tunnels,” the bait shop cashier explained to Curt, “we’ll have great white sharks in the Delta.” OK. Rewind.

 

Giant ‘rivers in the sky’ – that can carry up to 15 times the amount of water in the Mississippi River – can virtually wipe out species when they dump vast amounts of rain over a short period, causing some of the world’s worst floods, according to new research.And the problem is set to get worse because of climate change, scientists warned. They found that 97 to 100 per cent of wild Olympia oysters in north San Francisco Bay died in 2011 after the region was hit by dramatic rainfall caused by atmospheric rivers.

Welcomed by farm and water leaders as a balanced solution, significant federal legislation authorizing $558 million worth of drought-relief actions for California heads to the president after passage in Congress. The bipartisan drought legislation, part of the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act, or WIIN, invests in California water storage and desalination projects, and includes a number of short-term provisions intended to increase flexibility of the state’s water system in response to drought.