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California Democrats in Congress launched challenges Thursday to a proposed Obama administration settlement with a powerful California water district, including announcing their own probe of the deal.

The multi-front assault by the deal’s opponents comes as the U.S. Department of Interior and other federal agencies near conclusion on negotiations related to the settlement with Central California’s Westlands Water District, the country’s largest irrigation district.

Dramatic photographs showing California’s diminishing, drought-ravaged reservoirs circulated all over news sites and social media last year. Images of exposed lake beds with parched, cracked earth became symbols of the Golden State’s water crisis.

The story changed this winter. After four solid drought years, a series of storms walloped the state and the Sierra Nevada. The El Niño wasn’t the “Godzilla” many experts predicted, but it did bring above-average rain fall to the state overall, building up the snow pack and dumping billions of gallons of water into the state’s network of over 1,300 reservoirs.

Declaring that the Delta “will not be the next Owens Valley,” San Joaquin and Contra Costa counties — along with farmers and environmental groups — sued Thursday to block a Southern California water district from buying more than 20,000 acres of farmland in the heart of the estuary.

The lawsuit, filed in San Joaquin County Superior Court, charges that the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California violated the law when it determined that the $175 million land buy is exempt from environmental study.

Officials fighting plans by the state to build two giant tunnels under the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to send water south took their case to court Thursday, seeking to block one of the project’s main backers from finalizing a key land deal.

San Joaquin and Contra Costa counties say Metropolitan Water District of Southern California failed to perform environmental reviews before entering into a $175 million deal to buy sprawling delta islands east of San Francisco.

Just days after a powerful Southern California water agency announced it was spending $175 million to buy five islands in the heart of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a coalition of opponents has sued to demand environmental review of the purchase.

The lawsuit was filed Thursday in San Joaquin Superior Court by San Joaquin and Contra Costa counties, the Central Delta and Contra Costa water agencies, and two environmental groups. It alleges the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California improperly exempted itself from the state environmental review process while the purchase agreement was being hashed out.