For Farmers Below The Oroville Reservoir, Water Still Poses A Threat

Marysville, Calif., farmer Brad Foster stood at the eroded edge of the Feather River recently and contemplated how he was going to pull his water pumps out of the soggy, collapsed river bank. “We’ll have to recover them somehow,” said Foster, 58, who owns about 500 acres of walnut orchards in Yuba County. “Those are stationary pumps. They’ve been there 50 years.” In all his years of farming, Foster said he’d never seen such severe and widespread erosion along the winding waterway. “This is not normal,” he said.