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.