The San Diego City Council approved $9 million Tuesday for short-term repairs to two city dams found to have cracks and other structural problems during state-ordered assessments in 2019.
The repairs will be completed by Orion Construction on the Morena Dam, which is 63 miles east of the city near Campo and the Laguna Mountains, and El Capitan Dam, which is 7 miles east of Lakeside.
California officials on Tuesday said they will spend about $60 million to build a channel along the Yuba River so that salmon and other threatened fish species can get around a Gold Rush-era dam that for more than a century has cut off their migration along the chilly waters of Sierra Nevada streams.
The snow melt provides most of the water that flows into the Colorado River. However, in California capturing rainfall is another option to save water to help the crisis on the Colorado River.
For the second year in a row, the State Water Project will cut deliveries to 5% of requested supplies amid a continuing drought that officials Thursday termed “a new era.” The network of 21 dams and hundreds of miles of canals, pipelines and tunnels serves 27 million Californians from Chico through the Central Valley to Los Angeles, though not San Diego County.
It was a harrowing vision of the vulnerability of aging California dams — crews laboring feverishly to sandbag and drain the lower San Fernando Reservoir, as billions of gallons of Los Angeles drinking water lapped at the edge of a crumbling, earthquake-damaged embankment that threatened catastrophe on the neighborhoods below. Although the 1971 San Fernando earthquake and the near failure of the Lower Van Norman Dam have given rise to construction improvements — the much newer Los Angeles Dam survived an equivalent shaking in the 1994 Northridge quake — the overwhelming majority of California dams are decades past their design life span.
A recent UCLA study says that in the next 40 years, California could likely see a flood massive enough to cause nearly $1 trillion of damage, force millions of people to evacuate, and leave houses in California’s Central Valley 30 to 40 feet underwater. And the state is ill-prepared when it comes to infrastructure like dams that could prevent flooding.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
