California water officials are urging a $3.2-billion investment in flood prevention projects over the next half decade to safeguard the Central Valley; particularly communities on the San Joaquin River that are considered among the most vulnerable in the nation.
The shadows were long and the wind across the flatlands fierce as trucks and ATVs began pulling into Chepo Gonzales’s yard one afternoon this March. “Did you double up your socks today?” Gonzales teased one of the arrivals, a man who complained about cold feet during the previous night’s patrol. Another man leaned out the window of his truck and offered a more serious status report: “There’s a lot of water out there, but it’s flowing north.”
In the Central Valley, agriculture is everything. Farmers here grow 25% of the country’s food, yet copious amounts of flawed produce is dumped or left to rot.
For many supermarkets, an orange with a hail scratch is deemed unsellable. In 2019, researchers from Santa Clara University found that an estimated one-third of food in northern and central California is wasted, largely because of supermarket standards and consumer habits. We cannot follow this model of growing more produce than we need – or wasting this much – given California’s limited water resources, drought on surface water, and severe overpumping of groundwater.
In what is expected to be one of the biggest snowmelt events in its history, California could see some 277 billion gallons of water flowing from the Sierra during the month of May alone.
Experts said Tuesday that the state’s biggest snow year since 1950 could result in a dangerous spring, as warming temperatures push high volumes of snowmelt downstream.
This winter, storm after storm after storm dumped rain and snow on California, and now, as the spring poppies bloom, the state is lush. Hillsides once prickly with dry vegetation have softened. Ski resorts, once thawed out and closed by late spring, are buried under record snow and planning to stay open into July. Satellite photos show a state transformed from brown to green, streaked from top to bottom with bright-emerald patches.
During a winter of blizzards, floods and drought-ending downpours, it’s easy to forget that California suffers from chronic water scarcity — the long-term decline of the state’s total available fresh water. This rainy season’s inundation isn’t going to change that.
How is this possible, given the unrelenting series of atmospheric river systems that have dumped near-record snowfall over the Sierra and replenished the state’s reservoirs?
California is once again bearing the brunt of inclement weather, as a low-pressure system off the coast rapidly intensifies and becomes a storm, tapping into another atmospheric river that’s flowing between Hawaii and California.
The storm that started Monday night is forecast to raise powerful winds along the coast that will spread to all corners of the Bay Area, Central Coast and Central Valley and peak just before sunrise on Tuesday. These winds will ferry heavy rainfall, thunderstorms and the risk for more flooding across most of the California coast and eventually Southern California.
California is bracing for another round of rain beginning Monday as officials assess the damage from severe flooding along the Central Coast and Central Valley, which left scores stranded, and whole blocks under water.
Two winters’ worth of snow has already fallen in the Sierra Nevada since Christmas, pulling California from the depths of extreme drought into one of its wettest winters in memory.
But as a series of tropical storms slams the state, that bounty has become a flood risk as warm rains fall on the state’s record snowpack, causing rapid melting and jeopardizing Central Valley towns still soggy from January’s deluges.
The recent storms that walloped the Sierra have significantly moved the needle on the state’s stubborn drought: A large swathe of California, including part of the Sierra foothills, the Central Valley and the south-central coast, is no longer classified as being in drought, according to a map released Thursday by the federal government in partnership with a university group.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
