Devastating floods are almost annual occurrences in the West and
in California. With the anticipated sea level rise and other
impacts of a changing climate, particularly heavy winter rains,
flood management is increasingly critical in California.
Compounding the issue are man-made flood hazards such as levee
stability and stormwater runoff.
Moldering houses, sodden with rainwater. Muddy back roads
awaiting bulldozers to clear away debris. Families without
flood insurance wondering how they will afford to repair their
wrecked homes and replace belongings. This is the reality for
many low-income and working-class residents in Santa Cruz and
Monterey counties, the bull’s-eye of a series of historic
atmospheric river storms that began on Dec. 26 and lasted
through Jan. 18. The storms dumped as much as 3 feet of water
in parts of the Santa Cruz Mountains, flooding homes, blocking
critical access roads and trapping communities. Across the
state, at least 21 people died in the deluges. The floodwaters
have receded, but one month later, residents are still
struggling to move forward with scant resources while
navigating bureaucratic labyrinths to procure promised federal
aid.
A Super Bowl party mainstay that nearly every fan can get
behind is poised to take advantage of California’s decreasing
drought despite early predictions that crop output may come in
below the previous season’s totals. The California Avocado
Commission recently announced it’s expecting a crop harvest of
257 million pounds of avocados during the 2022-23 fiscal year,
which is a drop of around 7% from the 2021-2022 season. Central
and Southern California are home to nearly 3,000 farms, with
many experiencing years of drought and strict water
restrictions. A decrease in the severity of the drought
triggered by atmospheric river events that dropped some 32
trillion gallons of water over the state has some hopeful that
initial estimates may not capture the full success of farmers.
California’s mandated first flush of the Sacramento-San Joaquin
Delta in January resulted in the vast majority of incoming
Delta water being sent out into the San Francisco Bay.
Data from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation for the month of
January revealed that more than 90 percent of all water that
entered the Sacramento Delta was pumped out to the Bay and into
the Pacific Ocean. The backstory: In early January,
following weeks of heavy rainfall throughout the Golden State,
up to 95 percent of all incoming water to the Delta was being
purposefully pumped into the ocean at points. -Written by SJV Sun reporter Daniel Gligich.
An estimated 32 trillion gallons of water — in the form of rain
and snow — came down on California in a series of nine
back-to-back atmospheric rivers between late December and
mid-January. To put this in perspective, that amount is
just shy of the quantity of water held within Lake Tahoe, one
of the deepest lakes in North America. The lake has, on
average, about 37 trillion gallons of water. These storms
were destructive and deadly, claiming the lives of at least 20
people, and the estimated cost is likely to end up being in the
billions. And new research is revealing these storms will
likely become larger and drop even more rain than what we have
experienced so far this winter. Dr. Ruby Leung, an
atmospheric scientist at the Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory in Washington state, joined CapRadio’s Vicki
Gonzalez to discuss what this means for California’s future.
The atmospheric rivers that pummeled California are a far cry
from what a series of extreme storms could potentially bring,
climate scientist Daniel Swain said at a legislative hearing on
Wednesday that explored the impacts of the recent storm
sequence. … Climate change is increasing the odds that
severe storms, like what Californians encountered, will happen
more frequently. A warmer atmosphere can hold onto more water,
which can translate to stronger storms and heavier
downpours. “There’s about a two in three chance of seeing
an event that is about 20 or 30% larger than what we just
experienced over the next forty years or so,” Swain said,
noting that there is still uncertainty with the numbers.
… Such an event would be comparable to the Great
Flood of 1862, where weeks of storms pounded the state — far
worse than the downpours that began on Dec. 26.
After historic rains hit California over a three week
period, many have been wondering if enough is being done to
store the excess water. The city of Woodland has been
prepared for water storage for over a decade. What started off
as a treatment facility to clean water soon became a treatment
and underground storage facility. Tim Busch, a utilities
engineer with the city of Woodland, says they received rights
to divert water from the Sacramento River in 2011 to provide
water to Woodland-Davis residents. That treated water was
put through their first Aquifer Storage and Recovery well, or
ASR well. The project broke ground in 2014 and since then,
three ASR wells now help hold hundreds of millions of gallons
of water. … The goal this year is to supply 800 million
gallons of water. Busch says that’s would cover about 30% of
the water used in the summer months.
Our beloved Capital Region has been literally awash with rain,
snow, flooding and downed trees, and I’m sure many of us think
that California’s persistent drought has at last been rinsed
away. After all, we’ve received huge amounts of snow in the
Sierra, which will thaw and flow westward to fill our
reservoirs, basins and valleys as it makes its way to sea. Add
to that the atmospheric rivers of rain that have been pouring
into our towns, overflowing our riverbanks, curbs, basements
and canals, we’re tempted to assume that our state is no longer
destined to be a desert. But that’s probably not going to be
the case.
The interior of the plane looked like a cross between a private
luxury jet and a space mission control room. The Gulfstream IV
cruised at 43,000 feet, high above a seemingly peaceful layer
of thick clouds that stretched to the horizon. Crew members in
blue jumpsuits stared at computer screens that revealed their
hidden target miles below: a powerful atmospheric river that
was churning across the Pacific Ocean toward California,
bearing torrential rains and fierce winds. Soaring more
than 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii, the specially
equipped hurricane-reconnaissance jet “Gonzo” was preparing to
drop dozens of data-collecting devices into the heart of the
storm. By capturing the equivalent of a CT scan, the crew would
help to predict when and where the rains would hit. And how
hard.
Recent rains could mean a more flexible water budget for San
Diego as state authorities announced increased water deliveries
throughout California. The state will allocate additional water
deliveries to some 29 public water agencies, delivering 30
percent of requested water supplies after initially projecting
only five percent delivery. The areas receiving additional
water allocations include the Bay Area, central coast, San
Joaquin Valley and Southern California, including the
Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, according
to Maggie Macias, a representative of the California Department
of Water Resources.
Last year, the world watched as punishing heat and drought
killed people in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, and floods
destroyed parts of Pakistan and the Philippines. This year,
we’ve seen torrential rain drowning sections of coastal
California. These events underscore the devastating role water
can play in a changing climate, something I have been studying
for the last two decades. … Last year, the Sixth
IPCC report showed clearly that climate change is causing
water insecurity. The report, which comes from the United
Nations, also showed how the extremes of water—floods,
shortages and droughts—are linked to the natural water
cycle. -Written by Vidhisha Samarasekara, a strategic program
director at the International Water Management
Institute.
The wavy, colored lines rose with each big storm and fell
slightly with each break in the rain. Each time, the “forecast”
and “guidance” lines in the river charts approached the
somewhat arbitrary, broken red line describing Russian River’s
32-foot flood stage in Guerneville. During the seemingly
endless parade of atmospheric rivers earlier this month, the
colored, sinusoidal graphs — produced by the California Nevada
River Forecast Center — became a go-to resource for predicting
flooding along the river, advising first responders, business
owners, residents and government officials. But each time,
predictions were off, in some cases, by several feet.
Sometimes, predictions changed dramatically throughout the same
day.
A single Cosumnes River levee sustained $1.5 million in damage
after recent winter storms tore out a hole the size of a
football field. But the federal government’s emergency
management has not yet agreed to give local officials the money
to fix that embankment. The agency has refused to fund this
stretch of the river for years, saying the barriers do not meet
the criteria for intervention because they were not built to
meet the agency’s standards. It regards them as “levee-like”
structures, not levees. The policy has had lasting
repercussions in this corner of south Sacramento County, where
certain parts of flood infrastructure stay broken for years. In
2017, for instance, storms battered levees along a 15-mile
stretch of the Cosumnes. Local officials asked the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, for help fixing 16 pieces
of infrastructure damaged during the floods.
An estimated 62 million gallons of sewage — or about 94
Olympic-sized swimming pools — spilled into the San Francisco
Bay during the storms in late December and January. Those
storms are now behind us, and officials say the water is now
safe. But now is actually the perfect time to unpack what went
wrong with our sewage system, and how we can better prepare our
infrastructure for the next big storm.
A flurry of storms unloaded historic amounts of rain and snow
across California over the past month. The deluges, fueled by a
parade of atmospheric rivers, filled reservoirs and have
improved drought conditions across large swaths of the state.
The Sierra snowpack has ballooned to more than double its usual
size for this time of year. The snow will continue to replenish
California’s water supplies as it melts during the warmer
months. …Picturesque locales where Californians ski and enjoy
other snow activities are burning in wildfires more often,
undergoing long-lasting changes that make snowpack melt
earlier. Snow can even melt in the middle of winter, before
reservoir managers are ready to shift from flood control to
water storage.
Plans for ensuring the long-term viability of four major
groundwater basins in the North Bay were approved Thursday by
state water regulators. The State Department of Water
Resources announced that it gave the okay to plans developed
for the Napa Valley Subbasin in Napa County and the Santa Rosa
Plain Subbasin, the Petaluma Valley Basin and Sonoma Valley
Subbasin in Sonoma County. The plans were developed by
four different local groundwater sustainability agencies under
the requirements of the 2014 Sustainable Groundwater Management
Act.
The new year started off with a parade of storms, leading to
San Francisco and the wider Bay Area seeing one of its rainiest
time frames since the Gold Rush era. This onslaught of storms
seemed a bit out of place with the trend of La Niña, an outlook
that traditionally brings warm, dry conditions to most of
California. Instead, the first half of the 2022-23 winter
season was marked by atmospheric river-enhanced storms and
notable reductions in drought conditions across the state.
… For meteorologists in both the Bay Area and across the
Western U.S., this January’s shift toward wet and stormy
conditions brings with it questions over what
other factors might be stomping out the typical La
Niña outlook.
Just six months ago, California Gov. Gavin Newsom and his
administration were boasting a budget surplus of $97.5 billion.
Today, thanks to a falling stock market and a weakened tech
sector, California has an apparently unforeseen budget deficit
of $22.5 billion. Cuts must be made. But Newsom’s proposed cuts
seemingly come at the expense of climate-related projects, a
curious decision from a governor who often speaks about how
confronting climate change is one of his key priorities.
Unsurprisingly, his actions do not meet the weight of his
words. Newsom’s budget proposal, ironically released on the
heels of an atmospheric river that unleashed catastrophic
flooding across the state, suggests slashing approximately $6
billion dollars from climate-related projects, including $40
million that had been promised to floodplain restoration
projects in the San Joaquin Valley.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Sacramento District awarded a
$27.575 million construction contract on January 20, 2023, to
Maloney Odin Joint Venture of Novato, for more than 2.6 miles
of levee improvements at five locations along the Sacramento
River East Levee between the I Street Bridge and just south of
the town of Freeport. Work is scheduled to begin this spring
and is expected to be complete in December 2023. USACE is
planning to host an informational meeting in March to discuss
what this construction work will look like, including trail
access, haul routes, and staging areas. Details for this
meeting are still being finalized and will be posted
to www.sacleveeupgrades.com prior to the
meeting.
As California grappled with drought conditions over the past
three years, flooding was the last thing on most people’s
minds. That changed this month when bomb cyclone rainstorms
saturated the state and left communities reeling from rushing
water. Unbeknownst to many, work on flood control progressed
during the dry times. Chico-based River Partners has
supplemented repairs to levies by restoring watersheds in the
Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. … Much of this work is on
hold, however, after Gov. Gavin Newsom announced deep cuts to
the state budget that hit flood plain projects particularly
hard. From funding levels of $250 million a year, the governor
cut flooding mitigation to $135 million — a fraction of the
$360 million to $560 million called for in the Central Valley
Flood Protection Plan adopted in 2012 and updated last year.
After weeks of near-constant rain and flooding, California
is finally drying out—but hopefully not getting too dry,
because the state needs all the rain it can get to pull itself
out of a historic drought. This is California at its most
frenetic and contradictory: Climate change is making both dry
spells and rainstorms more intense, ping-ponging the state’s
water systems between critical shortages and canal-topping
deluges. A simultaneous solution to both extremes
is right beneath Californians’ feet: aquifers, which are
made up of underground layers of porous rock or sediments, like
gravel and sand, that fill with rainwater soaking through the
soil above. … In paleo valleys, those coarser sediments
are topped with perhaps just a few feet of soil, so they
readily channel water into the aquifer system—this is where
you’d want to refill.
With federal and state elected officials listening in,
representatives from 10 Monterey County departments lobbied for
assistance – financially and legislatively – for what they
consider the top priorities for 2023. Homeless funding,
reservoir improvements, clean drinking water, refurbishing all
or parts of the historic jail in Salinas, a new health clinic
in Marina, immigration reform and a reauthorization of the Farm
Bill, a veterans home, and ensuring ongoing flood relief
assistance from the Federal Emergency Management
Administration, or FEMA, were all selected as the most
important projects that will need federal or state assistance,
or both. Last week’s annual workshop was an opportunity for
department heads to outline these needs for elected officials
that included U.S. Congressman Jimmy Panetta, U.S.
Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, state Sen. John Laird, state
Assemblyman Robert Rivas and state Assemblywoman Dawn Addis.
On a brisk afternoon in mid-January, Eloy Ortiz is pacing the
back alley behind a white house in Watsonville, California, in
the heart of California’s strawberry industry. The house is
under an evacuation warning after weeks of torrential rain, but
that hasn’t stopped hundreds of women and children from
crowding around the back gate. … Ortiz is a board member
and volunteer with the Center for Farmworker Families, a
nonprofit that assists farmworker communities throughout Santa
Cruz and Monterey Counties on California’s Central Coast. The
group has been distributing food for over a decade, but this is
a big crowd, even by their standards. Many of the women in line
pick strawberries for a living, and the crop has taken a
beating from California’s winter storms. Farmers face up to
$200 million in damages, according to the California Strawberry
Commission.
The past weeks following our recent large storms have been
awash in misinformation and hypocrisy about operating and
permitting water infrastructure in California. Even those who
closely follow the news about California water are likely
unaware that the data shows that more than half of the runoff
from the storms in early January was captured and stored in the
Central Valley. Or that the loudest voices criticizing
environmental protections for our rivers and fisheries during
the storms – which are requirements of the Trump
Administration’s 2019 biological opinions – are the very same
voices demanding that legislators and the courts keep those
biological opinions in place.
Sediment research has found that six storms similar to or even
more severe than the 1861-62 storm hit California in the past
2,000 years, arriving about every 200 to 400 years…. Given
this history, it is inevitable that another great flood will
hit the state someday, and climate change is thought to boost
the odds of such an event. And when the next great flood comes,
the damages could well dwarf those of any previous global
weather disaster, adding up to more than $1 trillion — an
extraordinary catastrophe with triple the cost of the feared
great quake on the San Andreas fault.
[C]limate experts and state officials are taking stock of flood
protection systems and our ability to take advantage of the
rainfall. The good news, they report, is “the ongoing rains are
already boosting California’s water storage system.” The bad
news, they warn, is “it would be hasty, though, to assume the
ongoing storms and wet forecast mark an end to the drought.”
… A significant casualty of the storm systems has been
our trees. Perpetually saturated soils have loosened their
roots, and vicious winds have taken them down. Over the summer,
we published an opinion piece by the Sacramento Tree Foundation
and Regional Water Authority that urged Sacramentans
to care for trees during drought, illustrated by a
satellite view of the area’s canopy loss.
What’s worse? Horrifying killer storms or slow death by
drought? California’s climate can be extreme — drought or
deluge. Both are deadly, each exacerbating damage caused by the
other. Fortunately, some people are doing the necessary,
innovative and difficult work to combat drought and deluge at
the same time. Infuriatingly, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget
proposal abandons some of the most important flood-control,
drought-fighting measures taking place in our state. He removed
a $40 million allocation approved last year for floodplain
restoration — work designed to reduce lethal flooding, store
water underground, remove carbon from the atmosphere and create
wildlife habitat. This comes on top of a decision two years ago
to remove $60 million for other San Joaquin Valley floodplain
projects. -Written by Adam Gray, formerly
representing Merced County and part of Stanislaus County
in the California Assembly.
Global catastrophe and risk modelling solutions firm, Moody’s
RMS estimates total US economic losses from the recent
California flooding to be between $5-7 billion. This
estimate reflects inland flood impacts for the US, which
includes damage to infrastructure. The insured losses are
anticipated to be between $0.5-1.5 billion, including losses to
the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and the private
flood market. Since late December, California has been hit
with extreme rain and winds, leaving entire neighbourhoods
under water, downing trees, and causing severe mudslides.
The California Department of Water Resources is set to begin
phase one of its plan to replace the hoists on the Oroville Dam
spillway sometime between May and October. Project Manager
Zerguy Maazouddi, who works under DWR’s Division of Operations
and Maintenance, said the first phase of prerequisites such as
site surveys and approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission. … The idea behind the project is that during the
winter times when the lake level is higher, a new hoist is
created. During the later parts of the year, the hoist will be
installed. This will last for eight cycles.
The Sites Project Authority released findings from a new
analysis that projected Sites Reservoir could have diverted and
captured 120,000 acre-feet of water in just two weeks if the
reservoir had been operational from Jan. 3 through Jan. 15 and
would continue to capture water over the next few weeks as
flows continue to run high. … The project, which has
been in the works for more than 60 years, hopes to turn the
Sites Valley, located 10 miles west of Maxwell where Colusa and
Glenn counties meet, into a state-of-the-art off-stream water
storage facility that captures and stores stormwater flows in
the Sacramento River – after all other water rights and
regulatory requirements are met – for release in dry and
critical years for environmental use and for communities, farms
and businesses statewide to utilize when needed.
On Sunday, Jan. 22, a group of hikers stood on a hillside in
China Camp State Park near San Rafael watching, not wildlife
thriving in the park’s salt marshes, but cars and bicycles
below. It was close to 12:30pm, and a short segment of the
low-lying North San Pedro Road was covered in water, forcing
visitors to brave the shallow water or turn back. … In
the Bay Area, though, untouched wetlands and salt flats, like
those at China Camp, are fairly rare. Before human development
accelerated in the 20th century, there were 200,000 hectares,
or approximately 770 square miles, of salt marshes along the
edges of the bay, according to the San Francisco Bay
Keeper.
Moab, Utah, gets just eight inches of rain per year, yet
rainwater flooded John Weisheit’s basement last summer.
Extremes are common in a desert: Rain and snow are rare, and a
deluge can cause flooding. Weisheit, 68, co-director of Living
Rivers and a former Colorado River guide, has long warned the
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that its two biggest dams on the
Colorado River could become useless because of prolonged
drought. Although recently, at a BuRec conference, he also
warned that “atmospheric rivers” could overtop both dams,
demolishing them and causing widespread flooding. Weisheit
points to BuRec research by Robert Swain in 2004, showing an
1884 spring runoff that delivered two years’ worth of Colorado
River flows in just four months. -Written by David Marston, of Writers on the Range.
California’s water supply has hit a new milestone for the year
in the wake of three weeks of wet weather. Water levels at two
of the state’s largest reservoirs are now at their highest
point in 2.5 years, Chief Meteorologist Mark Finan said.
… Lake Shasta and Oroville have both added more than 1
million acre-feet of water in the past month and the levels
continue to rise. Inflow rates into those reservoirs have
decreased considerably, which is to be expected during periods
of dry weather. As of Tuesday, Lake Shasta is at 55% of
its total capacity and Lake Oroville is at 62% of capacity.
Last summer, Lake Shasta peaked at about 40% of its total
capacity.
The recent series of atmospheric rivers dumped enough rain and
snow on Northern California to give us hope that the end of the
drought may be near. … The tremendous amount of water flowing
through the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to the Pacific Ocean
is additional evidence of this winter’s bounty. … The outflow
is so abundant now that it’s more than 20 times the threshold
set by the state to meet environmental standards. …
[D]ecades-old regulations limit how much water can be captured
— even water is flowing over the banks of creeks and streams
and trees are being toppled. The rule preventing us from saving
more of this near-biblical flood is based on fish behavior
under certain historic conditions. However, we are clearly
living through exceptional circumstances, and these rules — and
California’s rule-makers — are utterly incapable of
adjusting. -Written by Ian LeMay, president of the
California Fresh Fruit Association and the chairman of the
Water Blueprint for the San Joaquin Valley.
Now that the shock of a series of January storms has worn off,
Los Angeles County officials face a herculean chore: Five
reservoirs along south-facing San Gabriel Mountain slopes are
filled with so much debris and soupy mud that they pose a flood
risk to the communities below. Another intense storm, they say,
could unleash new surges of dirt, toppled trees and boulders
down canyons stripped of their binding vegetation by the 2020
Bobcat fire, sending chocolate-colored floodwaters over the
dams and into the cities of Arcadia, Sierra Madre, Pacoima, Sun
Valley and Sunland. An urgent concern is emptying the reservoir
behind 96-year-old Santa Anita Dam of about 600,000 cubic yards
of muck more than 80 feet deep. Two of the three valves that
control releases of stormwater from the 20-story-tall dam are
blocked with silt.
Multiple flood protection projects in California are on hold
after Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed cutting their funding to help
cover a $22.5 billion budget deficit — a decision disappointing
environmental advocates as weeks of powerful storms have caused
widespread flooding that damaged homes and washed away roads.
Newsom’s budget proposal, released last week, cuts $40 million
that had been pledged for floodplain restoration projects along
rivers in the San Joaquin Valley, an area at high risk of
catastrophic flooding. Those projects would allow for rivers to
flood in strategic places during winter storms or the spring
Sierra Nevada snowmelt, reducing the risks for populated areas
downstream while also benefiting environmental ecosystems.
The long reign of La Niña may soon be over. According to the
latest outlook released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, there’s an 82%
chance that by springtime – sometime between March and May
– La Niña will have faded away. In the spring, La Niña is
most likely to be replaced by conditions meteorologists refer
to as “ENSO neutral,” which is when neither La Niña nor El Niño
is present. Looking further down the forecast into late summer
and early fall and there are signs of something we haven’t seen
in years: the return of El Niño. By the August through
October timeframe, there’s about a 50% chance El Niño will take
hold. Of course, that means there’s also about a 50% chance it
won’t.
After three consecutive years of drought, relentless rains have
hammered California for the past three straight weeks. From
flooding to mudslides, the unforgiving weather is wreaking
havoc on agriculture and infrastructure in the state. The
culprit? An atmospheric river. Even with the intense
moisture, the rains hit ahead of the area’s main growing
season, which is good news for crops like lettuce and
strawberries. … Livestock producers worked to get their
livestock to higher ground, while produce fields in some areas
flooded as levees caved to rushing waters. California is
finally getting a break from the back-to-back storms, Rippey
says an atmospheric river is nothing new, but it is rare during
a La Niña year.
When San Francisco’s new Southeast Community Center opened in
October, the three acres of parkland included an expansive
landscaped bioswale that, in theory, would handle the water
running off even the most extensive storm. Less than a month
later, the theory was put to the test — and it passed with
flying colors. … The amount of runoff from the overall
site was 45% below what it would have been before the project
converted a former office site; on New Year’s eve, water
cascaded through the site and filled the retention basin, but
it never surged over its banks.
A gazillion gallons of stormwater have been rampaging down
rivers into the sea. But that uncaptured bounty hasn’t been
“wasted.” “Wasted water” being dumped in the ocean is an old
cliché that resurfaces whenever there’s a big storm in this
weather-eccentric state — or during the inevitable dry periods
when crops are thirsty and homeowners are told to shut off
their lawn sprinklers. But “wasted water” is a myth. Uncaptured
runoff flowing to the sea flushes pollutants out of rivers and
bays, helping to cleanse water for local domestic use. It also
saves many kinds of fish, including salmon, not only for
recreationists but for the coastal fishing industry. And it
deposits sand on beaches. -Written by LA Times columnist George Skelton.
California is experiencing one of its wettest winters in recent
history following a series of atmospheric rivers that hit the
state in rapid succession. The recent downpours and deluges
wreaked havoc on many parts of Northern California. But north
of San Francisco, the town of Petaluma was spared the worst of
the storms. There, the rain has been a boon for newts. … What
the newts need now is a safe way to get to their rendezvous
points. In many places, busy roads lie between newts and their
breeding grounds. In Petaluma and other parts of the San
Francisco Bay Area, thousands of newts are killed by cars each
year as they try to cross these roads. The carnage in Petaluma
is so severe that a group of local residents has taken it upon
themselves to stop it.
Storms have dumped historic amounts of rain and snow on
California over the past month. But in the not-so-distant
future, winter storms in the Western U.S. could get bigger and
more intense as greenhouse gas emissions warm the planet, a new
study reported in Nature Climate Change. Between Dec. 26 and
Jan. 19 in downtown San Francisco, 17.74 inches of rain fell
during a series of historic storms, an amount totaling 78% of
the rainfall that the city typically receives during an entire
year. Deluges across the state over the past few weeks have led
to deadly floods and landslides, killing at least 20 and
causing widespread damage.
As work gets underway on the state budget, the recent weather
events in California — which left more than a dozen people dead
and caused tens of thousands to evacuate their homes — have put
a spotlight on the state of water infrastructure. In the new
budget proposal he recently announced, Gov. Gavin Newsom
proposed $202 million to go toward flood protection. The
investments will be divided between urban flood risk reduction,
delta levees and Central Valley flood protection, according to
the plan. … The governor’s proposal isn’t the final product.
Legislators will hold hearings and work through the proposal.
Newsom’s office will release a revised plan based on the latest
economic forecast in May, and the legislature has until June 15
to pass the budget.
The sun was shining again recently when Fidencio Velasquez
visited what used to be 90 acres of prime Ventura County
strawberry fields. He pointed to a 40-foot storage container
that Santa Clara River floodwaters had swept off a neighboring
farm and deposited before him. Overturned tractors and
fertilizer bins were strewn about like toys, while the deep
channels between crop rows were filled with mud. A harvesting
machine was damaged beyond repair. Metal pipes, hoses and trash
littered the farm’s outskirts. … Velasquez, a supervisor
at Santa Clara Farms in Ventura, estimates that the expense of
cleaning up and replacing damaged crops, machinery and
equipment could run upward of $900,000.
Early January was an unusually wild ride of atmospheric rivers.
Nine sizable systems produced a train of storms beginning about
New Years and lasting for several weeks across almost all of
California. After three years of drought, the storms reminded
us that California has flood problems similar in magnitude to
its drought problems, and that floods and droughts can occur in
synchrony. As the dust begins to settle, let’s look at the
impacts of these early January floods and examine if the recent
three-year drought and its longer-term drought impacts might be
ending.
Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday joined state and local
leaders at a Los Angeles County site recently upgraded to
increase groundwater retention, where they touted ongoing
efforts to improve drought resiliency across California and
neighboring states. Harris’ visit came on the heels of a series
of storms that battered the state for weeks, causing
fatalities, flooding and extensive damage — but also provided
record-setting precipitation needed in the water-starved West.
Harris said the climate whiplash — from years of severe drought
to pummeling rain — was indicative of the climate crisis,
requiring better preparation for such weather extremes. And
with much of that recent stormwater already flowing into the
Pacific, the situation has renewed calls to change how the
state collects and stores rainwater.
Here in Fig Garden, a suburb that creeps up to the edge of the
San Joaquin River, on land my neighbors prefer not to think of
as a floodplain, the rain started falling in late December and
didn’t stop for two weeks. My lawn turned into pond. Geese were
honking like they haven’t honked in years. As the last big
storm was nearing, I got a call from my aunt and uncle,
California natives who high-tailed it to Cleveland a half
century ago. “You guys all right?” they asked. The pond had yet
to reach my front door. “I think we’re going to be OK,” I said.
I reminded them that there are seven dams on the San Joaquin. I
don’t know of any other river in America that has been more
corralled by man. Over 90 percent of its flow is shunted via
canals and ditches to farmland that produces almonds,
pistachios, table grapes and mandarins. -Written by Mark Arax, author of “The Dreamt Land: Chasing
Water and Dust Across California.”
The recent onslaught of storms and the backdrop of relentless
drought might make Los Angeles residents wish we had an
old-school water czar to tap distant rivers. But the days of
having William Mulholland single-mindedly create a system to
quench Los Angeles’ perpetual thirst are long gone. … Still,
as Los Angeles residents watched the winter storms drench the
region with billions of gallons of water — most of which
rushed, unused, to the Pacific — it’s natural to wonder why our
water systems don’t capture that water to use when we need it.
… Adopted by voters in 2018 as Los Angeles
County Measure W, the program is building a network
of small, local rainwater- and runoff-retention projects,
anchored by several larger catch basins that together will
increase by at least a third the amount of water that seeps
into groundwater basins.
By some estimates, more than 32 trillion gallons of water
have fallen on the state since the first storms hit in late
December. On a levee overlooking the swollen Sacramento River
last week, a group of Republican state lawmakers criticized
their Democratic colleagues and Governor Gavin Newsom for not
prioritizing new projects to capture the deluge. …
Republicans called it a “failure of leadership” by Democrats
and called for more investments in water storage, both above
ground and below. A large reservoir is planned for the northern
Sacramento Valley but has been undergoing a lengthy permitting
process. Construction at the Sites project is estimated to
begin in 2024 with operations beginning in 2030. According to
the Sites Project Authority, the reservoir could have captured
120,000 acre-feet of water between Jan. 3 and Jan. 15 if it had
been operational.
Environmental rules designed to protect imperiled fish in the
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta have ignited anger among a
group of bipartisan lawmakers, who say too much of California’s
stormwater is being washed out to sea instead of being pumped
to reservoirs and aqueducts. In a series of strongly
worded letters, nearly a dozen legislators — many from
drought-starved agriculture regions of the Central Valley —have
implored state and federal officials to relax environmental
pumping restrictions that are limiting the amount of water
captured from the delta. … Since the beginning of
January, a series of atmospheric rivers has disgorged trillions
of gallons of much-needed moisture across drought-stricken
California, but only a small fraction of that water has so far
made it into storage.
As damaging as it was for more than 32 trillion gallons of rain
and snow to fall on California since Christmas, a
worst-case global warming scenario could juice up
similar future downpours by one-third by the middle of this
century, a new study says. The strongest of California’s
storms from “atmospheric rivers,” long and wide plumes of
moisture that form over an ocean and flow through the sky over
land, would probably get an overall 34% increase in total
precipitation, or another 11 trillion gallons more than just
fell.
During a tour of the storm-ravaged Central Coast, President
Biden vowed that federal assistance to rebuild California would
not end until the job is complete. Biden visited the state
Thursday and joined Gov. Gavin Newsom and U.S. Sen. Alex
Padilla in a helicopter to survey areas battered by winter
storms that caused major flooding and landslides across the
state. The president walked along a broken boardwalk in
Capitola and spoke with business owners about the estimated $1
billion in damage from the string of storms that started on
Dec. 26 and led to at least 22 deaths. … The governor
praised the Biden administration for its support of California
during and after atmospheric rivers pummeled the state. The
storms ultimately dropped more than 17 inches of rain in San
Francisco and 20 inches in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Nearly every square mile of California was in a severe drought
four months ago. … Now we’re worrying about whether we have
too much water in some places. California, always a state of
extremes, rarely faces one quite like this. After three years
of drought, the state’s snowpack is suddenly the deepest it’s
been on record for mid-January. Most spots in the Sierra
already have far more snow today than is usually measured on
April 1, the date the snowpack typically peaks. In the central
Sierra. The snowpack is 255% of normal for Jan. 17.
… The [flooding] concern might increase in April, when
the snowpack typically begins to melt, sending water flowing
from the mountains and into rivers, streams and reservoirs.
Lake Oroville is at just 58% of total capacity, but already has
more water than it had in either 2021 or 2022.
President Joe Biden will visit California’s storm-wracked
Central Coast on Thursday to survey recovery efforts with Gov.
Gavin Newsom. The White House said Biden and Newsom will meet
with local officials, residents affected by the storms and
public safety responders in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz
counties, where storms have caused severe floods and
landslides. Biden is expected to arrive around noon at Moffett
Federal Airfield in Mountain View, where he will speak with
reporters before taking a helicopter to view storm damage from
the air on his way to Watsonville Municipal Airport. From
there, the president will travel to Capitola to meet with
merchants and residents affected by the storms, which damaged
the Capitola Wharf and nearby businesses. Biden will also
travel to Seacliff State Park, where another pier was damaged
by tidal surges.
As California emerges from a two-week bout of deadly
atmospheric rivers, a number of climate researchers say the
recent storms appear to be typical of the intense, periodic
rains the state has experienced throughout its history and not
the result of global warming. Although scientists are still
studying the size and severity of storms that killed 19 people
and caused up to $1 billion in damage, initial assessments
suggest the destruction had more to do with California’s
historic drought-to-deluge cycles, mountainous topography and
aging flood infrastructure than it did with climate-altering
greenhouse gasses. Although the media and some officials were
quick to link a series of powerful storms to climate change,
researchers interviewed by The Times said they had yet to see
evidence of that connection.
Rainfall from the recent storms in California have been an
encouraging sign for rice farmers in the north state. Lake
Oroville, which feeds water to farmers along the Feather River,
has surpassed its historical average capacity for this time of
year with its elevation measured at about 779 feet on
Sunday, a rise of more than 100 feet since Dec. 1. The lake is
at 56% of its total capacity and carries more water now than
last year’s highest recorded capacity of 55% in May
2022… Colleen Cecil, executive director of Butte County
Farm Bureau, said conversations about how much water will be
allocated to farmers are happening now, but that the area will
likely have enough water to produce as much or more than last
year.
During the recent storms that left widespread flooding in their
wake, water wasn’t just coming down from the sky or in from the
ocean. It was also bubbling up from underground into basements
and inundating wastewater systems. Shallow groundwater, the
layer of water just underground, rises up during wet winter
weather, contributing to flooding problems. The groundwater
table is expected to go up as the sea level rises, according to
climate scientists. … The report maps out current
and future groundwater levels along the bay shoreline in
San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda and Marin counties, based on
climate change models, to give local governments newly
available data to incorporate into planning for sea level rise.
A chorus of Republicans and moderate Democrats in the San
Joaquin Valley has called for the Newsom administration to ease
pumping restrictions and export more water to drought-stricken
regions of the state. For two weeks a surge of floodwater
flowed nearly unimpeded through the Sacramento–San Joaquin
Delta and into the bay. It was another missed opportunity to
seize on a wet year to export and store more water, argued the
lawmakers. Climate extremes and a lack of preparation underline
the challenge. But the fault lies with an inflexible process
for updating the pumping permits rather than on water managers,
according to a group of irrigation districts and water agencies
with contracts for the exports. This week the same regulatory
inertia put up another obstacle in the way of Delta pumping.
“During the dry years, the people forgot about the rich years,
and when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the
dry years. It was always that way.” Sadly, nothing much has
changed in California and the Salinas Valley since 1952, when
John Steinbeck wrote those words for the opening chapters of
his novel, “East of Eden.” As a result, the atmospheric rivers
drenching the state have been a decidedly mixed blessing. The
rainfall means for the first time in more than two years, the
majority of California is no longer in a severe drought. The
Sierra snowpack is at 226% of average for this time of year,
the largest we’ve seen in more than two decades. Reservoirs are
filling at a rapid rate. … Then there’s the bad news,
starting of course with the deaths of 17 Californians …
The storms that have been battering California offer a glimpse
of the catastrophic floods that scientists warn will come in
the future and that the state is unprepared to endure. Giant
floods like those that inundated the Central Valley in 1861 and
1862 are part of California’s natural cycle, but the latest
science shows that the coming megafloods, intensified by
climate change, will be much bigger and more destructive than
anything the state or the country has ever seen. A new state
flood protection plan for the Central Valley presents a stark
picture of the dangers. It says catastrophic flooding would
threaten millions of Californians, putting many areas
underwater and causing death and destruction on an
unprecedented scale. The damage could total as much as $1
trillion.
A pier in Santa Cruz split in half. Extensive flooding in
Soquel Village, Capitola and Planada. Vital bridges badly
battered or closed. More than 500 reported mudslides across
California in the last few weeks, including some that damaged
homes and cars in L.A. hillside communities. The atmospheric
river storms that pummeled California for weeks inflicted
“extensive” damage to as many as 40 of the state’s 58 counties,
and total repairs could reach as much as $1 billion, according
to authorities. The estimated cost is likely to change as teams
of local, state and federal officials on Saturday began damage
assessment that is expected to continue for several weeks,
according to Brian Ferguson, a spokesperson for the Governor’s
Office of Emergency Services.
A massive amount of water is moving through the Sacramento–San
Joaquin Delta in the wake of recent storms, and calls have
risen from all quarters to capture more of this bounty while
it’s here. We spoke with PPIC Water Policy Center adjunct
fellow Greg Gartrell to understand what’s preventing that—and
to dispel the myth of “water wasted to the sea.”
… People complain that we’re wasting water to the ocean.
While it’s true that there are pumping restrictions right now
to protect fish, the maximum the projects could be pumping is
about 14,000 cubic feet per second (cfs), not quite double what
they’re currently pumping (8,000 cfs on Jan 12). With current
outflows at about 150,000 cfs, we’d still see 144,000 cfs
flowing to the ocean if they were pumping without restrictions.
As California experiences more extreme swings between wet and
dry periods, it is critical for the State to deploy innovative
forecasting and water management strategies to adapt to our
changing climate. The Department of Water Resources along with
federal and local water agencies, have developed a
Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations (FIRO) program to take
advantage of scientific improvements in forecasting atmospheric
rivers to better anticipate and manage large storm events while
maximizing opportunities to increase water supply. Atmospheric
rivers like those we’ve seen in January 2023 have a profound
impact on water management in California.
Last week, days after a bomb cyclone (coupled with a series of
atmospheric rivers, some of the Pineapple Express variety) took
devastating aim at California, a downtown conference center
here was inundated by the forces responsible — not for the
pounding rain and wind but for the forecast. Scores of the
world’s most authoritative meteorologists and weather
scientists gathered to share the latest research at the 103rd
meeting of the American Meteorological Society. The subject
line of an email to participants on the first day projected
optimism — “Daily Forecast: A Flood of Scientific Knowledge.”
But there were troubling undercurrents. Scientists are in
consensus on the increasing frequency of extreme weather events
— the blizzard in Buffalo, flooding in Montecito, Calif.,
prolonged drought in East Africa — and their worrisome impacts.
At the Denver meeting, however, there was another growing
worry: how people talk about the weather.
Some might think that the recent rain would be good for
Southern California’s farms. But, water has inundated fields,
destroying crops and putting some farmworkers out of work. Some
workers were out in the muddy fields Monday trying to pick
fruits and vegetables as quickly as possible to get them out to
market. Berta Leon works in a strawberry field and says the
fruit can get damaged when the fields get too much water. It’s
a complete loss for the owner of the field, as well as the
workers because they lose out on work. Some workers said while
the rain is welcome, some can’t be out in the fields because
it’s too dangerous.
As recent storms have shown just how vulnerable the Bay Area is
to flooding, a new study finds that rising groundwater is a
crucial contributor to the region’s flooding challenges. The
study’s goal in four counties — Alameda, Marin, San Francisco
and San Mateo — is huge. “It’s to make the Bay Area the most
climate-resilient coastal region in the world,” said Adrian
Covert, senior vice president of the Bay Area Council, a
business association that helped fund the research. In
partnership with local climate scientists at Pathways Climate
Institute, the San Francisco Estuary Institute, UC Berkeley,
regional agencies and the counties, the study took existing
groundwater levels and imagined how they would push up around
the lip of the bay as seas rise. The authors also created
maps to provide a high-level overview of this challenge.
Coming into this winter, California was mired in a three-year
drought, with forecasts offering little hope of relief anytime
soon. Fast forward to today, and the state is waterlogged with
as much as 10 to 20 inches of rain and up to 200 inches of snow
that have fallen in some locations in the past three weeks….
The [Climate Prediction Center's] initial outlook for this
winter, issued on Oct. 20, favored below-normal precipitation
in Southern California and did not lean toward either drier- or
wetter-than-normal conditions in Northern California.
… The stark contrast between the staggering amount of
precipitation in recent weeks and the CPC’s seasonal
precipitation outlook issued before the winter, which leaned
toward below-normal precipitation for at least half of
California, has water managers lamenting the unreliability of
seasonal forecasts.
As Wallace Stegner, “the dean of Western writers,” once
observed, California is like the rest of America, only more so.
It’s a reference to the state’s character, but it could just as
easily apply to its weather. Extreme wildfires. Prolonged
drought. And now, massive rain and flooding. In a surprise
pummeling, along with the new year has come an unusually large
number of powerful, back-to-back atmospheric rivers: narrow
bands through the atmosphere that carry water vapor. They have
flowed the length of the state – and blown destruction eastward
across the United States. In the Golden State, they’re dumping
rainfall that’s 400% to 600% above average in some places,
forcing mass evacuations, closing highways, shutting down
power, and killing 19 people.
The current wet spell, made up of a parade of atmospheric
rivers, is a welcome change from the last three years of record
dry and warm conditions. For very good reasons, the focus
during these big, early winter storms is first and foremost on
flood management and public safety. There is of course also
great interest in the potential of these storms to relieve
water shortages for communities and farms. What is not always
appreciated is the role of these early winter storms in
supporting the health of freshwater ecosystems. For millennia,
California’s biodiversity evolved strategies to take advantage
of these infrequent, but critical high flow events. Benefits
from recent storms are now being realized throughout the state,
from temperate rainforests of the North Coast to semi-arid and
arid rivers in the south.
When Leland Stanford became California’s governor in 1862, he
needed a rowboat to carry him to the Capitol to be sworn
in. Sacramento’s streets were flooded. In fact, much of
California was. A 300-mile-long lake was created in the Central
Valley from near Bakersfield to Red Bluff. At least 4,000
people were killed. It was the largest flood in the
recorded history of California, Nevada and Oregon, dumping 10
feet of water on this state over a 43-day period.
… Burning fossil fuel has warmed the planet and appears
to have mucked up our climate. But we’d still suffer terrible
droughts and disastrous storms even if all the energy we used
was carbon free. -Written by Los Angeles Times columnist George
Skelton.
Amid dramatic ocean swells and drenching atmospheric rivers, a
new report lays bare a hidden aspect of sea level rise that has
been exacerbating flooding in the Bay Area. The report, which
was released Tuesday, maps areas that could flood from
groundwater hovering just a few feet, or even inches below
ground. This layer of water gets pushed upward as denser water
from the ocean moves inland from rising tides. On its way up,
even before the water breaks the surface, it can seep into the
cracks of basements, infiltrate plumbing, or, even more
insidiously, re-mobilize toxic chemicals buried underground.
Communities that consider themselves “safe” from sea level rise
might need to think otherwise, said Kris May, a lead author of
the report and founder of Pathways Climate Institute, a
research-based consulting firm in San Francisco that helps
cities adapt to climate change.
The Governor’s January Budget forecasts General Fund revenues
will be $29.5 billion lower than at the 2022 Budget Act
projections, and California now faces an estimated budget gap
of $22.5 billion in Fiscal Year (FY) 2023-24. … Some
highlights from the Governor’s January Budget include: The
Budget maintains $8.6 billion (98 percent) of previously
committed funding to minimize the immediate economic and
environmental damage from the current drought and support
hundreds of local water projects to prepare for and be more
resilient to future droughts. Delta Levees—$40.6 million
General Fund for ongoing Delta projects that reduce risk of
levee failure and flooding, provide habitat benefits, and
reduce the risk of saltwater intrusion contaminating water
supplies.
More than two weeks of storms have already hammered California,
and one more arrived Sunday night. The relentless downpours and
their impact — flooded homes, flattened cars, downed power
lines and more — have killed at least 19 people and disrupted
the lives of millions more since late December. Experts
have said that almost none of the storms, on their own, would
have been considered catastrophic, but the continual pounding
has taken a toll on California’s landscape. Soil now struggling
to hold water is more vulnerable to mudslides. Days
of strong winds have sent trees tumbling. And the
relentless precipitation has turned trickling creeks into
raging waterways.
More storms were expected to hit Northern California and the
rest of the state Friday, bringing fears of flooding, mudslides
and power outages in communities already battered by a series
of atmospheric rivers. All eyes will be on Monterey County as
officials warn that flooding could cut off the Monterey
Peninsula from the rest of the state and shut down major
roadways, including Highways 1 and 68. With more storms on the
way, the Salinas River region is forecast to receive 1 to 1.5
inches of rain Friday and up to 2 more inches over the weekend,
according to the National Weather Service. That could
swell the river to one of the highest peak flood levels in its
history.
A group of Assembly Republican lawmakers gathered on a levee on
the American River in Sacramento to call out the state’s
Democratic leadership for failing to invest in water
infrastructure to aid with flooding and water
storage. Around 22 trillion gallons of rain will fall in
California according to estimates. However, state Assembly
Republicans blame the lack of infrastructure as the root cause
for why most of the water will go uncaptured. … In 2014,
voters supported a water bond that authorized billions of
dollars to go toward state water supply infrastructure and
water storage projects. Since then, no new reservoir or other
water project has been built.
Up and down the coast, they have endured torrential rain, flood
waters, mudslides, lighting strikes, and downed trees, often
with little more than tents or bridges for shelter. “The water
backed up to my tent, it’s still going,” said Maurice, who
lives in San Francisco and who declined to provide his last
name. “Ninety percent of my stuff is still wet. I’m trying to
salvage the stuff I do need to keep on going.” … The storm
has placed a spotlight on the Golden State’s staggering
inequality, and its decades-long failure to adequately shelter
and support its homeless residents.
The capital region has faced a series of brutal storms since
New Year’s Eve, which have flooded homes, cut power to
thousands of families and killed five people in Sacramento
County alone. California has sought to control its rivers for
173 years, and the storms will only get worse: The Department
of Water Resources has acknowledged that climate change has
intensified the risk of flooding in the Central Valley. The
state and federal government have built levees and dams, but
the possibility of a major flood remains. Here are some of the
worst storms to hit the Sacramento area since John Sutter
showed up.
California, with its serial atmospheric rivers, is grappling
with an unfolding natural disaster. Over the longer term, there
are many ways to reduce or mitigate risks from storms like
these, including promoting good land use planning and zoning to
avoid hazards, building infrastructure to better handle storms,
and ramping up efforts to address the greater vulnerabilities
of many low-income communities. But in the moment, one of the
most important risk mitigation strategies involves
communication. Communication is the lynchpin of disaster
preparedness and response. This includes raising awareness
about a storm’s potential consequences, encouraging safe
behavior, and enabling all-important communication during and
immediately after the storm.
The danger lurking along a country road in central California’s
wine country was not clear to Lindsy Doan as she drove her
five-year-old son to school on Monday morning. The region, like
much of the state, had been hit by a deadly series of storms
that were , but the family had traveled through the area the
previous day, her husband told the Guardian, and countless
times before on their commutes. … It only became clear
the road was not safe as floodwaters began to carry the vehicle
into a creek near the village of San Miguel. … The search is
one of several that has taken place across the state in recent
weeks as a devastating series of storms battered the state. The
rains and wind have toppled trees and power lines and flooded
rivers and creeks, killing at least 18 people, including
three in Sacramento county who were found dead in or near their
cars.
Like it or not, adapting to climate change will involve human
beings retreating from places the weather has made too
dangerous for habitation. This will be easier to
accomplish in some places than others. On the
most difficult end of the scale sits California. In a
matter of weeks, the state has gone from being perilously
dry to drowning in “atmospheric rivers” of water falling
from the sky, in a series of storms likely to continue
for another week. Mud and rocks are pouring down
hillsides that recent wildfires swept clean of protective
vegetation. Storm surges are flooding the coast. -Written by Mark Gongloff, a Bloomberg Opinion
editor and writer.
A series of atmospheric river storms since Christmas has
significantly reduced California’s drought, the federal
government concluded Thursday. For the first time in more than
two years — since Dec. 1, 2020 — the majority of the state is
no longer in a severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought
Monitor, a weekly report put out by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture
and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Overall, 46% of
California’s land area remains in severe drought, the report
found, a dramatic improvement over the past month, when it was
85% on Dec. 6.
The seventh atmospheric river storm since Christmas hit
California on Wednesday, and more flooding is possible as two
more are forecast through the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday
weekend, officials said. Speaking to reporters in hard-hit
Capitola, a beach town east of Santa Cruz devastated by storm
damage, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday warned about more
destruction to come. By Wednesday, the number of confirmed
storm-related fatalities rose to 19. … Newsom previewed three
more atmospheric river-fueled storms, which should continue
through at least Jan. 18, meaning another week of rain, at
least for Northern California. Officials said numerous rivers
still could flood with the continuing rains.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Jan. 10 unveiled his proposed budget for
the next fiscal year … [T]he governor has proposed
timely new funding for flood risk reduction and protection, as
well as several other important water management issues.
Specifically, the governor’s proposed budget calls for funding
in the following categories. Urban Flood Risk Reduction —
$135.5 million over two years to support local agencies working
to reduce urban flood risk. Delta Levee — $40.6 million
for ongoing Delta projects that reduce risk of levee failure
and flooding, provide habitat benefits, and reduce the risk of
saltwater intrusion contaminating water supplies. Central
Valley Flood Protection — $25 million to support projects that
will reduce the risk of flooding for Central Valley communities
while contributing to ecosystem restoration and agricultural
sustainability.
A climatologist with The National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration is predicting that the ongoing storms in
California will likely be the first billion-dollar storm
of 2023 in the United States. … Smith is an applied
climatologist at NOAA’s National Center for Environmental
Information. He’s the lead researcher for the annual
“Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disaster’s”
report. “It takes into account many different impacts such
as damage to homes, businesses, government assets like schools,
all the contents of those structures,” Smith said.
Despite several weeks of torrential rain and flooding,
California is still facing a severe multi-year drought. That
has many people thinking about how to better capture winter
floodwaters to last through the dry season. An innovative
approach at two California reservoirs could help boost the
state’s water supply, potentially marking a larger shift from
decades-old water management approaches to a system that can
quickly adapt to precipitation in a changing climate. At issue
are rules that, at face value, seem perplexing to many
Californians. Even in a chronically dry state, reservoirs are
not allowed to fill up in the winter. … Two sites,
Folsom Reservoir and Lake Mendocino, are rethinking this by
using weather forecasts to guide their operations. Instead of
sticking to set rules, they only empty out if a major storm is
forecasted for the days ahead.
The Great Flood of 1862, seemingly lost in time, is the answer
to the question: What was the most destructive flood in
California history? Even as flood waters rise throughout the
state in January 2023 and President Joe Biden declared a state
of emergency on Monday, the event has created only a fraction
of the impact of the 19th century deluge. News reports from the
time describe a surreal scene: Entire towns were destroyed, and
farmland and plains turned into lakes as far as the eye could
see. Almost everyone in the state was impacted by the flood,
from victims who lost their homes to state employees who, in
the chaos and confusion, didn’t get paid for more than a
year. … San Francisco began flooding in December
1861, when steady rains drenched the city. The first week of
January dumped 12 more inches of rain in S.F., and one local
newspaper made Biblical comparisons.
Why Guy is getting many questions about why we can’t store all
the rainwater we’re getting. California is still officially in
a drought and we need water for drinking and agriculture and
other basic needs. Even though it’s been dumping rain like
watery gold, we can’t seem to store it all. We have reservoirs
and dams that do much of the water storage, but most of the
rain we’ve been getting is flowing into the Pacific Ocean. It’s
wasted. The rain is also falling so quickly that we can’t
store it and what we want to do with it is get it out of here
to clear our roadways and landscapes as soon as
possible. The best-case scenario is that we get a ton of
snow in the high Sierra that naturally melts as the weather
warms and disperses the water in doses to a thirsty state.
As a series of storms continues to pummel California, officials
say the havoc is a testament to the unexpected ferocity of
extreme weather. By Tuesday evening, at least 17 people have
been killed in circumstances directly related to a train of
atmospheric rivers that has inundated the state since New
Year’s Eve, bringing the death toll from the storms higher than
the last two wildfire seasons combined….The deadly weather is
foiling evacuation plans and straining the state’s aging
infrastructure as strong winds topple power lines and fast
rising waters overtop levees. Officials say the storms
highlight the way in which climate change is increasingly
catching people off guard as the state swings from one extreme
weather event to another, leaving little time to prepare.
As California wrangles with a projected $22 billion budget
deficit, Gov. Gavin Newsom has proposed cutting most heavily
from programs designed to help the state confront the worsening
effects of climate change. Newsom’s proposed budget, which he
released Tuesday, would cut a net $6 billion from the state’s
climate efforts. Among the cuts: subsidies for electric
vehicles; funding for clean energy programs, such as battery
storage and solar panels; and money for programs to help
low-income people deal with extreme heat waves. Climate
activists and some progressive legislators said they were wary
of the move, particularly as another atmospheric river drenched
much of the state and brought flooding to communities from
Santa Cruz to San Diego….Among the other proposed cuts to
climate programs and projects in Newsom’s budget: … $194
million for drought preparation and response
It’s been a wild couple of weeks of weather in Northern
California. But there is a rather bright silver lining to this
train of storms: our surface water supply is getting a big
boost. Here’s a look at some of the highlights. On
Oct. 1, 2022, the start of the new water year for California,
reservoir levels were woefully low throughout the state. But
after an active December and now a very busy January, water
levels are rising quickly. Folsom was the fastest reservoir to
fill up to the seasonal benchmark. There’s no surprise there,
given that it’s one of the smallest in the region.
… Reservoirs are steadily filling up with runoff from
rainfall and later this season, there will be plenty of
snowmelt to look forward to. As of Tuesday, the statewide
snowpack is at 214% of average for the date.
It wasn’t so long ago that California prayed for rain.
Something to quench the climate-change-fueled drought — the
worst in at least 1,200 years — that has caused farm fields to
wither and wells to run dry…. Now, the water that
Californians so desperately wanted is pummeling them like a
curse….The recent onslaught of atmospheric rivers has
underscored the perils of California’s climate paradox: Rising
global temperatures are making the region drier, hotter and
more fire-prone, but they also increase the likelihood of
sudden, severe rainfall. Experts say the state is not prepared
for periods of too much water, even as it struggles to make do
without enough.
Record drought in the American West contributes to a growing
number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters across
the country, and the quickening pace of large-scale events
makes recovery slower and pricier, according to a new report
from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Drought covered 63% of the contiguous United States on Oct. 25,
the largest such footprint since the severe drought of 2012,
according to the report, released Tuesday at Denver’s national
convention for the American Meteorological Society. Forty
percent or more of the lower 48 states has been in drought for
the past 119 weeks, a record in more than 20 years of the U.S.
Drought Monitor reports. That’s approaching double the previous
record of 68 weeks begun in 2012’s drought.
My umbrella was wide and sturdy, my rain slicker insulated and
as yellow as a Minion. I wore thick Dickies and my good pair of
Doc Martens. It didn’t matter. Just minutes after I stepped out
of my Yukon to walk around Parque de los Niños in Placentia’s
Atwood barrio last week, I was thoroughly soaked. A strong wind
made the rain whip at a 45-degree angle. Drops hit the baseball
diamond with such force that mud leaped into the air.
… Eighty-five years ago this March, this historic
Mexican American neighborhood took the brunt of the deadliest
flood in Southern California history. Five days of heavy storms
caused all of the region’s major rivers — the Los Angeles, the
San Gabriel and especially the Santa Ana — to overflow their
banks. -Written by Gustavo Arellano, columnist for the
Los Angeles Times.
California’s vulnerability to destructive flooding is anything
but a secret. Meteorologists and climatologists have been
warning of the enhanced risk for years, as climate change
drives the state through cycles of extreme drought and then
warms the winter air to produce violent downpours like the bomb
cyclone and atmospheric river events of the past few weeks. The
effects are felt up and down the map, including in key
agricultural areas and low-lying rural patches. But they are
not felt equally—another reality experts have been speaking
about for some time. The worst of California’s flood woes, both
this month and into the long future, will be visited upon the
state’s poorest residents.
Downpours from an atmospheric river storm triggered landslides
in the Santa Cruz Mountains Monday, burying highways in heaps
of mud and trapping residents in place. The damage is the
consequence of weeks of rain fueled by atmospheric rivers.
… Rain is one of the primary forces that trigger
landslides. As water trickles into the tiny gaps between soil
and rocks, it adds pressure, which makes soils more
unstable. … The New Year’s Eve storm produced
hundreds of landslides across the Bay Area, with a focus in the
East Bay, Collins said. This week in the Santa Cruz
Mountains, waterlogged soil from weeks of frequent rain is
breaking free from deeper layers of earth and slipping down
slopes onto roads.
The prevailing goal in Southern California has been to get
water that falls from the sky away from our roads and buildings
as quickly as possible. Much of the rain washes out to the
ocean — often carrying trash and other pollutants. The L.A.
Times reported up to 10 billion gallons poured into the Los
Angeles Basin in recent storms and only about 20% will be
captured. L.A. County has plans to double the amount
of rainwater currently captured every year and use it
to provide nearly two-thirds of the county’s drinking
water. Voters approved a new property tax in 2018
meant to raise up to $300 million a year to fund the capture
and treatment of stormwater.
As torrential rainfall continues to batter the West coast, you
may be wondering how all of this wet weather is affecting
California’s wildlife. In Australia at the end of last year,
heavy rain and floods caused snake sightings to soar across the
country—could the same thing happen in California? “Rapidly
rising flood water from heavy rain can displace wildlife,
including rattlesnakes,” Bryan Hughes, owner of Arizona-based
snake rescue service Rattlesnake Solutions, told Newsweek.
“This can mean that in some areas, there will be a temporary
increase of the likelihood of random encounters.”
Growing up in the shadow of the
Rocky Mountains, Andrew Schwartz never missed an opportunity to
play in – or study – a Colorado snowstorm. During major
blizzards, he would traipse out into the icy wind and heavy
drifts of snow pretending to be a scientist researching in
Antarctica.
Decades later, still armed with an obsession for extreme weather,
Schwartz has landed in one of the snowiest places in the West,
leading a research lab whose mission is to give California water
managers instant information on the depth and quality of snow
draping the slopes of the Sierra Nevada.
A powerful winter storm barreled into Southern California on
Monday, forcing the mass evacuation of Montecito and other
communities exactly five years after mudslides in the same area
left 23 people dead. Pounding rain wreaked havoc throughout the
coastal counties north of Los Angeles, bringing flooding, road
closures and tragedy, including the death of a motorist who
entered a flooded roadway and the presumed death of a
5-year-old boy who was swept away by flood waters in San Luis
Obispo County. The storm, which was expected to move through
Los Angeles, Orange and other southern counties through
Tuesday, dumped more than 16 inches of rain in some mountain
areas Monday and prompted pleas for people to stay indoors.
California has gone from extreme drought to extreme flooding in
a matter of days. On Monday, 90% of the state’s population was
under a flood watch as another round of storms rolled through.
Yet it was just last week when several counties in the state
were experiencing the exact opposite – exceptional drought,
which the US Drought Monitor considers the most severe
category. … But the abrupt shift from drought warnings to
flood warnings highlights the dilemma California faces: How do
you manage an overwhelming amount of rain in a water-scarce
state? And is it possible to harness that water so it’s
available in the dry summer months? Part of the solution,
climate scientists told CNN, is drawing levees back to allow
rivers more room to flood safely into surrounding land.
California could get 22 trillion gallons of rain in the coming
days. But what does that mean for the state’s drought? In a
perennial problem that even when California does get rain, much
of it runs off into the ocean or is otherwise uncollected. But
there’s new storm water technology that could help change that,
scientists say, as the decades-old discipline shifts to help
water managers collect rainwater, purify it and store it for
times of drought. Much of the new technology is often
referred to as “green infrastructure,” … To learn
more, The Washington Post talked with Andrew Fisher, a
professor of hydrogeology at the University of California in
Santa Cruz, and David Feldman, the director of the University
of California Irvine’s water institute.
With the arrival of a series of atmospheric rivers in recent
weeks, drought-weary Californians are now confronting the
weather whiplash that is a hallmark of our state’s climate.
Flooding, power outages, and downed trees are now dominating
the news. It’s a remarkable shift from the past few years,
which saw the driest three-year period in the state’s recorded
history. And while it’s tempting to think the drought is now
over, it’s not—and if anything, the recent shift in conditions
highlights just how much Californians need to prepare for
wetter wets and drier dries. The past year was very important
for California water. Water managers found ways to innovate and
adapt.
NOAA’s hurricane hunters might be just as busy now as they were
during hurricane season. However, it’s not hurricanes they are
flying through, but the atmospheric river systems plaguing
California since Christmas week. Atmospheric rivers may not
make headlines in the same way hurricanes do, but they can have
extreme consequences. “Atmospheric rivers can span the whole
Pacific. They are long and narrow, but they’re way larger than
hurricanes,” Atmospheric River Reconnaissance Coordinator Anna
Wilson said. They are crucial to the West Coast. Half the rain
and snow the West gets comes from atmospheric rivers, which are
plumes of moisture coming in from the Pacific Ocean. And they
cross an area with very few observation sites, making them
challenging to forecast.
Rebekah Rohde, 40, and Steven Sorensen, 61, are two of at least
14 people killed by the recent storms — and both were unhoused.
The Sacramento County Coroner reported Monday that both were
found with trees collapsed onto their tents. It’s a tragic —
and telling — convergence of two California crises: extreme
weather and worsening homelessness. The current series of
storms (“parade of cyclones” is the latest National Weather
Service warning) pummeled communities with as much as 8 inches
of rain and wind gusts of nearly 70 mph, causing power outages,
school shutdowns and flood risks, especially in coastal regions
and areas burned by wildfires. They include the coastal enclave
of Montecito in Santa Barbara County, where evacuations were
ordered on Monday, five years to the day that mudslides killed
23 people and destroyed 130 homes.
During Sacramento’s centuries-long history of battling flood
waters, inhabitants have devised nearly every possible method
of slowing or diverting water, and one of those methods is
using the Sacramento Weir. Completed in 1916, the more than
1,900-foot long weir featuring 48 gates sits along the west
bank of the Sacramento River about three miles north of the
confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers. However,
the placement and purpose of the Sacramento weir differs from
typical weirs found along other streams and rivers.
If you lived in the Bay Area during the winter of 1996-1997,
one memory probably jumps to mind: flooding. Much like this
year, the week of New Year’s started out stormy. And the rain
didn’t stop. For a week, California was inundated, and its
rivers and creeks rose. On Jan. 1, 1997, catastrophe struck
Sonoma County. The Russian River burst its banks, cresting at
45 feet, well over its flood stage of 34 feet. (This week, the
river is forecast to hit about 36 feet.) … In
Oroville, there were evacuations amid fears a dam on the
Feather River was about to overflow, while people living along
creeks and streams around the Bay Area were forced to find
higher ground as water seeped into backyards and homes. In
Fresno, Millerton Lake spilled over the Friant Dam, sending
millions of gallons of water down the San Joaquin River,
wreaking havoc on homes and bridges in its path.
As rain has deluged our parched state since New Year’s Eve,
many Californians have found themselves asking a familiar
question: Is this somehow because of El Niño? In the California
imagination, the climate pattern known as El Niño has an almost
mythological status as a harbinger of prolonged wet spells,
while its counterpart, La Niña, is associated with drought. The
past three years have been La Niña years. The continuing
procession of storms this winter has drawn comparisons to the
famed wet winter of 1997-98, when rain driven by El Niño
drenched the Golden State. Californians are bracing for one of
the season’s most intense storms to date on Monday and Tuesday.
But Daniel L. Swain, a climate scientist at the University of
California, Los Angeles, said that El Niño hasn’t taken over —
yet.
The string of wet storms streaming over California since the
end of 2022 have brought the San Joaquin Valley both relief and
frustration, depending on location. In the Fresno area, flows
out of Millerton Lake into the San Joaquin River have nearly
tripled from 600 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 1,600
cfs. In the coming days the Bureau of Reclamation, which
operates Millerton’s Friant Dam, expects releases to exceed
4,500 cfs. That’s great for agricultural water districts
that take Millerton water on the northern end of the Friant
system. And it’s great for the San Joaquin River Restoration
Program, which aims to bring back native spring Chinook salmon
runs. … Meanwhile, water managers on the southern end of
the Friant system are watching those flows with more than a
little frustration.
A bomb cyclone hit California this week, knocking out power,
downing trees, dumping massive amounts of water. Now, that last
one, massive amounts of water – it’s interesting because all
that rain is hitting in a state that has been stricken with
drought. Some California residents are watching this precious
resource wash away and wondering, why can’t we save the water
for later, for times when we desperately need it? Well, Andrew
Fisher, hydrogeologist and professor at UC Santa Cruz,
attempted to answer that question in an op-ed for The LA Times.
And we have brought him here to try to answer it for us.
Professor Fisher, welcome.
Big waves – some topping 18 feet in Los Angeles County –
wreaked havoc on Friday, Jan. 6, as high tides and a winter
swell continued to work over the Southern California coastline
leading to beach erosion, pier closures, crumbled asphalt
parking lots and boats torn from their docks. In the South Bay,
piers at three west-facing beaches remained closed Friday as
waves more than 15 feet tall pummeled the structures.
… Additionally, the high surf and tide surge swamped a
block jetty at Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro, flooding and
closing the nearby parking lot. Mounds of sand buried a bike
path that runs from Torrance Beach to Avenue H in Redondo Beach
and sea water flooded into a parking lot and public bathroom
facility.
California is bracing for another week of destructive storms
that will probably bring flooding and hazardous winds Monday to
an already battered state. A series of atmospheric rivers that
pummeled coastal communities last week and left more than
400,000 without power in California on Sunday will be followed
by particularly brutal weather as rivers reach flood levels and
powerful winds wreak havoc, forecasters fear…. For days,
forecasters had warned of a “relentless parade of
cyclones” barreling out of the Pacific toward
California, and continuing until about Jan.
19, intensifying the risk of flooding in parts of the
state this week. A flood watch remains in effect for the
Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys and nearby foothills until 4
p.m. Wednesday.
Federal officials announced Thursday that water releases from
Friant Dam are being substantially increased to control the
fill rate of Millerton Lake and create room for more forecast
rain. Starting Thursday, releases from Friant Dam to the San
Joaquin River are set to increase by 1,000
cubic-feet-per-second – from around 600 cfs to 1,600 cfs.
Similarly, releases to the Madera Canal are set to increase by
800 cubic-feet-per-second – from around 200 cfs to 1,000 cfs.
Officials add that Friant Dam releases to the San Joaquin River
are expected to further increase to at least 4,500 cfs over the
next few days.
The City of Rio Dell is experiencing an ongoing hazardous
materials spill as heavy rainfall infiltrates outdated sewer
pipes that were damaged during the 6.4 magnitude earthquake
that struck on December 20. An estimated 140,000 gallons
rain-diluted wastewater has spilled out of a manhole cover at
the end of Painter Street, near the city’s wastewater treatment
plant, and the spill is continuing at a rate of about 50
gallons per minute, according to Rio Dell City Manager Kyle
Knopp.
In a special message about California weather, the National
Weather Service said that another atmospheric river would
arrive in Northern California Friday night and bring the
“threat of heavy rain (and) flooding on Saturday, along with
1-2 feet of snow and “dangerous” mountain travel conditions.
But that’s just a warm-up: A “stronger” atmospheric river is
expected to arrive Monday and persist into Tuesday, bring more
precipitation and gusty winds.
We don’t always treat water like the life-sustaining resource
it is. Instead, we take it for granted: With the turn of a tap,
it’s at our fingertips to drink, grow our food and keep our
communities clean. But according to the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation, it’s time for changes if we want that to continue.
Their recently released American River Basin study highlights
the growing imbalance between water supply and consumer demand.
With the stresses of population growth, regulatory updates, and
the effects of climate change, this disparity will only get
worse without new strategies and approaches to keep water
flowing.
The project to address flooding and subsidence in the
Friant-Kern Canal hit a milestone with the recent completion of
a critical siphon structure, sparing surrounding areas of flood
damage in the event of heavy rainfall. In November, the Friant
Water Authority (FWA) made a key accomplishment on their
33-mile middle reach project that has plagued conveyance on the
Friant-Kern Canal (FKC). Aptly named the Deer Creek siphon, the
siphon ensures the FKC can handle high flows in the event of
potential winter storms or flood events by allowing water from
the canal to pass under the creek.
California is in an impressive wet period. According to
the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes, four
powerful atmospheric rivers have hit California since
Christmas. And their modeling suggests that at least three more
significant storms are on their way. It looks like January is
going to be a very wet month…. These atmospheric rivers—with
their intense low-pressure systems and warm, subtropical
moisture—are California’s version of hurricanes. The
combination of high rainfall rates and winds causes urban and
river flooding, as well as landslides and debris flows
(especially in areas that have recently burned), and routinely
knocks out power to thousands. But these storms also create an
awful lot of benefit for Californians.
California drought conditions have improved significantly in
the past week, after a series of storms drenched the state. The
state has received 119% of the precipitation it normally gets
by this point in the water year, which begins on Oct. 1. The
statewide snowpack is also 179% of average for this time of the
year…. According to the map released Thursday morning by
the U.S. Drought Monitor, no part of California currently
falls under the category of exceptional drought, something that
hasn’t been the case since the map released on May 10, 2022.
And that update doesn’t include the impact of heavy storms that
swept through the Bay Area on Wednesday, downing trees and
flooding roadways.
The Los Angeles River roared to life this week as a series of
powerful storms moved through the Southland. In Long Beach, 3
feet of water shut down the 710 Freeway in both directions,
while flooding in the San Fernando Valley forced the closure of
the Sepulveda Basin. It was by all accounts a washout, but
despite heaps of water pouring into the area, drought-weary Los
Angeles won’t be able to save even half of it. The region’s
system of engineered waterways is designed to whisk L.A.’s
stormwater out to sea — a strategy intended to reduce flooding
that nonetheless sacrifices countless precious gallons.
A powerful winter storm unleashed heavy rain and
strong winds across Northern California on Wednesday,
triggering evacuations and power outages, and heightening fears
of widespread flooding and debris flows. … Wednesday’s
storm is the third atmospheric river that’s hit California in
the last two weeks. The successive storms have brought a deluge
of water to the drought-stricken state, prompting Gov. Newsom
to declare a state of emergency to “support response and
recovery efforts.” … The series of atmospheric rivers that
started toward the end of December was somewhat surprising
after one of California’s driest years on record, which left
reservoirs drained and soils parched.
The atmospheric river storm hitting California this week
presents a test for an experimental waste-capturing system
that’s intended to keep plastic bottles, diapers and other
trash from flowing into the Pacific. It has even captured a
couch. The solar-powered system, designed to work mostly
autonomously, was introduced in October at the mouth of Ballona
Creek near Playa del Rey.
With $5 million in funding from NOAA’s Climate Adaptation
Partners (CAP) initiative, the California Nevada Adaptation
Program (CNAP), a collaborative initiative between UC San
Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the DRI in
Reno, Nevada will work to expand climate research and focus on
building adaptation strategies. The program will last five
years and aim to empower local communities to use this
knowledge to make informed decisions in the face of long-term
drought, unprecedented wildfires, and extreme heat impacting
public health.
As California battles a second week of lashing rain and snow
that have flooded communities, broken levees and toppled power
lines, the state is facing questions about whether its approach
to handling crippling storms is suited to 21st-century climate
threats. For decades, federal and state planners built dams and
levees in California to store water and keep it at bay. But as
climate change increases the risk of stronger and more
destructive storms — like the one that was battering Northern
California on Wednesday — experts and some policymakers are
urging another approach: giving rivers room to overflow.
With another storm on the way later this week, record rainfall
totals from a storm that hit the area New Year’s Eve caused
numerous roads to close due to mudslides and flooding,
officials said. In Livermore where nearly 2 inches of rain were
recorded in a 24 hour period, police were asking residents on
Sunday to stay away from Arroyo Mocho creek and trail as the
California Department of Water Resources released water from
the Del Valle Dam at a rate of 500 cubic feet per second. State
officials said the dam was not at risk Sunday. Recovery efforts
were focused on ensuring streets would remain passable,
something that could be hampered by the upcoming pineapple
express-fueled storm expected to hit the Bay Area Wednesday and
Thursday.
What is an atmospheric river? These storms get their name
from their long, narrow shape and the prodigious amount of
water they carry. They form when winds over the Pacific
draw a filament of moisture from the band of warm, moist air
over the tropics and channel it toward the West Coast. When
this ribbon of moisture hits the Sierra Nevada and other
mountains, it is forced upward, cooling it and turning its
water into immense quantities of rain and snow. … Is
climate change making them more extreme? As humans
continue burning fossil fuels and heating the atmosphere, the
warmer air can hold more moisture. This means storms in many
places, California included, are more likely to be extremely
wet and intense.
The storm door is open — at least for now. An atmospheric river
battered Northern California this past weekend. The North Bay
was largely spared, but torrential rain across much of the
region lifted streams over their banks, trapped cars as
roadways became routes for kayaks and canoes, and flooded homes
and businesses from San Francisco to Sacramento. The National
Weather Service says another “truly … brutal system” will slam
Northern California on Wednesday. This time, Sonoma County
appears to be in the path. That could mean fierce wind gusts,
intense rain, flooded roads, mudslides and power outages. By
Friday, the Russian River is expected to reach flood stage in
Guerneville.
A successive series of powerful atmospheric river storms poses
a growing threat to California as the ground becomes more
saturated, river levels rise and heavy winds threaten the power
infrastructure. This week’s storms are expected to dump intense
levels of rain in a fairly short period of time. The greatest
potential for disaster is in Northern California, which has
already been battered by several destructive storms — including
one this weekend that caused a deadly levee breach. But each
new storm, including one set to arrive Wednesday, adds new
pressure.
This is a re-post from 2019 with updated links for pictures and
further readings. … Collapse of Los Angeles aqueduct pipeline
through Antelope Valley from a major flood in February, 1914
(3-months after the aqueduct’s official opening) “In February,
1914, the rainfall in the Mojave Desert region exceeded by
nearly fifty per cent in three days the average annual
precipitation. Where the steel siphon crosses Antelope valley
at the point of greatest depression, an arroyo or run-off wash
indicated that fifteen feet was the extreme width of the flood
stream, and the pipe was carried over the wash on concrete
piers set just outside the high water lines. The February rain,
however, was of the sort known as a cloud-burst, and the flood
widened the wash to fifty feet, carried away the concrete
piers, and the pipe sagged and broke at a circular seam.
Propelled by a bomb cyclone, the storm expected to barrel into
the California coast Wednesday is expected to drop several
inches of rain on top of already saturated soil and will
probably cause another round of widespread flooding across the
northern part of the state. But this storm is projected to
bring even more powerful, tree-toppling winds — 50 mph gusts —
than seen during the New Year’s Eve deluge…. “To put it
simply, this will likely be one of the most impactful systems
on a widespread scale that this meteorologist has seen in a
long while,” according to a National Weather Service forecast.
… “This is truly a brutal system that we are looking at
and needs to be taken seriously.”
Just days after rain left the city with flooding waters and
streets covered in debris, runoff is also leading to unsafe
swimming conditions along our coast. Right now, there are
currently four beach closures in our region: Imperial Beach
Shoreline, Tijuana Slough Shoreline, Silver Strand Shoreline,
and Coronado Shoreline. The San Diego Department of
Environmental Health and Quality warning beachgoers to stay
away until further testing. Along the Coronado shoreline
water contact warning signs line the sand, alerting beachgoers
to steer clear. … Ringing in the new year with moderate rain
and gusty winds has led to these south swell conditions and
urban runoff across the U.S. Mexico border raising bacteria
levels in ocean and bay water here at home.
With more storms barreling toward Northern California, south
Sacramento County communities near the Cosumnes and Mokelumne
rivers are on edge for new flood evacuations this week. Point
Pleasant residents were ordered to evacuate on Sunday and
Wilton residents were told to remain prepared to evacuate if
they haven’t already even as reclamation district officials
raced around the clock to shore up levee breaks ahead of the
storm system expected to arrive Wednesday. … Levees are
crucial along this 80-mile river because there’s no dam to slow
the flow from headwaters in the Eldorado National Forest, said
Jay Lund, vice-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at
the University of California, Davis. Consequently, he said,
flash flooding is a common after warm storms like the one this
past weekend that produced more rain than snow.
This tour explored the Sacramento River and its tributaries
through a scenic landscape while learning about the issues
associated with a key source for the state’s water supply.
All together, the river and its tributaries supply 35 percent of
California’s water and feed into two major projects: the State
Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project.
Water Education Foundation
2151 River Plaza Drive, Suite 205
Sacramento, CA 95833
This tour traveled along the San Joaquin River to learn firsthand
about one of the nation’s largest and most expensive river
restoration projects.
The San Joaquin River was the focus of one of the most
contentious legal battles in California water history,
ending in a 2006 settlement between the federal government,
Friant Water Users Authority and a coalition of environmental
groups.
Hampton Inn & Suites Fresno
327 E Fir Ave
Fresno, CA 93720
Explore the lower Colorado River firsthand where virtually every drop of the river is allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to some 40 million people in the Southwest across seven states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico. How the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial needs is the focus of this tour.
Hyatt Place Las Vegas At Silverton Village
8380 Dean Martin Drive
Las Vegas, NV 89139
The lower Colorado River has virtually every drop allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in the Southwest across seven states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico. How the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial needs was the focus of this tour.
Hyatt Place Las Vegas At Silverton Village
8380 Dean Martin Drive
Las Vegas, NV 89139
Land and waterway managers labored
hard over the course of a century to control California’s unruly
rivers by building dams and levees to slow and contain their
water. Now, farmers, environmentalists and agencies are undoing
some of that work as part of an accelerating campaign to restore
the state’s major floodplains.
Biologists have designed a variety
of unique experiments in the past decade to demonstrate the
benefits that floodplains provide for small fish. Tracking
studies have used acoustic tags to show that chinook salmon
smolts with access to inundated fields are more likely than their
river-bound cohorts to reach the Pacific Ocean. This is because
the richness of floodplains offers a vital buffet of nourishment
on which young salmon can capitalize, supercharging their growth
and leading to bigger, stronger smolts.
This tour guided participants on a virtual exploration of the Sacramento River and its tributaries and learn about the issues associated with a key source for the state’s water supply.
All together, the river and its tributaries supply 35 percent of California’s water and feed into two major projects: the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project.
USACE Sacramento District has a proven track record of facing
challenges head-on. When 2020 brought with it the Novel
Coronavirus, the District responded quickly to address the
needs of a rapidly changing work environment…This year marked
the start of major construction on the [American River Common
Features] project, and the pandemic hit just as crews were
mobilizing, meaning both USACE and its contractors faced
unexpected public impacts.
This event explored the lower Colorado River where virtually every drop of the river is allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in the Southwest across seven states and Mexico. How the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial needs was the focus of this tour.
The islands of the western
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are sinking as the rich peat soil
that attracted generations of farmers dries out and decays. As
the peat decomposes, it releases tons of carbon dioxide – a
greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. As the islands sink, the
levees that protect them are at increasing risk of failure, which
could imperil California’s vital water conveyance system.
An ambitious plan now in the works could halt the decay,
sequester the carbon and potentially reverse the sinking.
Many of California’s watersheds are
notoriously flashy – swerving from below-average flows to jarring
flood conditions in quick order. The state needs all the water it
can get from storms, but current flood management guidelines are
strict and unyielding, requiring reservoirs to dump water each
winter to make space for flood flows that may not come.
However, new tools and operating methods are emerging that could
lead the way to a redefined system that improves both water
supply and flood protection capabilities.
California is chock full of rivers and creeks, yet the state’s network of stream gauges has significant gaps that limit real-time tracking of how much water is flowing downstream, information that is vital for flood protection, forecasting water supplies and knowing what the future might bring.
That network of stream gauges got a big boost Sept. 30 with the signing of SB 19. Authored by Sen. Bill Dodd (D-Napa), the law requires the state to develop a stream gauge deployment plan, focusing on reactivating existing gauges that have been offline for lack of funding and other reasons. Nearly half of California’s stream gauges are dormant.
To survive the next drought and meet
the looming demands of the state’s groundwater sustainability
law, California is going to have to put more water back in the
ground. But as other Western states have found, recharging
overpumped aquifers is no easy task.
Successfully recharging aquifers could bring multiple benefits
for farms and wildlife and help restore the vital interconnection
between groundwater and rivers or streams. As local areas around
California draft their groundwater sustainability plans, though,
landowners in the hardest hit regions of the state know they will
have to reduce pumping to address the chronic overdraft in which
millions of acre-feet more are withdrawn than are naturally
recharged.
The Colorado River Basin’s 20 years
of drought and the dramatic decline in water levels at the
river’s key reservoirs have pressed water managers to adapt to
challenging conditions. But even more extreme — albeit rare —
droughts or floods that could overwhelm water managers may lie
ahead in the Basin as the effects of climate change take hold,
say a group of scientists. They argue that stakeholders who are
preparing to rewrite the operating rules of the river should plan
now for how to handle these so-called “black swan” events so
they’re not blindsided.
The majestic beauty of the Sierra
Nevada forest is awe-inspiring, but beneath the dazzling blue
sky, there is a problem: A century of fire suppression and
logging practices have left trees too close together. Millions of
trees have died, stricken by drought and beetle infestation.
Combined with a forest floor cluttered with dry brush and debris,
it’s a wildfire waiting to happen.
Fires devastate the Sierra watersheds upon which millions of
Californians depend — scorching the ground, unleashing a
battering ram of debris and turning hillsides into gelatinous,
stream-choking mudflows.
New to this year’s slate of water
tours, our Edge of
Drought Tour Aug. 27-29 will venture into the Santa
Barbara area to learn about the challenges of limited local
surface and groundwater supplies and the solutions being
implemented to address them.
Despite Santa Barbara County’s decision to lift a drought
emergency declaration after this winter’s storms replenished
local reservoirs, the region’s hydrologic recovery often has
lagged behind much of the rest of the state.
This tour explored the lower Colorado River where virtually every drop of the river is allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in the Southwest across seven states and Mexico. How the Lower Basin states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial needs is the focus of this tour.
Silverton Hotel
3333 Blue Diamond Road
Las Vegas, NV 89139
Although Santa Monica may be the most aggressive Southern California water provider to wean itself from imported supplies, it is hardly the only one looking to remake its water portfolio.
In Los Angeles, a city of about 4 million people, efforts are underway to dramatically slash purchases of imported water while boosting the amount from recycling, stormwater capture, groundwater cleanup and conservation. Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2014 announced a plan to reduce the city’s purchase of imported water from Metropolitan Water District by one-half by 2025 and to provide one-half of the city’s supply from local sources by 2035. (The city considers its Eastern Sierra supplies as imported water.)
The whims of political fate decided
in 2018 that state bond money would not be forthcoming to help
repair the subsidence-damaged parts of Friant-Kern Canal, the
152-mile conduit that conveys water from the San Joaquin River to
farms that fuel a multibillion-dollar agricultural economy along
the east side of the fertile San Joaquin Valley.
Just because El Niño may be lurking
off in the tropical Pacific, does that really offer much of a
clue about what kind of rainy season California can expect in
Water Year 2019?
Will a river of storms pound the state, swelling streams and
packing the mountains with deep layers of heavy snow much like
the exceptionally wet 2017 Water Year (Oct. 1, 2016 to Sept. 30,
2017)? Or will this winter sputter along like last winter,
leaving California with a second dry year and the possibility of
another potential drought? What can reliably be said about the
prospects for Water Year 2019?
At Water Year
2019: Feast or Famine?, a one-day event on Dec. 5 in Irvine,
water managers and anyone else interested in this topic will
learn about what is and isn’t known about forecasting
California’s winter precipitation weeks to months ahead, the
skill of present forecasts and ongoing research to develop
predictive ability.
This tour explored the Sacramento River and its tributaries
through a scenic landscape as participants learned about the
issues associated with a key source for the state’s water supply.
All together, the river and its tributaries supply 35 percent of
California’s water and feed into two major projects: the State
Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project. Tour
participants got an on-site update of Oroville Dam spillway
repairs.
There’s going to be a new governor
in California next year – and a host of challenges both old and
new involving the state’s most vital natural resource, water.
So what should be the next governor’s water priorities?
That was one of the questions put to more than 150 participants
during a wrap-up session at the end of the Water Education
Foundation’s Sept. 20 Water Summit in Sacramento.
The Colorado River Basin is more
than likely headed to unprecedented shortage in 2020 that could
force supply cuts to some states, but work is “furiously”
underway to reduce the risk and avert a crisis, Bureau of
Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman told an audience of
California water industry people.
During a keynote address at the Water Education Foundation’s
Sept. 20 Water Summit in Sacramento, Burman said there is
opportunity for Colorado River Basin states to control their
destiny, but acknowledged that in water, there are no guarantees
that agreement can be reached.
Farmers in the Central Valley are broiling about California’s plan to increase flows in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems to help struggling salmon runs avoid extinction. But in one corner of the fertile breadbasket, River Garden Farms is taking part in some extraordinary efforts to provide the embattled fish with refuge from predators and enough food to eat.
And while there is no direct benefit to one farm’s voluntary actions, the belief is what’s good for the fish is good for the farmers.
We explored the lower Colorado River where virtually every drop
of the river is allocated, yet demand is growing from myriad
sources — increasing population, declining habitat, drought and
climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in
the Southwest across seven states and Mexico. How the Lower Basin
states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this
water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial
needs was the focus of this tour.
Hampton Inn Tropicana
4975 Dean Martin Drive, Las Vegas, NV 89118
California voters may experience a sense of déjà vu this year when they are asked twice in the same year to consider water bonds — one in June, the other headed to the November ballot.
Both tackle a variety of water issues, from helping disadvantaged communities get clean drinking water to making flood management improvements. But they avoid more controversial proposals, such as new surface storage, and they propose to do some very different things to appeal to different constituencies.
Every day, people flock to Daniel
Swain’s social media platforms to find out the latest news and
insight about California’s notoriously unpredictable weather.
Swain, a climate scientist at the Institute of the
Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, famously coined the
term “Ridiculously Resilient Ridge” in December 2013 to describe
the large, formidable high-pressure mass that was parked over the
West Coast during winter and diverted storms away from
California, intensifying the drought.
Swain’s research focuses on atmospheric processes that cause
droughts and floods, along with the changing character of extreme
weather events in a warming world. A lifelong Californian and
alumnus of University of California, Davis, and Stanford
University, Swain is best known for the widely read Weather West blog, which provides
unique perspectives on weather and climate in California and the
western United States. In a recent interview with Western
Water, he talked about the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge, its
potential long-term impact on California weather, and what may
lie ahead for the state’s water supply.
Atmospheric rivers are relatively
narrow bands of moisture that ferry precipitation across the
Pacific Ocean to the West Coast and are key to California’s
water
supply.
This three-day, two-night tour explored the lower Colorado River
where virtually every drop of the river is allocated, yet demand
is growing from myriad sources — increasing population,
declining habitat, drought and climate change.
The 1,450-mile river is a lifeline to 40 million people in
the Southwest across seven states and Mexico. How the Lower Basin
states – Arizona, California and Nevada – use and manage this
water to meet agricultural, urban, environmental and industrial
needs is the focus of this tour.
Best Western McCarran Inn
4970 Paradise Road
Las Vegas, NV 89119
This tour explored the Sacramento River and its tributaries
through a scenic landscape as participants learned about the
issues associated with a key source for the state’s water supply.
All together, the river and its tributaries supply 35 percent of
California’s water and feed into two major projects: the State
Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project. Tour
participants got an on-site update of repair efforts on the
Oroville Dam spillway.
Participants of this tour snaked along the San Joaquin River to
learn firsthand about one of the nation’s largest and most
expensive river restoration projects.
The San Joaquin River was the focus of one of the most
contentious legal battles in California water history,
ending in a 2006 settlement between the federal government,
Friant Water Users Authority and a coalition of environmental
groups.
In a state with such topsy-turvy weather as California, the
ability of forecasters to peer into the vast expanse of the
Pacific Ocean and accurately predict the arrival of storms is a
must to improve water supply reliability and flood management
planning.
The problem, according to Jeanine Jones, interstate resources
manager with the state Department of Water Resources, is
that “we have been managing with 20th century
technology with respect to our ability to do weather
forecasting.”
Work crews repairing Oroville Dam’s damaged emergency spillway
are dumping 1,200 tons of rock each hour and using shotcrete to
stabilize the hillside slope, an official with the Department of
Water Resources told the California Water Commission today.
The pace of work is “round the clock,” said Kasey Schimke,
assistant director of DWR’s legislative affairs office.
ARkStorm stands for an atmospheric
river (“AR”) that carries precipitation levels expected to occur
once every 1,000 years (“k”). The concept was presented in a 2011
report by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) intended to elevate
the visibility of the very real threats to human life, property
and ecosystems posed by extreme storms on the West Coast.
A hydrograph illustrates a type of activity of water during a
specific time frame. Salinity and acidity are sometimes measured,
but the most common types
are stage and discharge hydrographs. These graphs show how
surface water flow responds to fluxes in precipitation.
Prado Dam – built in 1941 in
response to the Santa Ana
River’s flood-prone past – separates the river into its
upper and lower watersheds. After the devastation of the
deadly Los
Angeles Flood of 1938 that impacted much of Southern
California, it became evident that flood protection was woefully
inadequate, prompting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to
construct Prado Dam.
Contrary to popular belief, “100-Year Flood” does not refer to a
flood that happens every century. Rather, the term describes the
statistical chance of a flood of a certain magnitude (or greater)
taking place once in 100 years. It is also accurate to say a
so-called “100-Year Flood” has a 1 percent chance of occurring in
a given year, and those living in a 100-year floodplain have,
each year, a 1 percent chance of being flooded.
California’s seasonal weather is
influenced by El Niño and La Niña – temporary climatic conditions
that, depending on their severity, contribute to weather that is
wetter or drier than normal.
El Niño and La Niña episodes typically last nine to 12 months,
but some events may last for years. While their frequency can be
quite irregular, El Niño and La Niña events occur on average
every two to seven years. Typically, El Niño occurs more
frequently than La Niña, according to the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration.
This 30-minute documentary, produced in 2011, explores the past,
present and future of flood management in California’s Central
Valley. It features stories from residents who have experienced
the devastating effects of a California flood firsthand.
Interviews with long-time Central Valley water experts from
California Department of Water Resources (FloodSAFE), U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Reclamation, Central Valley Flood
Management Program and environmental groups are featured as they
discuss current efforts to improve the state’s 150-year old flood
protection system and develop a sustainable, integrated, holistic
flood management plan for the Central Valley.
20-minute DVD that explains the problem with polluted stormwater,
and steps that can be taken to help prevent such pollution and
turn what is often viewed as a “nuisance” into a water resource
through various activities.
15-minute DVD that graphically portrays the potential disaster
should a major earthquake hit the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
“Delta Warning” depicts what would happen in the event of an
earthquake registering 6.5 on the Richter scale: 30 levee breaks,
16 flooded islands and a 300 billion gallon intrusion of salt
water from the Bay – the “big gulp” – which would shut down the
State Water Project and Central Valley Project pumping plants.
Water truly has shaped California into the great state it is
today. And if it is water that made California great, it’s the
fight over – and with – water that also makes it so critically
important. In efforts to remap California’s circulatory system,
there have been some critical events that had a profound impact
on California’s water history. These turning points not only
forced a re-evaluation of water, but continue to impact the lives
of every Californian. This 2005 PBS documentary offers a
historical and current look at the major water issues that shaped
the state we know today. Includes a 12-page viewer’s guide with
background information, historic timeline and a teacher’s lesson.
This beautiful 24×36 inch poster, suitable for framing, features
a map of the San Joaquin River. The map text focuses on the San
Joaquin River Restoration Program, which aims to restore flows
and populations of Chinook salmon to the river below Friant Dam
to its confluence with the Merced River. The text discusses the
history of the program, its goals and ongoing challenges with
implementation.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to Integrated Regional Water
Management (IRWM) is an in-depth, easy-to-understand publication
that provides background information on the principles of IRWM,
its funding history and how it differs from the traditional water
management approach.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to
Flood Management explains the physical flood control system,
including levees; discusses previous flood events (including the
1997 flooding); explores issues of floodplain management and
development; provides an overview of flood forecasting; and
outlines ongoing flood control projects.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to California Water provides an
excellent overview of the history of water development and use in
California. It includes sections on flood management; the state,
federal and Colorado River delivery systems; Delta issues; water
rights; environmental issues; water quality; and options for
stretching the water supply such as water marketing and
conjunctive use. New in this 10th edition of the guide is a
section on the human need for water.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to the Central Valley Project
explores the history and development of the federal Central
Valley Project (CVP), California’s largest surface water delivery
system. In addition to the project’s history, the guide describes
the various CVP facilities, CVP operations, the benefits the CVP
brought to the state and the CVP Improvement Act (CVPIA).
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to the Delta explores the competing
uses and demands on California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Included in the guide are sections on the history of the Delta,
its role in the state’s water system, and its many complex issues
with sections on water quality, levees, salinity and agricultural
drainage, fish and wildlife, and water distribution.
A new look for our most popular product! And it’s the perfect
gift for the water wonk in your life.
Our 24×36 inch California Water Map is widely known for being the
definitive poster that shows the integral role water plays in the
state. On this updated version, it is easier to see California’s
natural waterways and man-made reservoirs and aqueducts
– including federally, state and locally funded
projects – the wild and scenic rivers system, and
natural lakes. The map features beautiful photos of
California’s natural environment, rivers, water projects,
wildlife, and urban and agricultural uses and the
text focuses on key issues: water supply, water use, water
projects, the Delta, wild and scenic rivers and the Colorado
River.
With the dual threats of obsolete levees and anticipated rising sea levels,
floodplains—low
areas adjacent to waterways that flood during wet years—are
increasingly at the forefront of many public policy and water
issues in California.
Adding to the challenges, many floodplains have been heavily
developed and are home to major cities such as Sacramento. Large
parts of California’s valleys are historic floodplains as well.
When people think of natural
disasters in California, they typically think about earthquakes.
Yet the natural disaster that residents are most likely to face
involves flooding, not fault lines. In fact, all 58 counties in
the state have declared a state of emergency from flooding at
least three times since 1950. And the state’s capital,
Sacramento, is considered one of the nation’s most flood-prone
cities. Floods also affect every Californian because flood
management projects and damages are paid with public funds.
Devastating floods are almost an annual occurrence in the West
and in California. With the anticipated sea level rise and other
impacts of a changing climate, particularly heavy winter rains,
flood management is increasingly critical in California.
Compounding the issue are human-made flood hazards such as levee
instability and stormwater runoff.
Flood forecasting allows flood control managers to predict,
with a high degree of accuracy, when local flooding is
likely to take place.
Forecasts typically use storm runoff data, reservoir levels and
releases to predict the rise in river levels.
In Northern California the National Weather Service, in
cooperation with the state’s California-Nevada River Forecast
Center in Sacramento, forecasts flooding.
Yolo Bypass occupies a historic floodplain between Davis and
Sacramento, California.
With the city of Sacramento and other area communities prone to
flooding, the 59,000-acre Yolo Bypass helps offset that risk
while also providing habitat for wildlife. Managed by
California’s Department of Water Resources and a part of the
Sacramento River Flood Control System, bypass boundaries are
defined by constructed levees. The huge floodway is three-miles
wide in some parts.
Liability for levee failure in California took a new turn after a
court ruling found the state liable for hundreds of millions of
dollars from the 1986 Linda Levee collapse in Yuba County. The
levee failure killed two people and destroyed or damaged about
3,000 homes.
The collapse also had long-term legal ramifications.
The Paterno Decision
California’s Supreme Court found that, “when a public entity
operates a flood management system built by someone else, it
accepts liability as if it had planned and built the system
itself.”
Dams have allowed Californians and others across the West to
harness and control water dating back to pre-European settlement
days when Native Americans had erected simple dams for catching
salmon.
This printed issue of Western Water This issue of Western Water
looks at climate change through the lens of some of the latest
scientific research and responses from experts regarding
mitigation and adaptation.
