California drought and flood update
By Patrick Ruckert
February 20, 2017
Here is a headline from February 20: “Atmospheric River Brings Historic Flood Risk to California.” As of last week, the drought in its sixth year, and the worst drought the state has experienced since records have been kept, still covers 25 percent of the state. That is sharply down from the 100 percent of just a few months ago.
Now, record precipitation is the norm, with more rainfall in the northern part of the state already this water year (began on October 1) than has been recorded in 100 years. Looking back to 1862, the last mega-flood in the state, Sacramento was under ten feet of water for months. All of the reservoirs are now full, with two, as of today, being forced to release more water, creating flood conditions along the San Joaquin River. Warnings to the populations of several cities have been issued to be ready to evacuate with a 15 minute notice.
As I wrote in the weekly “California Drought Update” several weeks ago, perhaps we are returning to the “normal” climate the region has experienced for most of the past 2,000 years– alternating mega-droughts and mega-floods. Mega-droughts are those that last more than ten years, with some lasting a century.
The very unusual, and not experienced by anyone alive, picture today is that the state is being hit by one atmospheric river after another, with each one being stronger and dropping more precipitation than the previous one. In addition to the record level of rain is the record or near-record snowfall, which at this moment is near 200 percent of normal for this time of the year and more than the average entire winter as measured on April 1. With six weeks remaining in this rainy season, the forecasts generally are that all records will be broken by then. And given what we have seen this winter, who is to say that April 1 will be the end of the rainy season?
As for Oroville Dam, which nine days ago threatened a collapse of the emergency spillway, forcing a no warning evacuation of near 200,000 people for three days, the continued release of water over the damaged spillway has lowered the reservoir level to 50 feet below the top of the dam. Water department personnel are now confident that even with 10 inches of new rain expected in the Oroville area Monday night from a new atmospheric river, there will be no danger of the reservoir level getting even close to the top once again.
Much noise has been generated about the warnings on the Oroville Dam emergency spillway being voiced a dozen years ago, which is true, and blame is being solely put on the Brown administration by conservatives, but they seem to forget that back in 2005, both the President and Governor were Republicans. So, partisan bullshit is being thrown around quite freely. Of course, Brown and his brown-shirts deserve no quarter for blocking the building of more water management infrastructure for decades. But, never forget, the partner of the environmentalists has been Wall Street and London who turned our economy into a gambling casino, wrecking the real physical economy of industry, science, infrastructure and the space program.
More importantly, as I noted in my update last week, what is at risk is the entire water management system of the state. The flooding is threatening the hundreds of miles of levees on the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers; with some of them already being breached. It is possible, especially if the atmospheric rivers just keep coming, that the levee system could collapse which could shut down both the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project system which provides the water for more than 20 million people.
In this overall context, the debate on infrastructure, and its negligence for decades, is getting some coverage in the media, including some articles bluntly stating that Trump’s “plan” cannot fix the California dams, since there can be no “tolls” on fixing dams, and new reservoirs will take a decade to build. What is missing from the public debate is a real solution. That is provided in this publication by the LaRouche PAC: “The United States Joins the New Silk Road.” https://larouchepac.com/20151229/us-joins-new-silk-road
