by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20220217-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf?_t=1645217110
A Note to Readers
The Feature this week is from our archives: My published article on the collapse of the Oroville Dam spillway and the alarming potential of the collapse of the emergency spillway, setting off the evacuation of 180,000 people.
One of the themes presented in the last couple of weeks by climatologists and others is that the state is being “whipsawed” between extremes of drought and very intense atmospheric rivers that unleash large amounts of precipitation. Such a phenomena is really not as new as it is being reported to be.
Really, they had been warned. A book published in 2013, “The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow” by B. Lynn Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam, makes the singular point that over the past more than 1,000 years, the climate of the southwest and especially California has been one of alternating megadroughts and megafloods. It is just the past 160 years that the climate has been relatively stable and moist. In addition, the authors hypothesize that perhaps we now are returning to that more characteristic climate now.
A link to my review of the book is here: “Are We Controlled by the Whims of Nature, or Will We Create Our Future?”
https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/eirv41n19-20140509/48-52_4119.pdf
Following the U.S. Drought Monitor, which shows no changes over the past week, a series of articles present the increasing worry that the winter is worsening the drought, rather than relieving it. As we are nearing two months now in the middle of the “rainy season” with nary a drop or flake of precipitation, I do think that the worry will soon turn to hysteria.
The situation is pretty much the same on the Colorado River, with new options being proposed weekly to somehow manage the record low levels of water available to the 40 million people who rely on it. The snowpack in the Colorado River Basin is extremely scarce, thus threatening the development of a real emergency later this year.
Underlining just how dry the state is, we have had several wildfires in recent weeks. One is burning now out of control. A short article and photo report on it.
Hoping the drought will go away one day, those pushing for more water storage projects continue promoting the building of the Sites Reservoir. A new article, “Sites Reservoir: A Part of the Solution for Dry Years,” is briefly excerpted.
The next to last item this week is “More Voices Demand that Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant Not Be Shut down.”
The Feature concludes this week’s report.
