There’s ample dishonesty to go round, no one has to miss out if they don’t want to.
Arguably, there are an infinite number of things that are dishonest, and only a finite number of things that can be honest at any given moment.
Therefore one can honestly say that there are effectively zero honest things, and the entirety of human thought and speech, the noosphere as it where, is the singular dishonesty.
I'm not sure that "effectively zero" is quite right; "approximately zero" seems more correct. And on that note, there are also approximately zero instances in the history of the universe where someone has responded to your comment, but hey look, I'm doing it now!
Bone dry here in Utah. Just as local government has been lowering their guard on the Great Salt Lake issue due to a couple strong snowpack years. Really hope we're proactive in response to the lack of snow.
Not great up here in Vancouver either - lots of rain but not snow. The problem with this is that even though we'll have full reservoirs at the start of the summer, when the rain ends, we deplete the lakes rapidly, and that slope downward gets steeper every year. It really makes me think that we'll need more dams, more reservoirs, to hold in more of the precious fresh water rather than letting it all run out. All winter long the rivers have been at really high flow rates because the lakes are full and the dams are wide open letting it go... but we'll miss that water in a few months!
Damn, is this the first time ever the east coast is doing better than Colorado? We’ve had record snowfalls all over Quebec, I spent all day last Friday skiing in a foot of fresh powder. Unheard of on the ice coast*.
*not literally. But still, crazy amount of snow this year so far
Unironically, wet / dry cycles isn't good news for California either.
Research published in the aftermath of the fire examines how this extremely wet to extremely dry weather sequence is especially dangerous for wildfires in Southern California because heavy rainfall leads to high growth of grass and brush, which then becomes abundant fuel during periods of extreme dryness.
I wonder how much of an effect human activity has on these cycles. Obviously, there are cycles within nature that don't include human activity but is this particular "equilibrium" (if we could call it that) the result of human settlements and all that entails or have they always happened this way but without a huge chunk of the population being in the midst of these modulations to witness it and be affected by it.
This might be a good time to recommend you all read the first 5 pages of East of Eden by George Steinbeck. It’s about how the Salinas valley goes through flood and draught cycles, and how every time they’re in one cycle they forget the other one ever happened
Depends on how you quantify human impact. Lodgepole Pine (for example) is fire adapted. That's not something that evolved overnight. So it's safe to say that broad swaths of California have been experiencing a feast-famine cycle since before humanity developed agriculture.
Most of the actual wild fires just get put out. The big ones are happening because the build up is too big since all the smaller ones have been put out. It's all in service of the forestry industry.
I've lived in California my whole life (and the same town for most of that). This was the most rain I can remember in decades and the most "destruction" I've seen caused by it. Between the ground being saturated and wind before/after/during the storms there were plenty of downed trees.
We were also down to running sprinklers once a week (lawns are silly), but have had them off entirely for a bit now.
California is big, and the LA basin can be extremely dry. For me this is the most I’ve seen since the one bad el nino season in the 90’s, but that one didn’t last nearly as long. It seems normal the last few years to get winter storm conditions that last months.
2025 was the coolest summer I’ve ever experienced living where I do near the coast with an onshore breeze that is now frigid and very wet at times. I usually get fog now in times of the year it rarely happened - almost like san francisco’s notorious summers.
Tracking local weather patterns used to be part of my last career so this stuff I notice pretty well.
The statewide rain totals for the 2025-2026 water year so far rank 6th out of the years of the 21st century, so aren't that remarkable in context. Do you live in a place that got slapped with a peculiarly high rainfall?
California is big! That's also why there have technically been small parts of California which have been in drought for the last few years while most of the state is in good shape.
This year, Southern California is having a wet year while most of Northern California is having a relatively dry one.
We're north of Los Angeles and the area has never really handled rain well. This is also entirely anecdotal having lived here for ~35 years.
Some of the towns in our county have developments built on floodplanes. In our neighborhood, only some streets have storm drains so many of them flood. On one of the main roads numerous trees fell over damaging walls and homes.
That last set of storms that really stands out were the El Niño events in the early oughts.
I wonder if overall rainfall doesn't tell the whole story. From my experience in SF (and admittedly CA is big and people will have very different experiences) there has been an enormous amount of rainfall early in the season and then another enormous amount over the holidays, but the rest has been dry. The total may not be that much but the acute heavy storms have been pretty intense.
Same with SoCal - it's the size of NY State. CA's big and somewhat evenly populated (at least compared to similar states out east) so there's inevitably some form of environmental issue somewhere. Not to minimize these incidents ofc.
Heavy rain is usually very localized. I live in Norcal and I've seen many situations where we were getting hammered with multiple inches an hour while a few dozen miles away it wasn't raining at all, and vice versa. So even in a wet year whether your neighborhood gets slammed is a crap shoot.
“I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
People also forget ARkStorm scenarios, which involve rains akin to 1861-1862, submerging the whole of the Central Valley. Likely several times worse in damages than the biggest earthquake possible in California.
> And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
Just as true with economic cycles and so many other things.
I read that recently and meant to look up the reality of that cycle. I mostly pay attention to ENSO but looking it up now I see there is a 15-30 year PDO cycle.
I think there are authors where this definitely applies and I don’t think Steinbeck is one of them.
It feels analogous to complaining about how Michelangelo painted the Sistine chapel on the ceiling instead of on a canvas where we wouldn’t have to crane our necks to see it.
Previous CA resident anecdata, I remember droughts being a normal part of life in central CA 1990-early 2000s. Don't run sprinklers during certain hours, odd/even watering, "the water bill" exclaimations, etc. Like another commentor mentioned I don't anticipate this will last, but it's nice to see the "official" state change even if for a bit.
I recall rather absurd demands such as telling restaurants not to offer water (as if a glass of water makes
any difference) and telling residents to skip showers.
That was widely ridiculed, but despite how it sometimes seems policy makers are not so stupid to believe saving water from cups not drunk would make a meaningful difference directly.
One of the big hurdles for changing human behavior at scale is improving awareness. Even people who want to conserve their water usage benefit from frequent reminders to actually make changes stick. Being reminded the state is in a drought every time you go to a restaurant was an effective way to keep lots of people regularly conscious of the issue. Even if they complained about the method.
This is a great example of how patronizing policies developed by intellectual authorities backfire in the real world.
The premise is, the general population is too stupid to do the right thing themselves and need to be reminded of the drought by being inconvenienced by completely ineffective performative policies.
All this actually does in practice is diminish trust in authorities to make good decisions. If the drought policies are bogus, which other ones are too? Fuel economy standards? Air quality? OSHA?
Instead of this nonsense - just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
Of course, the answer there is usually “Oh but there are special interests that need to be able to consume as much water as they want without paying more for it, even in a drought!” And thus as usual the problem is not the personal conduct of individual citizens but corrupt and spineless politicians who are not actually interested in solving any problems.
> just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
I'm 100% with you overall on the basic thrust of your comment, however I can't help but think that if we were adjusting water prices, somehow they'd go up by 60% in the dry years and go down 10% in the wet years.
Maybe that's just because here in California we pay 2x-3x what anyone else in the US pays for electricity, and 50% more than most people pay for gas.
I don't know why California's electricity costs so much, but the gas prices are high due to regulation distorting the market. California has special California gas produced only at in-state refineries. It's for a good cause--California's gas, "CARB gas" is cleaner. But the gas market in California is segregated from the wider US market
No, the amount of water conserved through these measures was absolutely meaningless even at scale. You are talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percent of use.
I remember during one drought, the day the LA Department of Water and Power was going to declare water rationing, we got, some crazy number, 7-8" of rain in the basin.
We got so much, we got "Lake San Fernando Valley" as the Sepulveda Dam did the job it was put up to do all those years ago and flooded. People had to move so fast (behind the dam is the a large park and recreation area, no homes were directly impacted) they abandoned their cars, and, later, divers with scuba gear were being arrested for looting them.
Isn't this the same state where the rich people water their plush lawns even in the peak of summer during drought?
And where 90% of the water for its huge capital city-district (Los Angeles) is not even sourced locally (say, by desalination of seawater, as it is a coastal city), but it's instead piped from hundreds of miles away, while banning the villages at the source locations from using the local rivers/lakes as all that precious water gets piped away to feed the thirsty city-district (Los Angeles)?
"villages"? You're not from here are you? Makes me wonder if internationally you're getting general anti-American propaganda or if Republican anti-California propaganda is leaking worldwide.
The point raised is valid however. Los Angeles in particular notoriously bad track record when it comes to managing water resources and depriving upstream communities of them.[1]
In the era of solar power saturating the grid in daytime, the energy cost is far less of an issue - At least, I assume California has similar characteristics to Australia in this regard.
strange because this is one of the warmest winters in decades. snow levels are far below normal, i saw 8% of normal in truckee. full reservoirs now are great but keeping them filled depends on a long snow melt going into june. i don’t think this is going to be a good year for that
It's not quite that dire. Statewide 69% normal to date. Snowpack peaks March-April, so still have a ways to go in the season. https://snow.water.ca.gov
But yeah, snowmelt plays a huge role in supplying water into the summer, so just looking at precipitation totals isn't the full picture.
The warmth partially explains the rain. Storms far across the pacific have formed and traveled east to land on California. Unfortunately it also means, as you said, we can't capture as much of it as snow pack.
The southern end of the central valley (San Joaquin region, whole central valley is outlined in red) is particularly hard-hit by groundwater depletion. Some of that storage does not come back, because the ground compacts after the groundwater is withdrawn.
Sure, I'm not saying they don't, but it isn't a critical crop for day to day life, biologically speaking. No one is going to die for not eating almonds.
We don’t decide what to grow based on what someone decides is “critical for living.” We decide what to grow based on what sells for a decent margin above cost. Some countries in the Eastern Hemisphere tried the first way and it didn’t work out very well.
Sure - the problem is that the almond farmers are being incentivized to grow almonds by giving them a significantly below market cost. If the the costs reflected reality, almonds wouldn’t be profitable.
California has already invested a lot into reservoirs. In fact, as a pilot, I recall noticing that nearly all lakes in California are actually man-made reservoirs. I doubt there is much room left for economically building more; all the easy ones have been taken, and more. Surely the cost benefit of just investing a lot into desalination must be getting close.
I haven't heard of any new desalination projects making headway since. The cost-benefit analysis may favor it, but I'm not sure the politics do. Of course, those politics will probably change in 10-15 years in our next big drought cycle, and then we'll really wish we'd gone forward with more desalination.
We only have one because the Coastal Commision issued one for a plant around 1990 in a previous drought. The permit was maintained through to the current drought, at which point the Coastal Commission tried to get it shut down, but they lost since it was already permitted. Note that maintenance on the plant during the wet years was contentious; I don't know how it polled, but there were vocal people complaining about it, since it was barely used. Had those people prevailed, water would have been much dearer in the most recent drought.
Poseidon currently runs a desal plant in Carlsbad. My understanding is that the water the plant releases into the ocean requires exemptions for how concentrated it is. Additionally, the plant draws plankton filled water. Not really what we want in California.
There are better desal solutions out there like OceanWell. They have a deep water desalination solution that solves many of the problems of conventional desal. They just signed a project in Nice, France in the past few days. Also, they are working with the city of Las Virgines over the past few years.
If I remember correctly, the new desal plant in Doheny has a slightly different approach to draw water in from beneath the sand, using the sand as a prefilter. But I'm not sure how that works better than drawing water in from near the surface. I can't imagine how the plankton can possibly escape the suction forces drawing them into the sand.
Desalination must be insanely expensive; I’m always shocked it wasn’t done decades ago.
Considering California always seems to have power and water issues, I’d think combining these things would make a lot of sense. Some of these exist and there seems to be a fair bit of research in the area. I have to image at some point that will be the direction California would need to go. Of course, if they are all-in on solar and wind, then maybe not.
> nearly all lakes in California are actually man-made reservoirs
This is sometimes true even in much wetter states, though. I recall being thoroughly surprised to find that out that Virginia (!) has only two natural lakes, one of which is basically just an open area (though a large one) of the Great Dismal Swamp.
Could use some large scale geo-engineering. Pity that we don't have a radiation-free way of blowing a gigantic hole into the ground that can store a few trillion litres.
Probably bad idea, and definitely 'Need to bid it to responsible parties' question but would there be a way to safely use even separated 'landfill refuse' to build significant parts of the enclosing structure?
And is the only state with no drought right now. Although they way they figure it is a bit biased -- it's based on how much water there is compared to historical values, so it's easier to be "drought free" if you've been in a drought for a while.
Yeah hey but for real. The news is focused on California droughts all the time, but my part of flyover country is very, very dry. Like ponds that have never been empty are dry, sort of thing. It's getting bad. . . And we grow all your food.
Between this and all the political nonsense that's happening right now, I feel like a passenger that's noticed the car is out of control while the driver is still opening his beer.
California actually produced the most food of any state. :). But I know what you mean, the water is just as critical in the middle of the country as it is on the edges. Water is critical everywhere, and this problem is just going to get worse and worse.
California leads in the value of goods sold, because it produces a lot of relatively expensive agricultural products like almonds, avocados, tomatoes, etc. Additionally, it’s a larger state, so it naturally will inflate the totals. If you look at food staples, and at the amount produced by square mile, the Midwest is definitely the main food producer of the US.
A 1 square mile state that produced nothing but wheat would beat any other state in terms of “amount of staples produced per square mile,” but it wouldn’t be able to sustain a population. That’s not a useful metric.
I've lived in California for 20 years so this is my first year of non-draught. We've been enjoying the unusual prevalence of greenery in Orange County.
In the 70s and 80s there were big beautiful thunderstorms. Lightning would crash down for hours and the torrential fall rains would flood streets in north orange county (tri-city area) again and again. It rained so hard I had to take shelter under a tree when I was 8, due to how the rain and wind was threatening to knock me down. It rained for a week straight once, which was memorable. As was the times the rain ruined Halloween (more than once).
In other arid areas, people use terracing on hills so the water runoff is slowed and the water can soak into the aquifers. Also, dikes are built around fields to hold the water and also let it soak into the ground.
> In other arid areas, people use terracing on hills so the water runoff is slowed and the water can soak into the aquifers. Also, dikes are built around fields to hold the water and also let it soak into the ground.
> Are these done in California?
People terrace where the only arable land is in hills or mountains. The vast majority of California's farmland is flat as a board.
California's central valley also has one of the most massive systems of water control (aqueducts, levees, etc) in the world.
The problem with water and Ag in California is caused by the massive disparities in water rights that make it extremely cheap for some and expensive for others, depending on their water rights.
You need some outflow to carry away salts. Otherwise, the water just evaporates and leaves the salt there, and eventually the land becomes unable to grow crops. This has historically been a serious problem in Mesopotamia, for example.
This information is often buried in budgets under applied research grants. I suspect they obscure this information because it could create liabilities, for example, if gov funded rain seeding creates flooding and human death are they partially responsible for this?
Santa Clara County had an active cloud-seeding program from 1954 through 1994.[1]
Santa Clara County used to be a major agricultural area.
The goal is not to create rain, but to move it. Get the clouds to dump over the agricultural areas instead of the inland mountains. It worked, a little. But
there was a concern that it was making wildfires worse, by doing what it was intended to do and thus making the inland forests more dry.
Here’s a research report relating to weather modification. It references even a prior California case where a flood happened in an area utilizing cloud seeding.
Went to Badwater Basin in Death Valley last week and there's miles of (bad) water. Unfortunately the Park Service but the kibosh on paddle boarding, etc. Should be a good bloom this spring.
“Despite the welcome relief, climate change is expected to intensify weather swings from heavy rainfall to extreme dryness in a cycle that can fuel catastrophic wildfires.”
…but we’re still fucked and don’t you dare forget it!
The costs of delivering potable water and removing sewage/excess rain from a given lot or area is unrelated to the quantity of rainfall in a timespan measuring less than quite a few years.
Of the $250 of a water bill on Seattle’s Eastside, about $50 of it is something I can do anything about (use less water). The rest is fixed costs even if I never use a drop. It isn’t hard to imagine that California isn’t much different.
People shouldn't really be celebrating anything here. Wet winters just mean that the much more important snowpack isn't happening:
> Recent storms have brought snow to the Sierra Nevada mountains, but the state’s snowpack remains below average. According to the Department of Water Resources, the snowpack now stands at 89% of average for this time of year.
> Much of the West has seen warmer-than-average temperatures and relatively little snow so far this winter. The snow in the Rocky Mountains remains far below average, adding to the strains on the overtapped Colorado River, a major water source for Southern California.
Refilling the reservoirs is nice and all, but this is still essentially a payday loan out of the future.
One of the complexities of global warming is that it makes weather more extreme in all directions. It can be true that the same stretch of ground can be more susceptible to flooding in the same year it's more susceptible to drought.
That is basically doomer nonsense. Of course we can and should celebrate the lack of drought, even if there is some mathematically more optimal way for the precipitation to be falling.
It does rain in deserts, California isn't mostly desert (about 38% by land area), and drought is defined relative to normal rainfall, so even a place that usually has very low rainfall can have droughts.
And also droughts are defined by lower than normal precipitation. So if it didn't rain in a desert, and it's still not raining in a desert, that wouldn't even be a drought anyway.
Water policy isn't as simple as you might think. Dams aren't a magical fix, they cause a lot of issues (like crashing the salmon populations, etc.). They're expensive to build and maintain, and the water you store in a big reservoir doesn't magically stay in place - you lose a lot to evaporation and you lose a lot that ends up going into the groundwater system. A much bigger part of the problem is western water law, where water rights are assigned based on prior appropriation and are lost if they aren't exercised. That leads to a lot of bullshit, like people growing very water hungry crops (alfalfa, rice) in the middle of the desert.
The reason we don't build like the people who first came to California did isn't because we're stupid, it's because we've learned a lot of lessons the hard way. If you're interested in some of the history I'd recommend Cadillac Desert, which is about western water in general, but which focuses a lot on California (including the machinations that the movie China Town was based on).
Thanks for contributing these insights. Having worked with hydrologists for 15 years or so -- water is complicated, and people who say there are simple solutions generally do not know the domain.
A moment's reflection should make this clear. It's such a fundamental resource, touching everything we do. We just tend to take it for granted.
Can I ask why you see this as a clearcut issue? Dams have environmental costs, upfront monetary costs, maintenance costs, and can't prevent drought if conditions persist for multiple years. Why are dams the best way to address drought?
All the best sites were built on long ago. Dams require favorable geography. More can be built to squeeze out a bit more storage, but there are diminishing returns.
dams have trade offs that they stop sediment outflows which can cause faster erosion. this is a big reason many california beaches have gone from mostly sandy to mostly rocky
Yeah, and with California's typical topography (relatively younger mountains), there's a lot of sediment at the ready than can fill dams and render them worse than useless -- i.e., costs money, loses capacity fast, alters river and coast.
> Almost immediately after construction, the dam began silting up. The dam traps about 30% of the total sediment in the Ventura River system, depriving ocean beaches of replenishing sediment. Initially, engineers had estimated it would take 39 years for the reservoir to fill with silt, but within a few years it was clear that the siltation rate was much faster than anticipated.
There are similar sites all over the state. If you happen to live in the LA area, the Devil's Gate Dam above Pasadena is another such (but originally built for flood control, not for storage).
If you look into the actual design capacity of our municipal water systems, many of them were designed for far larger populations. The EBMUD, for example, intentionally secured 325 million gallons per day in upstream capacity because that was 10x the needs of the service area in 1929. Implicitly they assumed that the service area would grow to 4 million people, but it never did, primarily because of zoning. Today EBMUD delivers only about 120 MGD. We could more than double the service area population without water issues.
The new Sites Reservoir and capacity increase of the existing San Luis Reservoir are both expected to start construction this year. Several other recent proposals like the Pacheos Reservoir have been cancelled due to cost but it is not the case that California is doing nothing re: new water infrastructure.
Sites Reservoir isn't going to do a damned thing for municipal water systems in most of the state. You have to remember that there is not such a thing as a statewide municipal water policy. Every city or region has its own thing going on. The Sites capacity is dedicated to its investors, so depending on where you live it could be a helpful resource, or it could be irrelevant.
https://archive.is/aB3c4
Makes for a catchy headline, but you only have to go back to Jan 9, 2024* to find a similarly 'drought free' California:
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Maps/CompareTwoWeeks.aspx
(*Technically slivers of the state in the far north/south were 'abnormally dry' in 2024, a small difference from 2026)
For a quicker way to find near-alls you can go to https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/DmData/DataTables.aspx?state,... and select "All" at the bottom then sort D0-D4 ascending. It looks like 2011 had many dates 0.01 cumulative percent area!
Wait so who is being dishonest, the old article, the new one, or both?
Both!
yes!
There’s ample dishonesty to go round, no one has to miss out if they don’t want to.
Arguably, there are an infinite number of things that are dishonest, and only a finite number of things that can be honest at any given moment.
Therefore one can honestly say that there are effectively zero honest things, and the entirety of human thought and speech, the noosphere as it where, is the singular dishonesty.
The dishonest-gularity.
I'm not sure that "effectively zero" is quite right; "approximately zero" seems more correct. And on that note, there are also approximately zero instances in the history of the universe where someone has responded to your comment, but hey look, I'm doing it now!
Ironically, the rest of the country is having a drought:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026/01/18/winter-dro...
Bone dry here in Utah. Just as local government has been lowering their guard on the Great Salt Lake issue due to a couple strong snowpack years. Really hope we're proactive in response to the lack of snow.
Yeah, I want another 950" of snow at Alta Ski Resort again. That year - 2023 I think, was unreal!
Same in idaho. We are looking at historic lows for our reservoirs.
Same in Oregon. Snowpack way below normal.
Colorado is having a record low snow season. It's been tough for skiing.
Not great up here in Vancouver either - lots of rain but not snow. The problem with this is that even though we'll have full reservoirs at the start of the summer, when the rain ends, we deplete the lakes rapidly, and that slope downward gets steeper every year. It really makes me think that we'll need more dams, more reservoirs, to hold in more of the precious fresh water rather than letting it all run out. All winter long the rivers have been at really high flow rates because the lakes are full and the dams are wide open letting it go... but we'll miss that water in a few months!
Solar panels can also help, as BC gets long sunny days when the reservoirs are low.
Damn, is this the first time ever the east coast is doing better than Colorado? We’ve had record snowfalls all over Quebec, I spent all day last Friday skiing in a foot of fresh powder. Unheard of on the ice coast*.
*not literally. But still, crazy amount of snow this year so far
You're all in California's rain shadow.
Unironically, wet / dry cycles isn't good news for California either.
I wonder how much of an effect human activity has on these cycles. Obviously, there are cycles within nature that don't include human activity but is this particular "equilibrium" (if we could call it that) the result of human settlements and all that entails or have they always happened this way but without a huge chunk of the population being in the midst of these modulations to witness it and be affected by it.
This might be a good time to recommend you all read the first 5 pages of East of Eden by George Steinbeck. It’s about how the Salinas valley goes through flood and draught cycles, and how every time they’re in one cycle they forget the other one ever happened
For a non-fiction look at the topic of water in California - and really the whole shaping of the state - I highly recommend "Dreamt Land".
*John?
Depends on how you quantify human impact. Lodgepole Pine (for example) is fire adapted. That's not something that evolved overnight. So it's safe to say that broad swaths of California have been experiencing a feast-famine cycle since before humanity developed agriculture.
welcome to australia
wildfire is part of nature.
Yes, of course, those natural wildfires started by downed power infrastructure [1], bullets [2], and campfires on red flag days [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Fire
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldor_Fire
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis_Fire
Most of the actual wild fires just get put out. The big ones are happening because the build up is too big since all the smaller ones have been put out. It's all in service of the forestry industry.
Veritasium has a great video showing an intuitive simulation of this: https://youtu.be/HBluLfX2F_k?t=1168&si=7IwK98FnIcYV9HnH
I've lived in California my whole life (and the same town for most of that). This was the most rain I can remember in decades and the most "destruction" I've seen caused by it. Between the ground being saturated and wind before/after/during the storms there were plenty of downed trees.
We were also down to running sprinklers once a week (lawns are silly), but have had them off entirely for a bit now.
Spent 7+ years north of Truckee. There have been wetter/more snow years.
California is big, and the LA basin can be extremely dry. For me this is the most I’ve seen since the one bad el nino season in the 90’s, but that one didn’t last nearly as long. It seems normal the last few years to get winter storm conditions that last months.
2025 was the coolest summer I’ve ever experienced living where I do near the coast with an onshore breeze that is now frigid and very wet at times. I usually get fog now in times of the year it rarely happened - almost like san francisco’s notorious summers.
Tracking local weather patterns used to be part of my last career so this stuff I notice pretty well.
not even close to 2023 or 2017 seasons here in norcal, not by a mile...
I am so sad I missed 2023. But now I have the skills to really enjoy the next dump.
If it makes you feel better 2017 was way better =) incredible conditions all the way into mid May. I was skiing palisades at squaw on 4th of July
The statewide rain totals for the 2025-2026 water year so far rank 6th out of the years of the 21st century, so aren't that remarkable in context. Do you live in a place that got slapped with a peculiarly high rainfall?
California is big! That's also why there have technically been small parts of California which have been in drought for the last few years while most of the state is in good shape.
This year, Southern California is having a wet year while most of Northern California is having a relatively dry one.
We're north of Los Angeles and the area has never really handled rain well. This is also entirely anecdotal having lived here for ~35 years.
Some of the towns in our county have developments built on floodplanes. In our neighborhood, only some streets have storm drains so many of them flood. On one of the main roads numerous trees fell over damaging walls and homes.
That last set of storms that really stands out were the El Niño events in the early oughts.
I wonder if overall rainfall doesn't tell the whole story. From my experience in SF (and admittedly CA is big and people will have very different experiences) there has been an enormous amount of rainfall early in the season and then another enormous amount over the holidays, but the rest has been dry. The total may not be that much but the acute heavy storms have been pretty intense.
Weren't there massive floods, in the Bay Area, last year?
The Bay Area is the size of Massachusetts. Depends on where in the Bay.
I guess I'm wrong. It was south of the Bay area. I live in NY, but I remember hearing from friends in CA that it got very bad.
I think this story is only the latest one:
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/more-rain-expec...
That article is about flooding that is about as far from the Bay Area as Suffolk, VA is from New York City.
It's in California but California is...large. Especially along the North-South axis.
Same with SoCal - it's the size of NY State. CA's big and somewhat evenly populated (at least compared to similar states out east) so there's inevitably some form of environmental issue somewhere. Not to minimize these incidents ofc.
Perhaps GP is thinking of last winter?
Heavy rain is usually very localized. I live in Norcal and I've seen many situations where we were getting hammered with multiple inches an hour while a few dozen miles away it wasn't raining at all, and vice versa. So even in a wet year whether your neighborhood gets slammed is a crap shoot.
curious where in CA. in the past 15y ive def. seen more rain lol.
I think this has to be seen as "over some span of time", because a drought is an "over some span of time" thing.
As John Steinback said in East of Eden:
“I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
People also forget ARkStorm scenarios, which involve rains akin to 1861-1862, submerging the whole of the Central Valley. Likely several times worse in damages than the biggest earthquake possible in California.
> And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
Just as true with economic cycles and so many other things.
the 80 year cycle
I read that recently and meant to look up the reality of that cycle. I mostly pay attention to ENSO but looking it up now I see there is a 15-30 year PDO cycle.
This is practically all that need be said on the topic
Sounds like the addiction cycle.
how to be a novelist: use 10^n words when 10^(n-1) will do.
I think there are authors where this definitely applies and I don’t think Steinbeck is one of them.
It feels analogous to complaining about how Michelangelo painted the Sistine chapel on the ceiling instead of on a canvas where we wouldn’t have to crane our necks to see it.
"yes, I would my steak well done and macerated into an easily digestible paste with no seasoning".
There's more to good prose than just conveying the bare nutrients, y'know?
Maybe he could have just replaced that whole section with a couple graphs showing average rainfall and crop yield for the Salinas Valley.
Previous CA resident anecdata, I remember droughts being a normal part of life in central CA 1990-early 2000s. Don't run sprinklers during certain hours, odd/even watering, "the water bill" exclaimations, etc. Like another commentor mentioned I don't anticipate this will last, but it's nice to see the "official" state change even if for a bit.
I recall rather absurd demands such as telling restaurants not to offer water (as if a glass of water makes any difference) and telling residents to skip showers.
That was widely ridiculed, but despite how it sometimes seems policy makers are not so stupid to believe saving water from cups not drunk would make a meaningful difference directly.
One of the big hurdles for changing human behavior at scale is improving awareness. Even people who want to conserve their water usage benefit from frequent reminders to actually make changes stick. Being reminded the state is in a drought every time you go to a restaurant was an effective way to keep lots of people regularly conscious of the issue. Even if they complained about the method.
This is a great example of how patronizing policies developed by intellectual authorities backfire in the real world.
The premise is, the general population is too stupid to do the right thing themselves and need to be reminded of the drought by being inconvenienced by completely ineffective performative policies.
All this actually does in practice is diminish trust in authorities to make good decisions. If the drought policies are bogus, which other ones are too? Fuel economy standards? Air quality? OSHA?
Instead of this nonsense - just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
Of course, the answer there is usually “Oh but there are special interests that need to be able to consume as much water as they want without paying more for it, even in a drought!” And thus as usual the problem is not the personal conduct of individual citizens but corrupt and spineless politicians who are not actually interested in solving any problems.
> just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
I'm 100% with you overall on the basic thrust of your comment, however I can't help but think that if we were adjusting water prices, somehow they'd go up by 60% in the dry years and go down 10% in the wet years.
Maybe that's just because here in California we pay 2x-3x what anyone else in the US pays for electricity, and 50% more than most people pay for gas.
I don't know why California's electricity costs so much, but the gas prices are high due to regulation distorting the market. California has special California gas produced only at in-state refineries. It's for a good cause--California's gas, "CARB gas" is cleaner. But the gas market in California is segregated from the wider US market
> The premise is, the general population is too stupid to do the right thing themselves
This isn't premise, it's observable fact.
> and need to be reminded of the drought by being inconvenienced by completely ineffective performative policies.
This is just evidence that the authorities are also members of the general population.
You didn't use the word "almonds" in this post and for that I commend you.
Well it didn’t work. I don’t elect my representatives to change human behavior at scale.
So you don’t think the government should have any economic policy? No taxes, education, or social welfare services?
When I got here in '91 people told me "if it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down".
> as if a glass of water makes any difference
Just FTR, it's not a single glass of water, it's n glasses of water per day multiplied by some number of days and some number of restaurants
So, more likely, 2 or 3 glasses of water :-)
No, the amount of water conserved through these measures was absolutely meaningless even at scale. You are talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percent of use.
> So, more likely, 2 or 3 glasses of water :-)
but still allowing developers to build brand new houses and encouraging high-density multi-unit buildings.
I remember during one drought, the day the LA Department of Water and Power was going to declare water rationing, we got, some crazy number, 7-8" of rain in the basin.
We got so much, we got "Lake San Fernando Valley" as the Sepulveda Dam did the job it was put up to do all those years ago and flooded. People had to move so fast (behind the dam is the a large park and recreation area, no homes were directly impacted) they abandoned their cars, and, later, divers with scuba gear were being arrested for looting them.
im not sure you're allowed to state all this! kidding but yeah.
Isn't this the same state where the rich people water their plush lawns even in the peak of summer during drought?
And where 90% of the water for its huge capital city-district (Los Angeles) is not even sourced locally (say, by desalination of seawater, as it is a coastal city), but it's instead piped from hundreds of miles away, while banning the villages at the source locations from using the local rivers/lakes as all that precious water gets piped away to feed the thirsty city-district (Los Angeles)?
"villages"? You're not from here are you? Makes me wonder if internationally you're getting general anti-American propaganda or if Republican anti-California propaganda is leaking worldwide.
The point raised is valid however. Los Angeles in particular notoriously bad track record when it comes to managing water resources and depriving upstream communities of them.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars
Desalination uses a lot more energy and is higher cost
In the era of solar power saturating the grid in daytime, the energy cost is far less of an issue - At least, I assume California has similar characteristics to Australia in this regard.
There's still cost involved, and solar seems to be around 30% of the total
strange because this is one of the warmest winters in decades. snow levels are far below normal, i saw 8% of normal in truckee. full reservoirs now are great but keeping them filled depends on a long snow melt going into june. i don’t think this is going to be a good year for that
It's not quite that dire. Statewide 69% normal to date. Snowpack peaks March-April, so still have a ways to go in the season. https://snow.water.ca.gov
But yeah, snowmelt plays a huge role in supplying water into the summer, so just looking at precipitation totals isn't the full picture.
The warmth partially explains the rain. Storms far across the pacific have formed and traveled east to land on California. Unfortunately it also means, as you said, we can't capture as much of it as snow pack.
Here's the data from the Berkeley snow lab, located along I80 at the Sugar Bowl exit: https://cssl.berkeley.edu/
Snowfall is currently 75% of normal.
We are having an unusually dry and sunny winter in PNW.. I wonder if it is related.
Groundwater and aquifers still depleted.
Here's a nice animation tracking this (covers up to 2022, not sure about 2025): https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/42/grace-and-grace-fo-t...
The southern end of the central valley (San Joaquin region, whole central valley is outlined in red) is particularly hard-hit by groundwater depletion. Some of that storage does not come back, because the ground compacts after the groundwater is withdrawn.
If only we built reservoirs to keep the water for the drought years it would be great news.
The problem isn't storage capacity. It's wasteful consumption growing water-intensive crops in the desert.
crops are kind of important though
They don’t have to be grown in the desert
Almonds aren’t grown in the desert, they’re grown in the Central Valley. And they’re grown there because before it’s incredibly fertile soil.
You can grow almonds elsewhere, they are not needed for daily life
CA, apparently, grows almonds for the entire United States, and 80% of the world's almonds, too.
Sure, I'm not saying they don't, but it isn't a critical crop for day to day life, biologically speaking. No one is going to die for not eating almonds.
Is it economically important? For sure.
Is it critical for living? No.
We don’t decide what to grow based on what someone decides is “critical for living.” We decide what to grow based on what sells for a decent margin above cost. Some countries in the Eastern Hemisphere tried the first way and it didn’t work out very well.
Sure - the problem is that the almond farmers are being incentivized to grow almonds by giving them a significantly below market cost. If the the costs reflected reality, almonds wouldn’t be profitable.
California has already invested a lot into reservoirs. In fact, as a pilot, I recall noticing that nearly all lakes in California are actually man-made reservoirs. I doubt there is much room left for economically building more; all the easy ones have been taken, and more. Surely the cost benefit of just investing a lot into desalination must be getting close.
Well, the California Coastal Commission put the kibosh a few years ago on a decades-long desalination project: https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/05/california-desali...
I haven't heard of any new desalination projects making headway since. The cost-benefit analysis may favor it, but I'm not sure the politics do. Of course, those politics will probably change in 10-15 years in our next big drought cycle, and then we'll really wish we'd gone forward with more desalination.
We only have one because the Coastal Commision issued one for a plant around 1990 in a previous drought. The permit was maintained through to the current drought, at which point the Coastal Commission tried to get it shut down, but they lost since it was already permitted. Note that maintenance on the plant during the wet years was contentious; I don't know how it polled, but there were vocal people complaining about it, since it was barely used. Had those people prevailed, water would have been much dearer in the most recent drought.
Doheny was approved shortly after the Huntington Beach desal plant was killed. Update from last month: https://www.ocregister.com/2025/11/26/landfill-trash-could-h...
Poseidon currently runs a desal plant in Carlsbad. My understanding is that the water the plant releases into the ocean requires exemptions for how concentrated it is. Additionally, the plant draws plankton filled water. Not really what we want in California.
There are better desal solutions out there like OceanWell. They have a deep water desalination solution that solves many of the problems of conventional desal. They just signed a project in Nice, France in the past few days. Also, they are working with the city of Las Virgines over the past few years.
If I remember correctly, the new desal plant in Doheny has a slightly different approach to draw water in from beneath the sand, using the sand as a prefilter. But I'm not sure how that works better than drawing water in from near the surface. I can't imagine how the plankton can possibly escape the suction forces drawing them into the sand.
Desalination must be insanely expensive; I’m always shocked it wasn’t done decades ago.
Considering California always seems to have power and water issues, I’d think combining these things would make a lot of sense. Some of these exist and there seems to be a fair bit of research in the area. I have to image at some point that will be the direction California would need to go. Of course, if they are all-in on solar and wind, then maybe not.
> Desalination must be insanely expensive
It isn't. Mostly there are environmental concerns.
> nearly all lakes in California are actually man-made reservoirs
This is sometimes true even in much wetter states, though. I recall being thoroughly surprised to find that out that Virginia (!) has only two natural lakes, one of which is basically just an open area (though a large one) of the Great Dismal Swamp.
Could use some large scale geo-engineering. Pity that we don't have a radiation-free way of blowing a gigantic hole into the ground that can store a few trillion litres.
Probably bad idea, and definitely 'Need to bid it to responsible parties' question but would there be a way to safely use even separated 'landfill refuse' to build significant parts of the enclosing structure?
And is the only state with no drought right now. Although they way they figure it is a bit biased -- it's based on how much water there is compared to historical values, so it's easier to be "drought free" if you've been in a drought for a while.
Yeah hey but for real. The news is focused on California droughts all the time, but my part of flyover country is very, very dry. Like ponds that have never been empty are dry, sort of thing. It's getting bad. . . And we grow all your food.
Between this and all the political nonsense that's happening right now, I feel like a passenger that's noticed the car is out of control while the driver is still opening his beer.
California actually produced the most food of any state. :). But I know what you mean, the water is just as critical in the middle of the country as it is on the edges. Water is critical everywhere, and this problem is just going to get worse and worse.
California leads in the value of goods sold, because it produces a lot of relatively expensive agricultural products like almonds, avocados, tomatoes, etc. Additionally, it’s a larger state, so it naturally will inflate the totals. If you look at food staples, and at the amount produced by square mile, the Midwest is definitely the main food producer of the US.
A 1 square mile state that produced nothing but wheat would beat any other state in terms of “amount of staples produced per square mile,” but it wouldn’t be able to sustain a population. That’s not a useful metric.
> And we grow all your food
Well, not all of it, California leads IIRC.
yeh, my natural pond in Michigan has lost about 15 feet, the snow we're getting now won't be enough to regain it
I've lived in California for 20 years so this is my first year of non-draught. We've been enjoying the unusual prevalence of greenery in Orange County.
In the 70s and 80s there were big beautiful thunderstorms. Lightning would crash down for hours and the torrential fall rains would flood streets in north orange county (tri-city area) again and again. It rained so hard I had to take shelter under a tree when I was 8, due to how the rain and wind was threatening to knock me down. It rained for a week straight once, which was memorable. As was the times the rain ruined Halloween (more than once).
Parts of Orange County are really beautiful after the rare good rain. Doesn't wash away the rampant bigotry, though.
In other arid areas, people use terracing on hills so the water runoff is slowed and the water can soak into the aquifers. Also, dikes are built around fields to hold the water and also let it soak into the ground.
Are these done in California?
> In other arid areas, people use terracing on hills so the water runoff is slowed and the water can soak into the aquifers. Also, dikes are built around fields to hold the water and also let it soak into the ground.
> Are these done in California?
People terrace where the only arable land is in hills or mountains. The vast majority of California's farmland is flat as a board.
California's central valley also has one of the most massive systems of water control (aqueducts, levees, etc) in the world.
The problem with water and Ag in California is caused by the massive disparities in water rights that make it extremely cheap for some and expensive for others, depending on their water rights.
I infer they aren't bulldozing a dike around the flat farmland to prevent runoff and allow the water to soak into the ground.
This will also reduce flooding from overloading the rivers with water.
You need some outflow to carry away salts. Otherwise, the water just evaporates and leaves the salt there, and eventually the land becomes unable to grow crops. This has historically been a serious problem in Mesopotamia, for example.
It’s important to note that rainfall in CA is not 100% natural. The state actively funds cloud seeding.
https://www.grants.ca.gov/grants/gfo-23-311-advancing-precip...
Example of a recent $2.5M grant.
This information is often buried in budgets under applied research grants. I suspect they obscure this information because it could create liabilities, for example, if gov funded rain seeding creates flooding and human death are they partially responsible for this?
From the link alone, it looks like the state actively funds cloud seeding research, not active practical cloud seeding?
Applied research is active cloud seeding
Santa Clara County had an active cloud-seeding program from 1954 through 1994.[1] Santa Clara County used to be a major agricultural area. The goal is not to create rain, but to move it. Get the clouds to dump over the agricultural areas instead of the inland mountains. It worked, a little. But there was a concern that it was making wildfires worse, by doing what it was intended to do and thus making the inland forests more dry.
[1] https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/valleywater.org.us-west-1...
To my point, liability concerns are listed on that pdf as a reason why Santa Clara County stopped.
Cloud seeding can definitely increase rain over California even by your logic. Clouds don't respect state boundaries.
This doesn’t seem important to note at all.
It can affect current rainfall numbers, future rainfall, and future projections
That's a grant, to research them, which is important. There are programs that are shut down, since they learned from them: https://sawpa.gov/santa-ana-river-watershed-cloud-seeding/
Applied research is active cloud seeding
That’s silly. If you know about it, so do the lawyers who would come out of the woodwork to take these cases.
Here’s a research report relating to weather modification. It references even a prior California case where a flood happened in an area utilizing cloud seeding.
https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
If you’re truly interested in the subject, contact the organizations actually doing research in the subject. Leave your tinfoil hat at home.
There are companies that do cloud seeding:
https://www.rainmaker.com/
>Though cloud seeding has been in use around the world for 80 years, we recognize that people have valid questions about how the technology works.
Nothing tinfoil about it.
Thank you. Every time I talk about cloud seeding in CA people have a strongly negative response without any facts and I'm not really sure why
Went to Badwater Basin in Death Valley last week and there's miles of (bad) water. Unfortunately the Park Service but the kibosh on paddle boarding, etc. Should be a good bloom this spring.
This reminds me of a related issue: http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/
so you're saying wildfires are kind of like a war, so DJT has fixed 9 wars!
Stupid brain …
“… free of doughnuts …”
Definitely had me clicking.
“Despite the welcome relief, climate change is expected to intensify weather swings from heavy rainfall to extreme dryness in a cycle that can fuel catastrophic wildfires.”
…but we’re still fucked and don’t you dare forget it!
We already know he'll want a prize for that. Anyone has a Nobel for making it rain that usually goes to God?
And yet our water rates are still as if we are in a drought.
The costs of delivering potable water and removing sewage/excess rain from a given lot or area is unrelated to the quantity of rainfall in a timespan measuring less than quite a few years.
Of the $250 of a water bill on Seattle’s Eastside, about $50 of it is something I can do anything about (use less water). The rest is fixed costs even if I never use a drop. It isn’t hard to imagine that California isn’t much different.
People shouldn't really be celebrating anything here. Wet winters just mean that the much more important snowpack isn't happening:
> Recent storms have brought snow to the Sierra Nevada mountains, but the state’s snowpack remains below average. According to the Department of Water Resources, the snowpack now stands at 89% of average for this time of year.
> Much of the West has seen warmer-than-average temperatures and relatively little snow so far this winter. The snow in the Rocky Mountains remains far below average, adding to the strains on the overtapped Colorado River, a major water source for Southern California.
Refilling the reservoirs is nice and all, but this is still essentially a payday loan out of the future.
One of the complexities of global warming is that it makes weather more extreme in all directions. It can be true that the same stretch of ground can be more susceptible to flooding in the same year it's more susceptible to drought.
That is basically doomer nonsense. Of course we can and should celebrate the lack of drought, even if there is some mathematically more optimal way for the precipitation to be falling.
This definitely isn't doomer nonsense. Rain is great - we'll take what we can get here in CA, but the snowpack is far more important.
I hope no one takes his headline as good news. Because it really signals dramatic changes in moisture in the atmosphere due to climate change.
Until ... 10 . 9 . 8 ...
But its so hot lol
Yeah cause Trump made them stop dumping the water into the ocean
Or maybe the 6th greatest year of rainfall in the last hundred years.
I had a joke that hit well: "California is in a drought? Who would have thought it doesn't rain in a desert."
It does rain in deserts, California isn't mostly desert (about 38% by land area), and drought is defined relative to normal rainfall, so even a place that usually has very low rainfall can have droughts.
I don't get it.
It does rain in deserts, of course. But most of California is not a desert anyway.
And also droughts are defined by lower than normal precipitation. So if it didn't rain in a desert, and it's still not raining in a desert, that wouldn't even be a drought anyway.
It’s a joke relying on several layers of not understanding basic concepts for its humor. Kind of worried about the environment in which it “hit well”.
It must only be funny to people who are unfamiliar with California’s climate.
Are you under the impression that California as a whole is a desert?
The dams in california were built years ago for a smaller population and since then they've only removed them.
If we simply built like the people who first came to california did we would never have water shortages again.
Any water shortage is a 1:1 failure of the state to do the clear and obvious task needed.
Water policy isn't as simple as you might think. Dams aren't a magical fix, they cause a lot of issues (like crashing the salmon populations, etc.). They're expensive to build and maintain, and the water you store in a big reservoir doesn't magically stay in place - you lose a lot to evaporation and you lose a lot that ends up going into the groundwater system. A much bigger part of the problem is western water law, where water rights are assigned based on prior appropriation and are lost if they aren't exercised. That leads to a lot of bullshit, like people growing very water hungry crops (alfalfa, rice) in the middle of the desert.
The reason we don't build like the people who first came to California did isn't because we're stupid, it's because we've learned a lot of lessons the hard way. If you're interested in some of the history I'd recommend Cadillac Desert, which is about western water in general, but which focuses a lot on California (including the machinations that the movie China Town was based on).
Thanks for contributing these insights. Having worked with hydrologists for 15 years or so -- water is complicated, and people who say there are simple solutions generally do not know the domain.
A moment's reflection should make this clear. It's such a fundamental resource, touching everything we do. We just tend to take it for granted.
A lot of stuff re: Salmon Populations is primarily around native groups wanting to continue their traditional life styles.
In the era of Trump/Republicans, I don't expect native issues to matter at all. "Drill baby drill" and all that.
So, actually, it is pretty simple if you're willing to finish the settler colonialist project that is our country.
You should really read the book mentioned in the post you're responding to.
Can I ask why you see this as a clearcut issue? Dams have environmental costs, upfront monetary costs, maintenance costs, and can't prevent drought if conditions persist for multiple years. Why are dams the best way to address drought?
All the best sites were built on long ago. Dams require favorable geography. More can be built to squeeze out a bit more storage, but there are diminishing returns.
https://www.ppic.org/publication/dams-in-california/
At best dams let you draw down water based on average rainfall. They cost water via evaporation if you don’t have excess rainfall to store.
Thus removing dams was actually useful amid a 25 year drought.
dams have trade offs that they stop sediment outflows which can cause faster erosion. this is a big reason many california beaches have gone from mostly sandy to mostly rocky
Yeah, and with California's typical topography (relatively younger mountains), there's a lot of sediment at the ready than can fill dams and render them worse than useless -- i.e., costs money, loses capacity fast, alters river and coast.
E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilija_Dam#History
> Almost immediately after construction, the dam began silting up. The dam traps about 30% of the total sediment in the Ventura River system, depriving ocean beaches of replenishing sediment. Initially, engineers had estimated it would take 39 years for the reservoir to fill with silt, but within a few years it was clear that the siltation rate was much faster than anticipated.
There are similar sites all over the state. If you happen to live in the LA area, the Devil's Gate Dam above Pasadena is another such (but originally built for flood control, not for storage).
It's just not as easy as GP comment imagines.
If you look into the actual design capacity of our municipal water systems, many of them were designed for far larger populations. The EBMUD, for example, intentionally secured 325 million gallons per day in upstream capacity because that was 10x the needs of the service area in 1929. Implicitly they assumed that the service area would grow to 4 million people, but it never did, primarily because of zoning. Today EBMUD delivers only about 120 MGD. We could more than double the service area population without water issues.
The new Sites Reservoir and capacity increase of the existing San Luis Reservoir are both expected to start construction this year. Several other recent proposals like the Pacheos Reservoir have been cancelled due to cost but it is not the case that California is doing nothing re: new water infrastructure.
Sites Reservoir isn't going to do a damned thing for municipal water systems in most of the state. You have to remember that there is not such a thing as a statewide municipal water policy. Every city or region has its own thing going on. The Sites capacity is dedicated to its investors, so depending on where you live it could be a helpful resource, or it could be irrelevant.
Investors? It's publicly funded.
It is funded by water districts, and they are the ones who get to use it.
This is my point. They know what to do but have trouble doing so.