In his column from today’s Bee Dan Walters lays out, both for the long-term and the short-term, what we need to be thinking about and doing to see that our region is protected from flooding, and in a key quote sums it up nicely:
“…over the longer term, California needs to do much more to handle the interrelated issues of flood control and water supply. We should not only be fixing levees, but developing more bypass channels such as the one that protects Sacramento, building more storage to handle heavy winter flows both for flood control and water supply, making local governments shoulder more legal responsibility for approving subdivisions behind levees, pursuing a year-round program of levee maintenance financed by those whose homes and property are protected and compelling those at risk to have flood insurance, just as they have fire insurance.”
An excellent column, and here is an excerpt.
Dan Walters:
As weather warms, snowpack melts - a reminder of perpetual peril
By Dan Walters -- Bee Columnist Published 2:15 am PDT Wednesday, May 3, 2006
Spring has finally sprung in California, a month later than usual, and with the abrupt change of seasons after a very wet winter, the immense mountain snowpack is beginning to melt rapidly.
The Northern California snowpack is, state hydrologists say, nearly twice as heavy as its historic average. In the main, that's a good thing. It means, for instance, that the State Water Project can do something it can't do very often: deliver 100 percent of the water its customers seek. And that's largely true, as well, of federal dams and reservoirs.
There is, however, another side to the water equation. If the runoff is too big or too fast, it will overwhelm the ability of dams and reservoirs to control it, and downstream flooding will result. Lester Snow, director of the state Department of Water Resources, and his aides are closely watching the San Joaquin River system, whose relatively small reservoirs could be overrun should hot weather accelerate the snowmelt.
The numbers of this year's water situation are truly staggering. The state's largest and most important river, the Sacramento, has been running high and fast for four solid months, pushing as much as 700,000 gallons a second past the state capital, enough water since Jan. 1 to fill its three major reservoirs - Shasta, Oroville and Folsom - twice over. Even so, all of those reservoirs, with a total capacity of 9 million acre-feet, are very close to being full and are rising even more as the mercury rises, the snowpack shrinks and reservoir inflows rise above downstream releases.
