Two of California’s largest reservoirs in Northern California are near 100% capacity, and the newly-resurrected Tulare Lake in the Central Valley is near its peak size, as the spring runoff from a rainy winter continues.
Lake Shasta, which is run by the federal government, and Lake Oroville, which supplies the state water project, are at 98% and 99% of capacity, respectively. Authorities are carefully managing both to prevent overflows.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports:
Shasta Lake in Shasta County and Lake Oroville in Butte County, where much of Northern California’s water is stored, are at 98% and 99% of their total capacity, respectively, for the first time in five years, according to data from the state Department of Water Resources.
Lake Oroville, which supports 27 million Californians, has experienced water storage whiplash over the last five years — a sign of how volatile the state’s hydrology has been. The last time water storage levels neared capacity was in July 2019. By August 2021, it had hit historic lows.
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Also close to full capacity are Folsom Lake in the Sierra Nevada foothills, now at 93% of its total capacity, and Castaic Lake in Los Angeles County, at 96%.
By 2021, Lake Oroville had dipped so low that it had to shut off its hydroelectric plant for the first time since the facility’s construction half a century ago. And just a few years before that, during the last extremely rainy winter, the lake overflowed, damaging both the main and the emergency spillway and creating a risk of collapse.
OROVILLE, CA – FEBRUARY 17: In this handout provided by the California Department of Water Resources (pixel.water.ca.gov), Water continues to move down the damaged spillway at Oroville Dam with an outflow of 80,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) on on February 17, 2017 in Oroville, California. Last weekend overflow waters from the emergency spillway eroded much of the area below the spillway. The California Department of Water Resources continues to examine and repair the erosion with more than 125 construction crews working around the clock, and placing 1,200 tons of material on the spillway per hour using helicopters and heavy construction equipment at the Butte County site. (Photo by Brian Baer/ California Department of Water Resources via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, the Chronicle adds, Tulare Lake has reached 178 square miles, which may be its peak size.
Farmland in the Tulare Lake Basin is submerged in water in Corcoran, Calif., Thursday, April 20, 2023, after more than a dozen atmospheric rivers dumped record-setting rain and snowfall. Residents in rural communities in the heart of the state are facing the prospect of being marooned by rising rivers or flooded out. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)
The lake, which dried up during the last century due to water diversion projects, has reemerged due to runoff from heavy rains and snow this past winter, which defied predictions and ended a crippling three-year drought.
Californians feared heavy flooding due to the sheer size of the snowpack on the Sierra Nevada mountains. But a cool spring has kept the snowmelt at a steady pace rather than a rush, thus far avoiding the worst-case scenario.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.