Just got back from a quick motorcycle trip down to Death Valley and ran the state route 70 corridor between Oroville and Marysville both directions. There was a LOT of water in the lowlands on both sides of the road on the way down, and a LOT MORE yesterday on the way back. But from what I could see it was all flood plain crop land and not much damage was being done to homes and the like. Farther south toward Sacramento and beyond the ground is covered in places and puddles abound, but again not much of any bad flooding. Heck, it even rained in Death Valley for two of the days I was there, filling many low spots on Highway 190 with enough water to interrupt traffic at times and leaving a thick layer of mud that required heavy equipment to remove. But through all this the folks running the Oroville Dam did get the
water level down to the 850' level and are holding it there through the storms that are coming in now. Part of the reason is that these storms haven't generated the 140,000 CFS inflows that helped trigger the problems at the dam in the first place, the other part is with the main spillway damage pretty much written off, they won't hesitate to raise outflows as necessary to keep the water levels in check.
As for the California Drought, the topic we're all supposed to be discussing in this thread, the
official classification maps show almost all of Northern California has recovered and is no longer in drought, while much of the southern state still suffers some effects. One wet winter like the one we're having now isn't going to cure the drought, especially since drought is a natural part of the state's climate. The DWR has a long way to go in establishing realistic water use guidelines, and an even tougher row to hoe in getting anyone here to pay attention to them. But that's what it's gonna take before we can shrug off the effects of drought, an "inconvenient truth" that most don't want to hear.
