Tag: floodwaters
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Can solid flood planning improve all California water planning?
Jay R. Lund, The Ray B. Krone Chair of Environmental Engineering, University of California – Davis “No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.” E.L. Kersten The best time to prepare for floods is during a drought. In December, the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) released their new Central Valley flood…
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The benefits of floodplain reconnection
By Jeffrey Mount For more than a century, California has sought to separate floodplains from rivers. An elaborate array of levees and dams usually confine, divert or capture winter floods, supporting agriculture on rich floodplain soils and unreliably protecting urban growth in flood-prone areas. Nowhere is this approach more evident than the Central Valley. One…
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Frolicking fat floodplain fish feeding furiously
By Carson Jeffres Spring is here, temperatures are warming, and juvenile salmon have filled the floodplains—a link for them between the gravel bedded rivers where they hatched and the ocean where they will spend the next one to five years. Although salmon may only use the floodplain for a month or two, this could mean…
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Water to the sea isn’t wasted
By Jeffrey Mount In December of 2010 we had a remarkable set of storms. Relentless rain and snowfall hit both southern and northern California. The news reports about these events followed a predictable pattern, including the inevitable articles that bemoan floodwaters as “wasted” because they discharge to the sea. This generalization about floodwaters or any…