Chiefs focus Last week’s record rainfall in the North Bay is good news for the state’s water supply, which has been robust for the previous two years following a protracted drought.
The increased amount of water running in several Marin County creeks and waterfalls on Tuesday was still indicative of the severe precipitation.
Hillary, a resident of the North Bay, said, “Well, I just wanted to get some footage along here with all the amazing colors and the water,” as she traveled along the Cataract Trail close to Stinson Beach. “The fact that the mountain’s old-timers weren’t more inventive in naming the waterfalls always makes me laugh. Both of our names, Cataract and Cascade, refer to waterfalls.
As the storm system’s tail end finally moves into the Tamalpais watershed, those waterfalls are still tumbling. Without having to brave the downpour, Hillary came out to take in the beauty of it all.
“Yeah, this is everything from the previous storm that’s left coming down,” she said. “And so it’s not crazy, but it’s much more manageable for walking.”
The entire amount of water is entering a Marin Water system that is now operating at 88% capacity. That places reservoirs at 136% of their typical levels for late November. Since Kent Dam was raised in 1983, the system has never been this full during the water season. And the benefits of the storm are not limited to Marin County. Last week, Sonoma Water also had some positive news.
“You look at well above what the average for this time of the year is, so going into the water year with that amount of rainfall in our reservoirs already captured, it’s a wonderful way to start,” Grant Davis, general manager of Sonoma Water.
And now, the entire state of California can see what that beginning looks like. Looking at the water season chart that compares different years, the blue line is the jump the state just received from last week’s rain. It not only kick started the season in a big way, it puts this year on a similar starting trajectory that we saw back in 2016-2017, the drought-busting wettest year on record in Northern California.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t expect to see 2016-2017 just yet,” laughed Jay Lund with the UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. “That was a one-in-a-100-year kind of wet water year.”
Lund points to the state’s major reservoirs which are now climbing above their historical averages, with sharp jumps compliments from the storm.
“Payoff, yeah,” Lund said. “And worries about floods. Because we have a long way to go in this wet season, and we could have floods.”
So the storm system was enough to push the state’s water situation towards fuller than normal, with a very long way to go.
“We have a lot more balancing that can happen in the next three months,” Lund said of what’s still to come.
As recent winters keep showing, average is hardly normal in California. The state finds itself swinging from one extreme to another. But it’s impossible to know if that kind of extreme rainfall is going to be the exception or the rule this winter. And as Northern California has just seen, it’s hard to ever really know what’s coming right around the next corner.
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