“There’s also an intense resistance by property owners when it comes to giving up their property rights.” “We have always had an engineering mentality with strong property rights,” Pinter said. Pinter said the US has always leaned toward building infrastructure to provide protection. They made a multi-billion-euro investment to draw levees back.” “The Europeans in the 1990s started doing this. “We are behind the curve on this,” Pinter told CNN. Nicholas Pinter, a researcher and professor of applied geosciences at the University of California at Davis, acknowledged managed retreat is a tall task but noted other countries are doing it. It means entire communities would need to relocate the process is known as managed retreat. Those aquifers are a vital source of water for drinking, bathing and agriculture across California’s Central Valley, and they are running dry.īut giving rivers more space to flood has a catch. Many climate experts agree – using levees to prevent floods during the wet season means less water is available to seep into underground aquifers. “That will allow us to capture more of these flood flows, store it underground in these aquifers, and then use those ground water resources when we need them in dry years.” “We need new thinking, we need to operate that infrastructure differently, we need to change some of the characteristics of that infrastructure,” Gleick said. Levees have effectively protected communities in the past, Gleick said, but they’re not designed for the climate-change challenges of today. “Instead of thinking we can control all floods, we have to learn to live with them.” The majority of the region’s rainfall hits during the winter season, which lasts through February, though precipitation can continue into early spring.Īs historic storms bear down on the Bay Area, cities across the Midpeninsula are declaring states of emergency, including Redwood City, which will ask the city council to ratify its proclamation at Monday’s meeting, according to City Manager Melissa Stevenson Diaz.īay City News contributed to this report.“We have to let our rivers flow differently, and let the rivers flood a little more and recharge our groundwater in wet seasons,” Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and co-founder of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, told CNN. More showers are predicted over the next few days, though meteorologists anticipate these storms will focus on the North Bay regions.Īs for Redwood City: “We’re not looking at any huge atmospheric rivers in the forecast just yet,” Murdock said. Several more storms are on the horizon, though none are expected to hit the Peninsula as hard as in the previous week. But we do have deficit conditions in these basins from our prior dry years." "We lose runoff until things get very wet, and we start getting good inflows into reservoirs and groundwater basins. "We are overcoming a deficit in soil moisture," Jones said.
But the same storms are bringing flooding to other parts of the state, said Karla Nemeth, director of DWR.ĭrought Manager of DWR Jeanine Jones said that the state needs above-average precipitation throughout the rest of its wet season in order to reach 100% of average runoff. On Tuesday, DWR's snow survey team determined that parts of the Sierra Nevada have snow depths 177% of average for this time of year.
On the one hand, extreme rain is boosting California's snowpack. State water officials at the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) have also said they are cautiously optimistic that this could replenish some of the state's heavily depleted water reservoirs but after four years of drought, heavy rains of this frequency and magnitude are pose a threat to property, natural resources and human life. He added that meteorologists are “excited to see how this turns out, as long as it’s not as intense as the New Year’s Eve system.” The last few years have been dry, region-wide, and even though we’re seeing much more rain at this point in the water year than the last few years, we have quite the deficit to make up.” “This is a step forward after several steps back. “These numbers are looking fairly good so far,” Murdock said. This year’s rainfall has far surpassed the total recorded for the previous three years: 16.1 inches in 2021-22, 6.3 inches in 2020-21 and 9.5 inches in 2019-20. 1, according to meteorologist Brayden Murdock of the National Weather Service. Monday morning, the city has already received 16.9 inches of rain for the current water year, which started on Oct.
As the winter storm season rages on, Redwood City has received record levels of rainfall, making meteorologists cautiously optimistic.Īs of 9 a.m.
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