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In February 2014, after three consecutive years of below-normal rainfall, California faced its most severe drought emergency in decades with fish populations in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta in unprecedented crisis due to the decades of large-scale water exports from Northern California to south of the Delta via state and federal ...
The California Water Documents collection in the Claremont Colleges Digital Library is a valuable online resource of archived materials related to California's water history. Additionally, the collection has digitized materials relating to the creation and operation of both the Central Valley Project and the California State Water Project as ...
The historical and ongoing droughts in California result from various complex meteorological phenomena, some of which are not fully understood by scientists. Drought is generally defined as "a deficiency of precipitation over an extended period of time (usually a season or more), resulting in a water shortage." [1]
Satellite image of Hinkley, Barstow and Harper Lake, California. From 1952 to 1966, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) dumped about 370 million U.S. gallons (1.4 × 10 9 liters) of chromium-tainted wastewater into unlined wastewater spreading ponds around the town of Hinkley, California, located in the Mojave Desert about 120 miles (190 kilometers) north-northeast of Los Angeles.
Throughout history, California has experienced many droughts, such as 1841, 1864, 1924, 1928–1935, 1947–1950, 1959–1960, 1976–1977, 1986–1992, 2006–2010, 2011–2017, 2018, and 2020-[12] [13] 2021. Precipitation in California is limited to a single, fairly short wet season, with the vast majority of rain and snowfall occurring in ...
From January 7 to 31, 2025, a series of 14 destructive wildfires affected the Los Angeles metropolitan area and San Diego County in California, United States. [5] The fires were exacerbated by drought conditions, low humidity, a buildup of vegetation from the previous winter, and hurricane-force Santa Ana winds, which in some places reached 100 miles per hour (160 km/h; 45 m/s).
The 2011–2017 California drought persisted from December 2011 to March 2017 [1] and consisted of the driest period in California's recorded history, late 2011 through 2014. [2] The drought wiped out 102 million trees from 2011 to 2016, 62 million of those during 2016 alone. [ 3 ]
The Oroville dam before the crisis, with main spillway center and overflow spillway immediately to the left, above vegetation. For flood control purposes, some space in Oroville Reservoir has to be kept dry to capture floodwaters, a practice that has caused controversy at other dams of California over the amounts of water wasted. [6]