Consider This from NPR - How California's Deadly Floods Are Tied To The State's Ongoing Drought

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

Destructive flooding caused by torrential rains has created a deadly disaster in California. The death toll rivals the worst wildfires and points to a common cause for both: drought. Brian Ferguson with California's Office of Emergency Services explains how a "weather whiplash" of dry years followed by heavy rain and snow can lead to dangerous outcomes. And NPR's Lauren Sommer reports on how officials are hoping to store more storm water as a way to prevent future floods and fight the ongoing drought. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University is committed to moving the world forward, working to tackle some of society's biggest challenges. Nine campuses, one purpose. Creating tomorrow, today. More at iu.edu. Veterinarian Mayde McPeters was working at her clinic in Carpinteria, California, Monday afternoon with some colleagues. And all of our phones go off. I don't know if you've ever gotten that emergency buzz. It was an evacuation order due to heavy rains and flooding. Carpinteria is just down the road from Santa Barbara, where Mady lives. You know, we start moving all of our appointments and we're like,

I'm evacuating and like talking to one of my clients. I'm like, here's this rabies shot, but I got to run. So she hopped in her car, a Prius, to try to get home. It's about a 15-minute drive and it just got to be zero visibility. She got off the freeway. Completely hydroplane coming off of it. And she turned down a street in one of the flatter areas of Santa Barbara. I'm in my little Prius.

The water's coming up, and I fear it's coming over my wheel well. So I'm afraid I'm going to completely flood my car. So she found a small high spot, pulled over, and left her car. Stole my scrubs, and I just started walking home. Mady took some videos as she walked. In the videos, the streets look like rivers, and the sidewalks are covered in murky brown water. It was coming up to my knees, but it smelled like the Pacific. Like I was literally walking in the ocean

and I was easily, gosh, I want to say like half a mile in from the beach. Honestly, what I honestly thought is that I was going to get electrocuted. I genuinely thought that something was going to drop in the water. Mady walked for about a mile and eventually made it back home. It's on a hill, so it was dry.

And when we caught up with her on Tuesday, she was hunkered down with her family, without power, but otherwise okay. All across our central coast has been pummeled in recent days by six consecutive storms. Brian Ferguson with California's Office of Emergency Services spoke with NPR Wednesday morning. We had aerial rescues throughout the area yesterday. We think we may have set a single-day record for the number of people who were rescued via helicopter.

It continues to be a very dangerous and dynamic situation. Consider this. Massive amounts of rain have led to destructive flooding throughout California's central coast. And as people respond to the damage, they're also assessing how the latest storms fit in with another natural disaster affecting the state, drought. The climate is changing, weather patterns are changing. In addition to that, the demand for water is increasing in the western United States. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Wednesday, January 11th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies.

Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. It's Consider This from NPR. The downpour in California has been so extreme over the past few days that the death toll has begun to rival those of other disasters. We've had over 17 fatalities, which would already have made this in wildfire terms one of the top five deadliest incidents we've had in the history of our state. That's Brian Ferguson again with California's Office of Emergency Services. Unfortunately, we do anticipate that number will rise in the coming days. There are people missing, but this is an event that's impacted the whole of the state, from Humboldt up by the Oregon border all the way to San Diego and Orange County in the south.

More than 100,000 homes have lost power in the state this week. And while Ferguson told NPR on Wednesday morning that the rain has paused for the time being we're watching very closely. And because of so much saturation in the soil, so much water in the creeks and streams, that any additional amount of rain does become dangerous very quickly. President Biden issued an emergency declaration on Monday to bring federal support to relief efforts in more than a dozen counties. And Ferguson says part of what has made these storms so dangerous is what he describes as weather whiplash. We've had four consecutive years of very dry weather, in fact, a declared drought. And then when we do get weather, it's all at once.

And that does make it dangerous because it's been so dry that the creeks, streams, culverts almost become a bobsled track for that water to rapidly run down. Or in other areas, it could lead to mudslides just because the soil has been so deteriorated by the drought. The climate change impacts that we see in wildfire season very much impacted this area as well. As most Californians were sheltering from the storms this week, a research team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was flying right into one. Power set. Airspeed's alive. The NOAA hurricane hunters were on a mission to go into an atmospheric river. It's a literal river of moisture in the sky,

a storm that stretches hundreds of miles. From 45,000 feet, the team released special instruments called drop sondes. They look like burritos with parachutes, and they collect vital data about the storm. Three, two, one, mark. Release sonde now. The flight can be a bumpy ride for the crew, but the info they gather is helping improve storm forecasts, especially flood alerts. Good temperature, good pressure, good humidity, wind direction and wind speed.

And it's not just about wet weather. These missions are also helping California deal with dry conditions, too. NPR's Lauren Summer spoke with my co-host Mary Louise Kelly about it. So this is the paradox, I guess, for California right now, that there's all this rain and yet the state's drought is ongoing. How are these winter storm forecasts helping with the drought side of things? Yeah, that's exactly what California officials have been saying. The state is in a flood emergency and a drought emergency at the same time. And that has a lot of people asking, how can the state catch more of this floodwater? How can more be stored to last through the dry season, you know, given how low reservoirs have been? And today there's a rule that's working against that in some cases, which is that reservoirs aren't allowed to be full in the

winter. They actually have to empty themselves out. Huh. Why? Filling up the reservoirs would seem to be advantageous in a state that is so chronically dry? Yeah, it would be. But reservoirs actually have another job in the winter too, which is to catch the runoff from storms so that it doesn't flood cities and towns downstream. They can't do that if they're full because the dams could be easily overwhelmed. So most reservoirs have automatic rules that say in late fall, they have to release a certain amount of water if they're too full. A certain amount. How much water are we talking? Yeah. One example, there's a major reservoir outside of Sacramento, California called Folsom Reservoir. The rule there said it could only be 60% full in the winter at the most.

And that means sometimes the reservoir would empty itself out when it didn't really need to because no major storms arrived. So now they're trying something else, which is to dynamically manage the reservoir using weather forecasts. So the reservoir doesn't empty out preemptively. It only does if a big storm is on the way. Aha. Okay. So it is the forecast that will determine what this reservoir does, which means the forecast would need to be very accurate because public safety is on the line. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, that's where those NOAA storm reconnaissance flights are coming in. They're helping fine-tune those forecasts even more. And this winter really is the first time Folsom Reservoir is kind of being managed this way when there's this big stream of storms hitting. And when I spoke to the Bureau of Reclamation, which manages that reservoir,

they said it's working well so far. I'm thinking through the possibilities here. With all the storms happening right now, all the rain coming, might managing reservoirs in this way, this more dynamic way, might that help California with its droughts that we're expecting to continue in the coming year?

It could, yeah. Especially if there's a repeat of last year where the storms just kind of dried up in January. And as the climate gets hotter, this could be a pattern that California sees more of. That's what Marty Ralph, who studies reservoirs at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told me. Longer droughts, deeper droughts, and bigger storms between them. So we need to prepare. There's a lot at stake. And these are methods that could really help us with climate adaptation. Lauren, is this something that other states, other reservoirs across the West are looking at?

Yeah, right now it's just two reservoirs working this way in California. A handful of others are studying it. And I spoke to David Raff, Chief Engineer for the Federal Bureau of Reclamation, about the possibilities beyond that. The climate is changing, hydrology is changing, weather patterns are changing. In addition to that, the demand for water is increasing in the western United States. When you put those things together, there is a significant interest to optimize reservoir operations in all of our reservoirs. You know, most of our water infrastructure is designed to fit the climate of the past, and that's obviously not a good fit going forward. But there's a lot more real-time data out there today, you know, to help dynamically manage these systems as things are changing,

you know, if water managers choose to use it. That's Lauren Sommer from NPR's Climate Desk You're listening to Consider This from NPR I'm Ari Shapiro This message comes from Indiana University Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year making discoveries that improve human health combat climate change

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