The Eastern Sierra Nevada has braced for snowmelt flooding since spring. Forecasters say the region’s waterways should return to normal by next month.
Although a state of emergency remains in effect throughout much of the Eastern Sierra Nevada — a region where epic snowpack had threatened to unleash catastrophic flooding on small valley towns — local officials and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power are finally breathing a collective sigh of relief: The worst days of the “Big Melt” are over, they say.
Pat Jaeger, a local fishing guide, holds a rainbow trout he caught recently at Hot Creek Ranch near Mammoth Lakes. Squeezed between the jagged peaks of the Sierra Nevada and the less lofty White Mountains, the Owens Valley is dotted with towns such as Olancha, Lone Pine, Big Pine and Bishop. Their rustic charm inspires a sense among motorists traveling north along U.S. 395 that they are heading back in time.
“Climate change is real,” said Anselmo Collins, senior assistant general manager of water systems at the DWP. “We now have to routinely prepare for the worst meteorological conditions imaginable in the course of a single year: severe drought and flooding.” DWP crews in waders were also rescuing thousands of trout, carp, bass, bullfrogs, red-eared slider turtles, crayfish and other aquatic species stranded on the mud flats of rapidly evaporating catch basins.“These creatures were inadvertently swept away by storm flows in emergency diversion systems,” said Frosty Mathieu, a construction and maintenance supervisor at the DWP, as he strode along a stretch of Bishop Creek swollen with snowmelt.
But the threat of catastrophic flooding bolstered a sense of community that Inyo County Emergency Services Manager Maekala Torres described as “a great collaboration.”
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