Opinion: How to get a good picture of California's water infrastructure and predicament, plus more from the week in Opinion.
“During the Great Flood of 1861-62, water covered the entire Central Valley. It would have been possible to sail from what was not yet Bakersfield, north past the flooded Capitol in Sacramento, almost to where Redding now sits.
“In drier times, though, those same flat floodplains looked especially attractive to farmers and builders, so now the valley floors are cultivated and developed. But in wet years like this one, all that rain, as well as the melted snow, still needs a place to go, and it doesn’t pay any attention to human development. It still seeks the lowest ground, and it will find it.
“The solution is shockingly simple, relatively cheap — compared with the cost of cataclysmic floods — and surprisingly non-controversial. We just haven’t yet done it on the scale that’s needed. “California needs to restore its floodplains. Not the whole valley floors, and not as they were in the pre-development era. But it needs to have many more acres of land reserved for floodwater.”Yes, the Pajaro River near Watsonville, Calif., is running high because of atmospheric-river storms, but it was a levee failure that sent flood waters into the small town of Pajaro, which is populated mostly by migrant workers and their families.
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