California Flood Concerns
With mountain snowpack levels near all-time highs in California, concern is rising that continued high rainfall from atmospheric rivers could cause significant flooding. Part of the concern is that reservoirs become overwhelmed by rapid snow melt, which happened on Lake Oroville, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, in February 2017. Following the wettest winter in the history of Northern California, water burst through a spillway on the Oroville Dam, collapsing downstream riverbanks, flooding farmland, forcing the evacuation of over 188,000 people and causing $1.1 billion of damage.