Liveblogging the Deluge: The Concerns (Panic?) at Oroville Dam, a Story We've Seen Before

The graphic above (from the Los Angeles Times, Google Earth, and the California Dept. of Water Resources) succinctly explains the serious problem unfolding right now at Oroville Dam on the Feather River. The lake is the second largest reservoir in California backed behind the highest dam in the United States. It is very close to capacity, but the main relief valve, the spillway, has been severely damaged and is essentially crippled. Without the spillway, the operators have only two choices to get rid of the rapidly rising floodwaters. They could let the floodwaters flow over the top of the dam itself, or they open a second emergency spillway.

California Dept. of Water Resources via The Landslide Blog

The first choice is unthinkable. The structure is an earthen-fill dam, made up of a core of impermeable clay covered by other sediments and rock material. If floodwaters top the dam, they would easily cut through the loose material, and the dam could fail. Such a failure would be a catastrophe without precedent. The instantaneous release of more than 3 million acre-feet into the Sacramento River system would be a flood of Biblical proportions. Sacramento and other towns would be inundated, threatening the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The water delivery system for California would be crippled for years or decades. Postscript: Darn it, I wasn't thinking right. The emergency spillways are below the level of the dam by 20 feet, so this is unlikely to happen, at least due to flooding. It just made such vivid narrative.  Thanks jfmiller for the clarification (see comments below). So that is not going to happen.

Source: CA Dept. of Water Resources via The Landslide Blog

The second choice is magnitudes less catastrophic, but would still be a problem. The emergency spillway would flow across slopes and hillsides that have never been exposed to fast-moving floodwaters. Trees, rocks, and mud will pour into the river downstream, complicating efforts to prevent flooding and levee breaches downstream.

We'll see where this situation resolves over the next few days. But I couldn't help but be reminded of two historical events involving dams and reservoirs that put a spotlight on the choices we've made to build such titanic structures to serve the needs of our society: Don Pedro Reservoir in 1997, and Glen Canyon Dam in 1983.

Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona

We tend to think of these huge structures as monuments to our creativity, power, and control over nature (it's an entirely different issue that I almost wrote "man's control over mother nature", which sounds very patriarchal or chauvinistic). The fact remains though, that we sometimes have flaws in our thinking and planning. Let's take Glen Canyon as an epic example.

Glen Canyon Dam was built between 1957-1964. It is 710 feet high (216 m) and 1,560 feet (475 m) wide, with a volume of 5,370,000 cubic yards (4,110,000 cubic meters) of concrete. It is anchored in Navajo Sandstone. When full the lake is 186 miles (299 km) long, with 1,960 miles (3,150 km) of shoreline, and a total capacity of 26.2 million acre feet (equivalent of two years of the average flow of the Colorado River). The main thing to notice about the picture above is that the dam has no spillway. It...has...no...spillway. If water ever came over the top of the dam, the floodwaters could destroy the power generators below, possibly "pulling the bath plug" on the dam. The sandstone that anchors the dam is relatively easy to erode, so such an event could threaten the very stability of the dam itself.

That not to say the operators have no way to deal with floods. When they built the dam, the Colorado River was diverted through tunnels in the cliffs around the dam site. The tunnels were adapted into an underground spillway within the cliffs. When floodwaters threatened to fill the reservoir, they would simply open the spillways and millions of gallons of water would shoot out of the cliffs at the base of the dam.

Which brings us to the events of 1983.

Wait a second...why is there a dam made of plywood here?

After construction was completed in 1964, the lake slowly filled (since water use downstream did not cease, only surplus water was used to fill the lake) and did not reach capacity until 1980. In 1983, the dam came perilously close to failing due to a major flood and design errors. An unexpectedly warm and wet storm caused a tremendous flood upstream of the nearly full Lake Powell. To prepare for the huge influx of water, the dam engineers opened up the underground spillways for the first time. They proved woefully inadequate to the task as cavitation caused the walls of the diversion tunnels to rip out. In places the powerful flow of water cut 32 feet (10 meters) into the soft Navajo Sandstone and threatened the structural integrity of the dam itself. People working within the dam reported rumblings and vibrations that simply shouldn't have been happening.

The diversion tunnels had to be shut down, and the lake threatened to flow over the crest of the dam in an uncontrolled fashion. As noted above, this could have led to catastrophe, as such uncontrolled flow could have eroded and weakened the sandstone abutments of the dam. Failure of Glen Canyon dam would have led to the domino-like destruction of other large dams downstream, and the decimation of the water-supply infrastructure of some thirty million people. The disaster was averted by the construction of an 8 foot high dam of wood flashboards that held back the water long enough for the flood to subside (see the picture above). The structural integrity and survival of the dam came down to less than a foot...the distance between the water level and the top of the flashboard dam in 1983.

The damaged spillway at Glen Canyon Dam in 1983

That is what came to mind as I saw pictures of the Oroville spillway yesterday. The other echo of the past was the need to open up the spillway onto new ground. Something very similar happened at Don Pedro during the floods of 1997 (and if the narrative below seems familiar, yes, I used it a couple of weeks ago as an introduction to the coming atmospheric river storms. I'm revisiting the story because of the similarity of events at Oroville Dam).

Don Pedro Reservoir on the Tuolumne River stores water for the Modesto and Turlock Irrigation Districts, and also serves as storage for Hetch Hetchy Reservoir water bound for San Francisco. The earth-fill dam stands 580 feet high and inundates 26 miles of the Tuolumne River, which flows out of Yosemite National Park. It stores just over 2 million acre-feet of water. The dam was built for irrigation storage, hydroelectric power generation, and recreation. And flood control.

The water year of 1996-1997 was unusual, but unfortunately familiar given the events of the last month in California. A series of large storms in December had built up a record or near-record snowpack in the Yosemite high country. Then a New Years Day Pineapple Express storm took aim at central California. The warm, moist atmospheric river flowed over the Central Valley dropping only a few inches of rain, but when it hit the mountains, it poured as much as three feet of rain at elevations as high as 10,000 feet and onto the record snowpack.

Don Pedro Reservoir was at the proper level for normal flash flood conditions, with about 300,000 acre feet of storage available. But the water coming downstream was not normal. At the peak, the rivers flowed into the lake at an unbelievable rate of 130,000 cubic feet per second (the Feather River, by the way, reached about 170,000 cubic feet per second this week). To put this number into perspective, the Tuolumne River is considered to be at flood stage at 9,000 cubic feet per second. The dam operators had a big problem and they knew it. They had to purposely flood the cities downstream to prevent a total catastrophe. They ramped up the power generating turbines, and for the first time in the dam's history, they opened the floodgate.

The floodgate didn't open into the Tuolumne River. It faced a meadow that had never before had a river flowing through. As can be seen from the pictures here, the meadow was hit by a flood of gigantic proportions. Ripping away soil and solid rock, the river quarried a channel forty feet deep in the space of three days. And it barely worked. At the highest point, the reservoir was flowing uncontrolled over a concrete weir that was the never supposed to be topped. The water was only a foot deep, but spread out over several hundred feet, it ripped away soil, rock, and the highway that passed below the floodgates.

The city of Modesto and others downstream experienced the greatest flood in their history, with top flows of around 60.000-70,000 cubic feet per second. But if Don Pedro Dam had not been there, the towns would have been hit with a flood twice as big.

Only one flood in recorded history could possible compare with 1997. That was the flood of 1861-62, which was so large that parts of the Great Valley turned into a lake for weeks. Sacramento was abandoned as the state capitol for months while the waters subsided. No gauges were present on any of the rivers so we don't know how the numbers compare, but considering that 1997 was considered a 250 year flood (a 1/250 chance of occurring in any one year), it must have been truly extraordinary. And in the last month, only twenty years later, we seem to have reached a similar level of flooding on many of our rivers in California.

And that's the way it is with Oroville Dam today. With a dam and a river that is larger than the Tuolumne. I can't imagine the stress levels of those who are dealing with the situation as they try to navigate their way between undesirable choices.

Since we have chosen to live together as a society in numbers totaling millions of people, we have to make many choices about how much we alter and change the landscape that supports us. Our basic needs of water, food and shelter have to be provided on a massive scale, but the infrastructure at such kinds of scale also have the potential to fail at equally high magnitude. Politicians are fond of keeping taxes low and complain endlessly about "burdensome" regulations and guidelines. They cut the budgets of agencies who provide the expertise that can allow us to avoid catastrophes. When they do this, they are setting up conditions for failure on an astronomic scale. So who will we blame in the end?

I wish the operators of Oroville Dam all the best. I assume they are talented at what they do and that they will be making the best possible decisions in coming days. I also hope that those who represent us in the halls of government will gain some kind of insight about the best ways to care for and improve the infrastructure that supports and protects us all. I hope, but I'm not all that optimistic, seeing the disdain that those in power right now hold for science and knowledge.

POSTSCRIPT: The incoming flow has declined to 120,000 cfs, with 65,000 cfs outflow. If it continues to drop, the operators might not need to use the emergency spillway.

POSTSCRIPT (2/11/17 at 8 AM): According to this Mark Finan at KCRA, this is the emergency spillway this morning at 7 AM. About to go over the edge...

The incoming flow at 8 AM is 89,276 cubic feet per second, the outflow is 55,092 cfs. The lake is still rising, with less than 2 inches of clearance before water flows through the spillway.

POSTSCRIPT (2/12/17): The inflow to Oroville Reservoir is finally dropping below the outflow, so the lake level can start dropping (hopefully enough to deal with the next storm in five days).

POSTSCRIPT (2/12/17, 6:45 PM): Gee whiz, things were quiet, so I went birding for a few hours and all hell broke loose while I was gone. First, if you are in the Oroville area, take the official announcements seriously and follow evacuation orders without delay. It's got to be serious if they take a step like that. In any case, the auxiliary spillway is in imminent danger of failing. If it does so, lake water would be surging over bedrock in an uncontrolled manner. It depends what kind of bedrock there is (I'm working on that), since the rapid flows could erode the rock channel downward (as happened at Don Pedro in 1997) which could then lead to higher flows and flooding downstream. It sounds like the operators increased flow on the other damaged spillway, so that the flow over the auxiliary spillway is down to 2 inches, rather than the 1 1/2-2 feet. That takes a lot of pressure off the auxiliary spillway, and offers hopes for some kind of repairs before the next storm hits.

Liveblogging the Deluge: Following Up on the Dry Creek Flood

Dry Creek in Modesto flooded to the greatest extent in two decades yesterday, with peak flows exceeding 6,000 cubic feet per second. I was out documenting the flood surge, and I managed to get to the Dry Creek Trailhead ahead of the high water around 4:30 or so. The water was rising but as you can see in the picture above, it had not breached the small levee that kept the river in the channel. I know from other reports that the flood hit a short time after I left.

I was out early this morning, and though the peak of the flood had passed hours earlier, the flow was still high, about 4,000 cubic feet per second, and there was a lot of water covering the flood plain. It was an impressive sight.

Now that the flows in Dry Creek are receding, the dam operators at Don Pedro Reservoir will probably start ramping up their releases from the lake. The goal is to keep flows in Modesto to 9,000 cfs or less to prevent flood damage. The reservoir has been accumulating water with inflows around a high of almost 45,000 cfs to the current 26,000 cfs. The lake stands at 812 feet, or 1,805,600 acre-feet, and has risen 26 feet since the beginning of the storm sequence. Since the lake will fill at 830 feet (2,030,000 acre-feet), it is now at 89% of capacity, and more than 130% of average for this time of year. They will need to free up more space for additional storms and spring runoff

Liveblogging the Deluge: "Dry" Creek Takes Center Stage Today

Dry Creek in December of 2016 before the current storms

 What happens when a small insubstantial creek that is dry for much of the year...

...gets hit with a flash flood amounting to 6,100 cubic feet per second? Let's find out!

Dry Creek at about 1,000 cubic feet per second on January 9, 2017

Dry Creek (one of many such "Dry Creeks" in California and elsewhere) is a "minor" tributary to the Tuolumne River that has its headwaters in the lower parts of the Mother Lode northeast of Modesto Reservoir. It actually isn't dry as much as the name might suggest because irrigation overflow keeps some water in the channel during the dry season. But it has no dams or reservoirs to control flows, so it has a history of sudden flashfloods during intense storms. I've been here in Modesto for nearly thirty years, and I've seen several events that resulted in flows of 3,000 cubic feet or so, but only once have I seen flows that approached that which took place today. It was in 1997 during some of the worst flooding ever experienced in Northern California. The opening scene in the video that I posted the other day about the 1997 floods shows Dry Creek in Waterford at that time. Compare that scene with the picture below.

Oakdale-Waterford Highway at high water on January 11, around 6,000 cubic feet per second.

There is only one stream gage on Dry Creek, and it is located downstream in Modesto at the Claus Road Bridge. The peak flow was predicted for around 5 or 6 PM, which meant the surge in Waterford upstream would be several hours earlier. I took these first pictures at the Oakdale-Waterford Highway Bridge at about 2 PM, and the river was indeed very high. Compare to the flow on December 9 in the picture above. The entire floodplain was covered by several feet of water.

A few hours later I headed downstream to see if I could get ahead of the flood crest, and I found high water at the Church Street Bridge north of Empire. The view was astounding. In the picture above one can see how entire orchards are under water. And it wasn't standing water, either. The entire channel was flowing rapidly downstream.

I then went just a few miles west to the Claus Road Bridge, and found that the highest flows had not yet arrived! The Dry Creek Trail had been closed because some portions were already under water, and the creek was expected to rise another couple of feet. I walked down to the river edge and found a sheriff's deputy and a crew from the office of emergency services who were using a drone to take video of the coming flood. Modesto friends: let me know if you see the videos posted anywhere!

It started raining again, and it was getting darker, so I headed east again to check out some of the other bridges.

Wellsford Road bridge was the most interesting. The main channel was moving fast, and the muddy water reminded me of running the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon a few years back. Not because of any canyon walls, of course, but because of the surging muddy water with eddies and whirlpools. The flows weren't all that much different; Dry Creek was at 6,000 cfs, and most of the time the Colorado was running at about 15,000 cfs. The big difference is that the Colorado flows at that rate more or less the entire year, and Dry Creek does it once in a generation! I found a bit of information somewhere (source has been forgotten) that suggested that about once every 500 years a flood on Dry Creek could exceed 18,500 cubic feet per second. It would be something to see something like that happen, but such a flood would do incredible damage, and I wouldn't wish such a thing on anyone.

The morning will tell if there has been any serious damage downstream. The dangers of flooding are well-known today, but a number of very nice homes were built decades ago along the lower reaches of Dry Creek near the confluence with the Tuolumne. The dam operators at Don Pedro Reservior work very hard to modulate flows of the Tuolumne River to prevent the combined flows of the two rivers from exceeding 9,000 cubic feet per second. If flows go any higher, water backs up in Dry Creek, causing flooding in the neighborhoods there.

I head to work before sunrise, but I'll probably try to catch a few more photographs in the morning. It will take a day or so for flows to recede.

Liveblogging the Deluge: Perspectives on the Biggest Storm in a Decade, Part Four

Check out some newly "discovered" footage from the floods of 1997!
We've been following developments on the Stanislaus, Merced, and Tuolumne Rivers as the biggest atmospheric storm in a decade or more has been sweeping through California. Many references have been made to the record-setting floods of 1997, and I was reminded that I was actually around back then. I even had a thing called a "VHS video camera" that recorded images on, of all things, magnetic tape. How so very quaint! I finally remembered the tapes, and even more importantly remembered that I had the tapes recorded to a DVD a couple of years ago to assist someone's research on the 1997 floods. I dug it out and isolated my videos of the Tuolumne River in Waterford, CA, and Dry Creek in Waterford and Modesto (it was not very dry at the time).

Some important numbers can be compared to the events transpiring right now. Don Pedro Reservoir is a huge dam upstream of Waterford and Modesto. It has a capacity of 2.04 million acre-feet. In 1997 it was relatively full, but not out of sync with the seasonal guidelines (about 1,690,000 acre-feet, around 83% of capacity; that's the level of the reservoir today, January 9). The storm of 1997 was not normal, however, and awareness was growing that the dam might fill and start flowing in an unconstrained manner. Operators ramped up flows on the river downstream to near-flood level at 9,000 cubic feet per second, and realized eventually that they were going to have to make a difficult choice. They were going to have to flood out a number of homes and ranches in order to make room in the reservoir for the even bigger flood to come. Several feet of warm rain fell on a near-record snowpack, and soon river flows well over 100,000 cubic feet per second were entering the reservoir. The lake level rose at an astounding rate of a foot per hour, and in less than two days, the level rose to 830 feet, overtopped the dam weir and floodgate.

For several hours, the Tuolumne River below the dam was flowing at 60,000 cubic feet per second, the highest such flow ever recorded. This was a disaster for several hundred homes downstream, but had the dam not been there, and had the operators not made the choice to produce an artificial flood, there would have been a flood in Modesto that was twice as large.

To compare to the flood going on right now in 2017, inflow to Don Pedro has been ranging as high as 38,000 cfs, and the controlled outflows have been as high as 10,000 cfs. The lake has reached an elevation of almost 802 feet, but the main part of the storm has passed, so I don't expect major problems on the Tuolumne River (but of course predictions are just that, predictions). Keep your attention on the news until this storm is over with).

And so that is the background to the video above. I was filming what I could from the various bridges before some of them were closed. I had to take a circuitous route to get to town that day to get video of Dry Creek in the La Loma Park area, which was completely inundated. I couldn't even stop, and had to take the video from a moving car (Mrs. Geotripper assisted with the driving in case you were wondering).

So here it is in all the glory of hand-held amateur film-making. Be thankful that it isn't happening again, at least not here (but give a lot of thought to those who are struggling with high water farther north in the Great Valley and along the Truckee River in Nevada).

UPDATE (1/10/17, 12:20 PM): It looks like the inflow at Don Pedro reached 44,905 cubic feet per second yesterday. Lake level reached 802.6 feet, about 1,698,000 acre-feet.

UPDATE (1/10/17, 4:40 PM): Don Pedro Lake level reached 804.9 feet, about 1,723,000 acre-feet. That's about 84.5% full.

Worried About Being Ready for the Big Storm? Let's Have a Practice Flood! The Tuolumne River Today

January 2016, one year ago

Okay, this is a bit odd. There is a lot of news about the coming atmospheric storm that will strike California this weekend, with the possibility of some truly epic (in the bad way) flooding across central and northern California. Some parts of the Sierra Nevada are facing the prospect of a few feet of rain at elevations of 10,000 feet or more. This may melt the newly fallen snowpack and produce flooding at an intensity not seen in this region since 2005 or 1997.

January 2017

So I go out this morning for my customary walk along the Tuolumne River Parkway trail (where the river leaves the Sierra Nevada and flows into the Great Valley). And instead of the 200 cubic feet per second discharge I have been seeing for the last few weeks/months/years (it's been a long drought), there is a flood going on. The discharge right now is 8,080 cubic feet per second, which is the highest the river has been in at least half a decade. It's just short of official flood stage.

But the storms haven't exactly arrived yet! There has been a lot of snow and rain in the last few days, but nothing that can explain the river this morning. In the picture above, the nearest channel isn't normally a channel at all. It's a dead-end slough, a spot that collects River Hyacinth and garbage. But right now it is a raging torrent. The hated invasive hyacinth is being flushed downstream. That's a very good thing.

The picture above is a section of the floodplain that has been dry for as long as I've been walking the river trail (the picture is from October 2015). Today it was completely inundated. 

So what's going on? Why is there a flood going on today a few days before some serious stuff starts happening across California? The explanation is pretty simple, really. The authorities are clearing space in Don Pedro Reservoir in preparation for the expected runoff from the storm this coming weekend.

There are three main water storage reservoirs in my immediate area, the New Melones Dam on the Stanislaus River (capacity 2.4 million acre feet), Don Pedro Reservoir on the Tuolumne River (2.03 million acre feet), and McClure Reservoir on the Merced River (1.02 million acre feet). The story of today is told by the present levels of each: McClure is at 47% of capacity, and New Melones is at 27%. There is little danger of these two filling during the coming storms. But Don Pedro is sitting at 74%. And two smaller reservoirs upstream, Hetch Hetchy and Cherry Lake are at 89% and 88% capacity respectively. The level at Don Pedro is not dangerously high necessarily, but if the storm plays out as expected, things could get a little too much like conditions in 1997 when the reservoir filled unexpectedly and for a short time was flowing uncontrolled through the emergency floodgates and over the adjacent weir. Downstream towns like Modesto were hit with the highest flood levels ever recorded (just imagine 60,000 cfs instead of today's 8,000; I don't have to imagine: I saw it, and it was astounding).

So, Mrs. Geotripper and I had a treat today, the chance to see a "good" flood, a flood on a sunny day that is probably not going to cause too many problems (although fast cold running water is always dangerous; we saw kids at the town park getting too close to the river). I gave up on my plans to clean up the geology lab in preparation for the new semester, and we took off up the river to see what else was happening out there.

At Roberts Ferry Covered Bridge (yes, we have covered bridges in California), the river was flooding the meadow on the north bank. In the picture above, the normal channel is to the left, beyond the line of willows. Everything in the foreground is normally dry. This particular bridge, originally dating back to the 1800s, was severely damaged in the 1997 flood and was replaced by current structure.

Our second stop was the Old Basso Bridge near the Gold Rush town of LaGrange. The 1912 vintage bridge is a tough one. It survived the 1997 floods, but is today only used for pedestrian traffic. A newer concrete structure crosses the river just upstream. The river had inundated an adjacent pasture.

Our last stop was at Don Pedro dam itself. The crest of the dam is in the front of the picture above. One can see that the dam looks very nearly full, although that is somewhat of an illusion. The most shallow part of a reservoir pool holds the greatest volume of water, since the canyon it occupies gets wider as one moves upward.

The tone in this post has been pretty upbeat, but please, if you live in the path of the storm, take the coming flooding very seriously. It has the potential to be the biggest such event in several decades. Even if it doesn't set records, high water is always dangerous. Don't ever try to cross flooded bridges or waterways. Find out if your home is in a potential flooding zone. Keep up with local news reports and take official announcements seriously. If word comes to evacuate, do so without hesitation. If there are things you think you can't live without, then have them packed and ready to go beforehand. Today was a good practice flood. Be ready for the real thing!

Floods Coming This Week May Rival 1997: Predictions at Yosemite Valley

National Park Service Photograph

This weekend's storm, if it lives up to predictions, may be one for the history books. Present projections are suggesting that the Merced River could rival the flows from the apocalyptic floods of 1997. In that flood, the Merced River reached a discharge of 24,600 cubic feet per second (23.4 feet). Official flood stage is about 7,000 cfs (10 feet). The waters covered the valley floor, wiping out roads and highways, destroying lodging and campgrounds, and closing the park for more than two months. Damages reached $178 million dollars (1997 dollars).

I'm not sure how the National Park Service prepared for the event in 1997, given how unprecedented the flooding was. Their current announcement suggests that they are preparing for the worst for this week's event. Being the stupid geologist that I am, I'm wishing I could be up there to get some pictures. Mrs. Geotripper is somewhat less enthusiastic.

There is at least one major difference between this week's storm: the reservoirs on the major rivers like the Tuolumne, Merced, and Stanislaus are below normal capacity and are probably in good shape to capture much of the runoff. In 1997, some reservoirs were overwhelmed (see the last post about the Tuolumne River and Don Pedro Reservoir).

The waters may top out at 23 feet on Sunday and Monday. Check this list of the effects of Yosemite Valley flooding at various water levels (Source: California Nevada River Forecast Center):

6.5 Feet                River is closed to rafters and flotation.

9.0 Feet                Chapel Meadow (south side of river) and Cooks Meadow (north side of river) begins to experience overflow.

9.5 Feet                Portion of Lower Pines Campground becomes flooded. Limited site-specific evacuations begin at Housekeeping Camp located along the south-facing bank of the Merced River. (Upstream from Sentinel Bridge and downstream from Stoneman Bridge)

10.0 Feet             Western portion of North Pines Campground, located at the east end of Yosemite Valley between the confluence of the Merced River and Tenaya Creek, begins to flood. Water rises to the base of the swinging bridge downstream from Chapel Meadow.

10.5 Feet             Water tops the swinging bridge downstream from Chapel Meadow. Overflow from Woski Pond floods access road (Northside Drive) leading out of the west entrance of the park.

11.5 Feet             Sewage pumping relay station at North Pines Campground becomes flooded.

12.5 Feet             Northside Drive and Southside Drive, which are the main roads in Yosemite Valley, become flooded and are closed to traffic.

23.45 Feet           Flood of record (01/02/1997). $178 Million damage to Yosemite Valley.

The video below shows what it was like:

There are local concerns as well. My own Dry Creek that runs through Modesto and Waterford is unconstrained by dams and reservoirs, and may reach troublesome levels. It's rare to see 3,000 cfs in the creek. It may reach 6,000 cfs on Monday. You can be assured that I'll be checking on the progress of the flooding.

Thanks to Daniel Swain (@Weather_West on Twitter) for the heads up on the predictions.