A flood watch has been issued for Wednesday and Thursday by the National Weather Service due to a series of wet storms moving through the region.
Don Bader, area manager of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, said Tuesday that the next system would hit Shasta hard. We are likely to see 40 or 50 feet of the lake.
Lake Shasta and Trinity Lake are managed by the Bureau of reclamation. The cities of Redding and Shasta Lake, as well as the other smaller water districts in the area, are dependent on the water supplied by the two dams.
For this time of year, Lake Shasta is usually 50% full, but as of Tuesday it was 34% full.
The California Department of Water Resources said that Trinity Lake was 42% of normal.
The lake rose in December.
As of Tuesday, Folsom Lake was nearly two-thirds full and 141% of average, thanks to the wet weather in December.
At times, it was coming up a foot an hour, because the American River is a big basin and Folsom is a small one.
He said that Lake Shasta only got 15,000 to 20,000 cfs of water.
We're going to see that triple in a day. That is the reason for the large increase in Shasta. It's possible to fill this thing up in the winter. It can be full, but it has to keep getting rained on.
Last year it didn't happen.
The rain stopped after a wet fall and early winter.
January and February are important months for precipitation. It's not the big winter events we like to see so we have to have it.
It's positive." We have some good storm events through the middle of January.
The Department of Water Resources conducted its first snow survey Tuesday and found the statewide snowpack to be 174% of average.
State water officials said that relief from the long dry spell will depend on the coming months.
It is good to see snow in the mountains, but it is not as important as the rain that fills the lake every year.
The last two years were so dry that all the water and snow went into the ground. The December rains got it wet and primed, and now most of the water will go into the lake.
The article was originally published on the Record Searchlight.
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