Friday , May 3 2024

Friant Officials Prepare For What Could Be A Record Amount Of Snowmelt

The Sierra Nevada snowpack is so big this year that water managers are worried that one warm storm or a couple warm days could inundate reservoirs in the region. FM89’s Ezra David Romero reports from Friant Dam. There’s capacity for over 520,000 acre feet of water in Millerton Lake and at the moment it’s about 82 percent full. That has water managers like Michael Jackson out of the Fresno Office for the US Bureau of Reclamation worried that once spring arrives the reservoir could spill over. He says he has a plan to avoid that. “We’ll probably end up needing to draw it down to below 300,000 acre feet in order to make room for what’s shaping up to be a record snowpack and runoff year,” Jackson says. He says this is a big deal because typically there’s around 2 million acre feet of runoff into the reservoir every year and this year that number could double. “So 500,000 acre foot reservoir, 4 million in terms of the water year runoff so that’s eight times the storage of what there is if
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