If not drought, then floods

After a couple of winter months with little rain or snow in the mountains, I keep hearing the usual moans and groans about the horrible drought we’ll face this next summer because of water released from Shasta Dam.

My answer to such complaints has always been, “Just wait, it won’t be long and you’ll be screaming, ‘Stop, turn off the water machine!’”

This has happened more often than not.

There have been droughts, sure, just as there have been flood years when we hear demands from the south to build Shasta Dam even higher!

Most people living here today don’t know about the severe floods we suffered in the past. Only people with long family history in the area from the last two centuries know of those events.

I remember my father telling of such flooding when he was a boy in the 1890s. Trinity and Shasta had the same storms and, thus simultaneous, floods.

I remember many floods with truly memorable ones in 1940, 1955 and another in the 1960s, when I was told that water reached the ceilings in houses that had only had their floors flooded in the 100-year flood of 1955.

I watched with interest the heavy winter storms of this past month and saw U.S. Bureau of Reclamation increase releases to 50,000 cubic feet per second to keep the river from flooding. I begin to wonder at the wisdom of a man who wrote a letter blasting the Bureau for their releases saying that water was needed by people down the river.