We still have a lot of risk: the snowpack is part of our reservoir system, but warm summers have been melting the snow faster than usual. So it’s good the state wants to build additional reservoir capacity.
How likely is this to happen? As far as I understand it, the US, and specifically California, has mostly regulated away it's ability to build any additional infrastructure. This may be overstated, hard to know as someone not living there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sites_Reservoir
> The project was certified by Governor Gavin Newsom in November 2023 under SB 149, a new law that provides certified projects streamlining benefits regarding legal challenges filed under the California Environmental Quality Act.[10][11] Construction is scheduled to begin in 2024 with final design expected to be done in 2025 and be completed in 2030.
If it was not for discretionary exemptions to regulations, it would likely not have been possible. It's also quite dystopian to have regulations that can be overwritten by executive discretion. This is a recipe for corruption.
Since you’re not in the US: California’s woes are vastly overstated. There are indeed real problems, but the government here is remarkably clean — shockingly so by the standards of East Coast States (original colonies) and in general California has a good track record of dealing with many major issues. We can all list unresolved longstanding problems we hate (my list is pretty much prisons, schools, housing NIMBYs and prop 13) but as a general rule they do ok.
Also this is non partisan. Geographically CA is mostly “MAGA red” but corruption etc is pretty thinly and uniformly spread around.
It’s also between 3.7 and 3.9 billion butts, for reference.
If a farmer knows they have a 100 acre field and they know that their corn requires 2 feet of water per year, they know that they must acquire 200 acre-feet of water.
If the state’s rivers are overflowing and the farmer wants to flood their field and help to recharge the groundwater [1], acre-feet is the unit they’d use to calculate how much water they can accept (depending on how many feet tall their levees are).
California is 100 million acres and there are 10 million acres of crops.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/amid-deluge-cal...
The California Aqueduct is currently dealing with problems relating to subsidence - what used to be a smooth downhill grade is now slumping in the middle. The capacity of the canal is reduced and without intervention it would eventually be unable to flow uphill.