LA County says it's prepared for any flood concerns as warmer storms approach

and the latest Whiplash weather could cause

flood

ing as Ed spoke of a loss of water supplies if the snow washes away too quickly, that's right. Pat Kel News Reporter Tom Waits spoke with local officials about how they are preparing for this. Tom and one that like Evelyn was talking about like you were talking about, they're worried about all those things that we're hearing Evelyn discuss, so Los Angeles County

says

their

flood

control infrastructure is ready to handle more runoff from

storms

, even if there is a lot of snowmelt, but Parts of Northern California could have problems even at higher elevations, where homes and businesses are being hit by the weight of all the white snow conditions over the past week, from Lake Tahoe to Southern California, where powerful

storms

buried homes and businesses, leaving people stranded for days. under deluge storms, so cold snow accumulated at much lower elevations, there is now talk of

warmer

storms on the way and there are major

concerns

about flooding, a potentially significant warm atmospheric river event now looks increasingly likely and very likely will likely hit some portion of northern or central California sometime between Thursday night and Saturday.

There is a lot of uncertainty at this time regarding how intense it will be and how long it will last. The lower elevations in Northern California, between two and four thousand feet, are the biggest concern at this time. The elevations will have significant potential for runoff problems and some flooding. Warmer storms have another serious consequence. Our water supply. Warm rain can wash away much of it. Felicia Marcus is the former chairwoman of the California State Water Resources Control Board and is now a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Landreth

says

that if our snowpack melts too quickly, we will probably lose much of it, you will lose a lot of that bank account that we are really going to need in the next few months of the year so that it can melt. slowly on a schedule, we would prefer to refill the reservoirs as we use them, replenish the streams and actually flow down at a rate where the groundwater can be replenished because that is by far our largest storage lake .

Oroville outside of Sacramento, one of the largest in California. Reservoirs devastated by years of drought after months of rain are 73 percent full, but Friday may be so full that the state is preparing to open the spillway to remove excess water here at home. Los Angeles County Public Works says they are ready if the heat hits. Storms Hit Southern California Many people don't realize that the Los Angeles County Flood Control District was actually founded in 1915 to deal with truly catastrophic storms that occurred in that time period. There are 14 dams in the foothills that protect the Greater Los Angeles watershed. and it will also allow us to capture storm water behind those dams and reservoirs that experts are confident that the hope is that the snow will melt slowly and steadily during the spring, without heat waves so that the reservoirs can contain all that runoff and the soil can absorb as much as possible.

That may be the hope, but you know, if everything goes too fast, if we could just program Mother Nature right so that all the time goes perfectly, we just haven't been able to do that and I guess we never will, yeah , but slow and steady, okay, thanks. thank you