On Thursday, water managers in the Central Valley learned that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been directed to dramatically increase the flow of water from reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada into local rivers, at a rate that officials said would have served no agricultural purpose and would have threatened the stability of local levees.
Mr. Thayer said an unplanned gush of water could fling debris and branches haphazardly and endanger homeless people camping in stream beds.
“We don’t typically just open the hatches and fill the rivers to maximum capacity,” he said. “You start at a trickle and build it up slowly.”
Alarmed, local water managers rushed Thursday to prepare for an abrupt onslaught of water they had not asked for, according to county officials. In an email to the Kings County Board of Supervisors, Jim Henderson, the county’s public works director, said that the water authorities had reached out with “serious concerns” before a flurry of calls to local Republican members of Congress dramatically slowed the flows.
