First, there was Donald Trump’s executive order to release billions of gallons of water from two reservoirs in California’s Central valley, a move the feds walked back after farmers and water experts decried it as wasteful, ill-conceived – and an unnecessary risk factor for levees in the region.
The mandate, said Nicholas Pinter, a professor of applied geoscience at the University of California at Davis who studies California’s levees, amounted to “hydrologic insanity”.
