The New York Times recently had a fun story about California that didn’t involve “alternate lifestyles” or illegal aliens, which I suppose is news in and of itself.
The topic was the abundance of water now filling Lake Berryessa, located in Napa County about 75 miles northeast of San Francisco. In February alone the torrential drought-ending rain in Northern California has added 30 feet to the depth of the lake.
In Lake Berryessa this was no problem for nearby residents — unlike the situation at Lake Oroville, where a collapsing spillway caused 188,000 people to be evacuated. (For more on this episode of wet government incompetence, click here.)
Lake Berryessa doesn’t have a spillway; instead it has a bellmouth drain that only becomes active when water in the lake exceeds a depth of 440 feet above sea level or 521 billion gallons. It’s active now and then some.
It looks like a 72-foot-wide bathtub drain as water pours into it and eventually winds up in Putah Creek. Some observers — and there are plenty, including drones — consider the sight of all that water pouring into oblivion to be a natural wonder like the geysers at Yellowstone Park. To me it looks more like what happens to our tax dollars when they arrive in Washington, D.C., and then disappear down a black hole.
Just as federal spenders assure us the waste these disappearing dollars represent won’t harm the nation, Kevin King, an operations manager at the Solano Irrigation District, claims getting too close to the drain won’t endanger nearby idiots. “It’s a lot of water, but not a lot of velocity,” King said.
Coming from an expert that’s of the same variety that assured Lake Oroville neighbors their spillway was A-okay, I don’t find that reassuring. Besides, the water is plunging into that black, forbidding circular waterfall at the rate of two million gallons a minute, which is significantly faster than the water leaving my tub, yet I can detect a current there.
The water show is expected to last for another two weeks, unless there’s significantly more rain, then the bellmouth will go back to being a simple concrete pipe rising above the level of the lake. If you hurry and make the trip — assuming you can work your way through the crowd of locals watching the flow — think of rain, nature, and tax dollars as the water disappears.
Michael Reagan, the eldest son of President Reagan, is a Newsmax TV analyst. A syndicated columnist and author, he chairs The Reagan Legacy Foundation. Michael is an in-demand speaker with Premiere speaker’s bureau. Read more reports from Michael Reagan — Go Here Now.