In this edition of Eyewitness Newsmakers with Marc Brown, Brett Sanders, professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Irvine, laid out a worrying scenario. He and his team mapped a 100-year flood scenario for our region. They discovered our network of flood control channels may not be up to the task, which could mean water may spill over the channel banks or banks could collapse, sending water into areas where millions of people live.

The possibility that drought would alter the Golden State’s hydropower capacity is not wholly new; in 2018, researchers at the University of California Irvine published a paper predicting that long-term drought would reduce the state’s hydro system’s spinning reserve (its unused, backup energy capacity to be used during periods of high strain) by 41 percent by 2046.