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Old 02-23-2017, 08:20 AM   #4
Snakeadelic
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Join Date: May 2015
Posts: 660
Most of the western US seems to have a pretty antagonistic relationship with the local water tables...not nearly enough or way, way too much.

If the Oroville Dam goes, or drought-ending downpours flood the San Joaquin Valley, maybe the SJV floor will recover some of the many feet of subsidence recorded since agriculture started taking a serious toll on the aquifer below it.

We're not anywhere near drought conditions where I live, but we've pulled too much water out of our own aquifers in this valley and as a consequence hundreds of our 5-story-tall or so cottonwood trees are dying. Their taproots are no longer reaching water and can't grow fast enough to find the lowered levels. Cottonwoods are already problematic because they're the rock stars of big deciduous trees--live fast, die young. Their speedy growth makes them vulnerable to dry rot and major limb breakage, resulting in like 6 of the partly-live trees closest to me (including the ones in which I photographed bald eagles and a peregrine falcon) being cut down. A line of about half a dozen on the county fairgrounds were taken down a few years back after a limb fell and not just hit a car...it dropped at an angle, harpooned a small sedan right in between the driver and her passenger, and still hit the pavement so hard it nailed the car in place. I'm not much of a disaster rubbernecker, but if I'd known about that before it was cleaned up I'd definitely have walked the 6 blocks for a photo! No on in the car was injured; the branch impaled the car in between the two adult occupants.

Water, man. Weird stuff. Makes the whole planet do strange things.
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