Stunning before-and-after images show California reservoirs' rebound - Los Angeles Times - Lemmy
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California’s two biggest reservoirs are all but full after reaching perilously low levels late last year. Lake Shasta, at 96% full, and Lake Oroville, at 100%, had fallen to around 25% to 30% of their capacity before the state’s historically wet winter rejuvenated them. Statewide, reservoirs are at 85% of total capacity, well above their 30-year average of 73% for the month of June. With the Sierra Nevada snowpack still above three times its normal level for mid-June, they are expected to fill up even more as the snow melts. The before-and-after images below from NASA show Lake Shasta on Nov. 18, 2022, when the lake stood at just 31% of capacity, and again on May 29, 2023, when it was 98% full. California’s biggest reservoir had not been so full in more than four years, according to California Department of Water Resources data. A “bathtub ring” around the lake showing how far the water lline had fallen was clearly visible in November, but it had vanished by May. Lake Oroville, in Butte County, has also undergone a spectacular transformation. The image below shows the lake near Enterprise Bridge on Dec. 21, when levels were at 29% of capacity. A narrow band of water winds through the bottom of the gully, far below the bridge’s span. Aerial view of a bridge crossing a mostly dry lake with a narrow band of water in the gully far below the bridge Lake Oroville under Enterprise Bridge had nearly disappeared on Dec. 21, 2022. (Ken James / California Department of Water Resources) Less than six months later, the landscape had undergone a noticeable shift. In the image below, taken June 12, water levels are dramatically higher at the same part of Lake Oroville, filling up nearly to the top of the piles supporting the bridge. Aerial view of a full lake with a bridge crossing A similar view of Lake Oroville on June 12, 2023, showed a dramatic transformation. The reservoir is now 100% full. (Ken James / California Department of Water Resources) In the second photo, the reservoir is 100% capacity, submerging the barren hillsides that were previously exposed by low water levels. A study of satellite data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory found that the winter brought the greatest net gain of water in California’s lakes in the 22 years that the metric had been tracked. Between October 2022 and March 2023, the Central Valley’s “lakes, rivers, soil, snowpack, and underground aquifers” saw their levels increased by the equivalent of 20 inches, or around twice the average gain in the last 22 years. However, groundwater levels remain depleted, experts say, and may remain so into the future. “One good winter of rain and snow won’t make up for years of extreme drought and extensive groundwater use,” said Felix Landerer, a scientist at JPL. Times staff writer Nathan Solis contributed to this report.

Teenagers filled the sidewalk outside a South Los Angeles party last week when gunfire rang out. After the crowd scattered, friends found a Crenshaw High School basketball player dead — the latest example of violence that is disproportionately killing young Black Angelenos, a Times analysis shows.

The fatal shooting of Quincy Reese Jr., 16, left his community searching for answers, illustrating the trauma left in the wake of such bloodshed.

“Black children are exposed to an epidemic of violence,” said Jorja Leap, a professor of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

In fact, Black children and adolescents in Los Angeles County are killed by firearms at a rate three times higher than their proportion of the population, according to data from the Department of Public Health’s Office of Violence Prevention.

The effects of that violence can be devastating not only for victims but also for survivors such as those gathered outside the party where Quincy was killed. Such trauma, and the fallout from mourning the loss of a friend or loved one, stays with children for the rest of their lives, Leap said.

Teenagers in Los Angeles are far more likely to have been exposed to violence than those elsewhere in the U.S., according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 31% of L.A. high schoolers polled anonymously in the CDC’s 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey, whose results were released this year, said they had seen someone be physically attacked, beaten, stabbed or shot in their neighborhood. Nationwide, that rate was just shy of 20%.

That violence falls disproportionately on young Black Angelenos.

From 2016 to 2022, about 30% of teen homicide victims in L.A. County were Black, according to data from the Office of Violence Prevention, but only about 8% of the county’s teenage population is Black.

Though California and Los Angeles County have half the youth firearm death rate of the United States as a whole, groups including Black teenage boys are killed at disproportionate rates.

According to numbers provided by the Department of Public Health, which studied youth firearm deaths between 2016 and 2022 (2020 and 2022 data are still provisional), the countywide rate was 1.9 firearm deaths per 100,000 youths. Among boys, the rate was 3.3 firearm deaths per 100,000, among teenagers it was 5.4, and among Black youths it was 6.4.

Before Quincy’s death, 11 minors had been killed in 2023. Four of those deaths were infants, and seven were teenagers — all boys, according to the police incident reports. One of the homicide victims was Black.

Geographically, minors in communities clustered around downtown and South L.A. are disproportionately affected by violent felony crime per capita.

These communities are historically and systemically underresourced, a point that Office of Violence Prevention Director Andrea Welsing cited as having an effect on rates of violence.

“At the same time we look at prevention, intervention and healing strategies, it is important that we look at issues of racism, who has access to resources, what communities are better funded; these things matter and those things can also perpetuate violence,” Welsing said, pointing to issues such as access to quality education and housing.

According to UCLA’s Leap, such communities are not only underresourced but are also “given the wrong resources.”

“We’ve got to be funding classrooms in these impacted areas, in these underresourced areas,” Leap said. “We’ve got to fund the classrooms at the rate we fund the police.”

In addition to educational resources, communities such as those around downtown and South L.A. are also less likely to have mental health resources that can help young people cope after suffering or witnessing violence. Results from the National Health Interview Survey, published this week by the CDC, show that urban children ages 5 to 17 are less likely to have received any mental health care, including therapy and medication, compared with their rural and suburban peers.

After Quincy was killed, the outpouring of grief from his family, friends and teammates at Crenshaw High followed a familiar pattern — “the immediate aftermath of sadness, mourning, crying, memorials,” Leap said.

But “the real problem is not in the immediate days afterwards, when invariably there is a swarm of attention,” Leap said. “The real problem is … six months later, when all the noise has died down and seemingly everything’s gone back to normal.”

For those teenagers affected by Quincy’s death, “normal” might never be the same.

“These kids will change forever,” Leap said. “And many of these kids in adulthood will refer back to the experience of losing a friend, a close friend, or a family member, and talk about how from that moment on in their life, they never felt the same again.”

Times staff writer Melissa Healy contributed to this report.