The reservoirs providing drinking water to the towns and cities of the Willamette Valley are pretty low, but there have been dark clouds on the horizon – literally, and that’s good news for areas that have still been struggling under persistent drought conditions.
The past week has seen a fairly generous amount of rain, and hopes have been high that soon the reservoirs will be high, too.
National Weather Service meteorologist Colby Newman told KLCC that the Army Corps of Engineers “hold the reservoirs super low on the west side of the Cascades during the months of December and January, and then starting in February they start to fill them. And because we didn’t get much rain in February they really weren’t able to fill them very much… so this will at least get them to fill them up closer to where they should be for this time of the year.”
That degree of reliance on the predictability of the weather may no longer be possible, given the dramatic changes to the global climate in recent years. Once, snow would have been piling up on the Coast Range and the Cascades all Winter, which would gradually melt in the Spring and Summer months, feeding streams which would come flowing east and cascading west toward the Willamette River. Alas, the snowfalls and rainfalls which we used to expect can no longer be consistently relied on.
By John M. Burt 
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