This is Lake Berryessa spillway north of Vacaville California. It was built by aliens. The internet can tell you wonderful things if you only listen.

That’s Monticello Dam going across in the front, and the river that it’s damming is the Putah river….puta river? did I read that right, well i did, because Mr. Joe Jesus Berryessa had a ranch granted to him by the king of Spain and he named it ‘Rancho Los Putas’. In 1843 no less. And it gets worse, because he names it that because he and his brother married twin sisters. Ay caramba mijo. These paragons of polite society eventually sold the rancho to a group of developers because they were, lol ju never guess, inveterate gamblers and lost it. The developers started a planned town & called it Montcello, hence the dam name.

The city got flooded when they started putting up the dam in 1953, finally, after drawing up plans and warning people to leave since 1906. The awesome spillway is a vertical concrete tube, that when the lake gets high enough, spills over and looks out of this world weird for such a simple explanation. (also with pic from greatest Japanese surreal comedy movie ever Cha no Aji)

Someone did die in it in 1997, a 41 year old woman from Davis. sigh that explains it, from Davis. who would go swimming near an 87 foot wide 200 foot deep hole in the lake? In winter when it’s flooding? Anyways, the last time they let the dam spill over was 2017 and a huge crowd gathered to watch. Quite a few dams in California purposefully try never let themselves get full enough to spill over because between when they were built and now with better ground penetrating radar and stuff they’ve discovered that they’re built over earthquake faults and could catastrophically fail on even a small quake. The things you learn. In 2017 though, Lake Berryessa guys didn’t have a choice about this. This was just two weeks after Lake Oroville spilled over and almost destroyed itself, with first the main spillway failing (and when I say failing I mean concrete gouged out 1000ft of canyon created in seconds), then the backup spillway failing (even bigger canyons created in seconds), and just general ‘barely averted disaster’(evacuated 200,000 people) because we had a double rainfall year. Not Arkstorm , just a little more than usual. So Berryessa spilled over and no one died, and the dam didn’t fail and everything went well. Good for them. Hopefully unlike Oroville Dam, they remembered to put rebar in their concrete. They finally got Oroville patched up in time for this winter’s wet season in November. holding steady so far! (those are great pictures of the fix by the way, you can get an idea of the truly massive scale of the spillway and its destruction) I’m assuming they want to keep that dry this year so that it can cure. I talk about Oroville too much. Dam.

Well, it’s rainy season again and all the creeks are roaring, all the hills turned brilliant emerald green one night in January, and now I’m painting ghibli-colors. Will Lake Berryessa spill over again this year? Well if it does it’ll be this Friday because we’ve got another storm coming in after a week of rain.

Everyone talks about the weather in California. Except for him.