With El Niño threatening to turn California's drought into drenching winter, worries mount

After four years of drought, creeks and rivers flowing through the Bay Area are more trickle than torrent. But weather scientists are recording water temperatures in the Pacific nearing the highest they've ever seen, suggesting El Niño will open an atmospheric fire hose in the jet stream this winter. That's caused a rising tide of anxiety that has left even the highest-and-driest Californians on edge. 

The last "very strong" El Niño winter of 1997-98 left 17 Californians dead and property damage of $550 million in its wake. It also brought San Francisquito Creek, quite literally, to the Palo Alto doorstep of Kevin Fisher. His was one of 1,700 Peninsula properties damaged when the creek overtopped its banks after a month of steady rains. "It was like being in an aquarium," Fisher said, recalling the water's ominous rise outside a picture window facing his backyard.

If the rains come in quick succession, city storm drains in low-lying places like Pinole and Hercules in the East Bay can be counted on to back up and turn the streets into rivers.

To prevent anybody being done in by the next El Niño, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties created the Joint Powers Authority (JPA), which has taken a special interest in the Pope-Chaucer Street Bridge, a chokepoint on San Francisquito Creek that sits at the juncture of Palo Alto, Menlo Park and East Palo Alto. Crews were out last week shoring up the creek's banks, and if the water gets dangerously high this winter, they will be back with sandbags and inflatable flood walls -- berms filled, perversely, with water.

http://www.mercurynews.com/drought/ci_28777823/el-nino-threatening-turn-californias-drought-into-drenching