Back-to-back atmospheric rivers have dumped buckets of rain across Northern California, filling its rivers to the brim and beyond. The Russian River spilled over its banks in Sonoma County, and in the far reaches of the state, Lake Shasta, a key marker of the state’s overall water levels, has nearly filled up.
And just east of Napa Valley, a rare not-fully-natural phenomenon was observed for the first time since 2019: Water began gushing, furiously, through a spillway in Lake Berryessa.
The eye-catching event has happened only three other times in the past 20 years, and it has drawn curiosityseekers to the man-made reservoir, 70 miles northeast of San Francisco.
“People were taking pictures and videos and just standing in awe,” said Peter Kilkus, the editor of the Lake Berryessa News, who was there Wednesday morning with about two dozen other people.
The 72-foot-wide spillway, called a morning glory because its shape mimics the flower, is a unique funnel-shaped cement pipe that sits within the reservoir. (Locals call it the glory hole.)
The mechanism is a type of drainage system with water pouring down the pipe and into Putah Creek on the other side of Monticello Dam. The spillway is among a few with that shape in the country; there’s also one at Pleasant Hill Lake in Perrysville, Ohio.
Chris Lee, general manager of the Solano County Water Agency, also made the trip to take a look. “It’s mesmerizing to watch,” he said. “It’s not something you can see in very many places in the world.”
Mr. Lee said the reservoir sits in a canyon that’s too narrow to accommodate a more typical design with a dam equipped with a spillway.
The spillway functions like the outflow at the top of a bathtub. When the water gets too high, it pours into the drain to prevent the tub from overflowing.
The water doesn’t get too high all that often. In recent history, the spillway was activated in 2019, 2017 and 2006.
Last year, the lake level was about a quarter of an inch from the hole spilling over — “as close to going without going,” said Jay Cuetara, the supervising water resources engineer for the Solano County Water Agency.
Mr. Cuetara said that the combination of the past two wet winters and the recent deluge of rain finally pushed the reservoir to the point of spilling over.
“We started the summer with a topped-off lake, and then this winter we had a lot of these storms that produced a lot of runoff. That did it,” he said.
Lake Berryessa was created in 1958 after the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built Monticello Dam and harnessed the waters of Putah Creek. The reservoir is in Napa County but supplies waters to residents, businesses and farmers in neighboring Solano County.
The lake is also a popular spot for recreation, and boaters zip across the waters in summer, but the spillway may be the lake’s best-known feature. People flocked to the area six years ago when the water last spilled, too. Mr. Cuetara gets the attraction.
“There’s really nothing like it,” he said. “It’s a very odd-looking spillway that just disappears into the void. You almost have to see it.”
For those who do want to see it, Mr. Cuetara said he expects the spillway to continue to be active through the weekend and likely for another week or two.
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