Don Pedro Reservoir stores water for the Modesto and Turlock Irrigation Districts, and also serves as storage for Hetch Hetchy Reservoir water bound for San Francisco. The earth-fill dam stands 580 feet high and inundates 26 miles of the Tuolumne River, which flows out of Yosemite National Park. The dam was built for irrigation storage, hydroelectric power generation, recreation and...flood control.
Today, the scene is a complete contrast to 1997. I was standing on a hill above the dam looking at the floodgate from the backside. The entire region in the picture below would be inundated if the reservoir was full. As you can see, there was no water in sight.
Only one flood in recorded history could possible compare with 1997. That was the flood of 1861-62, which was so large that parts of the Great Valley turned into a lake for weeks. Sacramento was abandoned as the state capitol for months while the waters subsided. No gauges were present on any of the rivers so we don't know how the numbers compare, but considering that 1997 was considered a 250 year flood (a 1/250 chance of occurring in any one year), it must have been truly extraordinary.
And that's the way it is with water in California. We rarely have a "normal" year. It tends to be a feast or famine kind of environment. Frankly, we're hoping for a "feast" next year, and for several years after, but the record kind of leans the other way. In the last 2,000 years, California has experienced two "megadroughts" that lasted a century each. The watermasters in our fair state have been consuming lots of antacids lately, I suspect.
The pictures of the flooding in 1997 are courtesy of the visitor center at Don Pedro Reservoir. I experienced the flooding, but I was in Waterford and Modesto. It was a sight. A normally dry creek in the middle of town called, creatively, Dry Creek was flooding at 9,000 cubic feet per second. As noted before, that's flood stage for the Tuolumne River. And Dry Creek was a small tributary. It truly was a one-of-a-kind event.
POSTSCRIPT: Turlock Irrigation District has a video of the flooding of the Tuolumne at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94sAz3gZciQ&feature=youtu.be&a. Stunning footage...