“You want to keep the lake rising slowly,” said Erin Mellon, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Water Resources. “What you’re balancing is water supply with flood protection. What you don’t want to do is have the lake totally full and then have a really wet system come through. California’s weather is so variable and so unpredictable that we have to plan for all of these different scenarios.”

Source: Los Angeles Times March 29, 2019 12:00 UTC