High winds. The potential for up to 3 inches of rain in 48 hours.

Heavy storms in the past three weeks that have saturated the ground.

Nobody is thinking about the drought.

Go back a few months.

No rain for months. A dismal Sierra snowpack on April 1 that was 38 percent of the historic average.

Groundwater tables dropping farther. In some areas, wells drying up.

Reservoirs with water rings that are going downhill from being classified as lakes to puddle status.

Water restrictions.

Dying or dead lawns.

Fallow farmland. Orchards dying.

Rest assured no one was worried about flooding in mid-August.

But here we are — again.

While the flooding is only local as the San Joaquin River is far from flood stage unless storms suddenly shift to heavy warm rains as they did in 1992 and prematurely melt the heavy December snowpack in a matter of weeks, no one will be packing up the U-Hauls and fleeing to higher ground.

That said, wasting water during a storm is a decadent and reckless act.

Yet you will not be hard pressed to find people doing that.

On Wednesday there were sprinklers — mostly in commercial areas — watering grass that is dormant due to the cold and definitely not suffering from a lack of moisture.

There is likely water waste you’re not seeing. People doing small loads of laundry instead of larger ones where possible.

Those who take long 20-minute showers every day.

The list goes on and on.

If you live in San Joaquin County — or any other county that is part of the Delta or in their respective watersheds — such behavior is not just irresponsible. Its reckless.

The Delta — of which San Joaquin County has the most land area — is ground zero for California’s water woes and almost every water calamity possible.

We’re just  a couple of feet above sea level where two massive water basins drain into the San Francisco Bay.

When there is spring storm runoff it naturally puddles here.

We can build all the dams and levees we want but we’re not changing the forces of nature.

We live on sediment that was built up over hundreds of thousands of years  after nature carved out places like Yosemite Valley to fill in what was once as great inland sea.

Rising sea levels is old hat.

Ocean Beach in San Francisco at one point was miles from the edge of what we call the Pacific Ocean.

Mega-droughts, mega-floods and glacial periods over the past 1.5 million years have shaped the Sierra and much of what we now refer to as California.

It is conceit, pure and simple, that what is in front of our noses at any given time is what we assume controls our fate. And that includes weather.

We are all atwitter when social media or the media breathless takes about “atmospheric rivers”.

That term was coined in 1994. It describes a weather condition that brings heavy moisture from the tropics that was once rereferred to as “The Pineapple Express”.

Back in the 1970s and before, the same weather phenomenon was responsible for serious flooding up and down Northern California.

PG&E reminded customers back in the 1970s that their crews were working diligently to keep the lights on while dealing with some of the nation’s most rugged terrain with the wildest winter weather along the Northern California coast as well as in the Cascades and Sierra.

Today we correctly attribute everything to climate change but then we add a lot of conceit.

The conceit  that man somewhere started the proverbial fire and can stop it doesn’t come from scientists but those with targeted agendas.

Again, climate change is real. It has always been real. The problem is us and how we adjust to it as a species.

When the well-documented Great Flood of 1862 left almost every square foot of the Central Valley covered in water for months, there were fewer people living between Bakersfield and Redding than live today in Tracy, Manteca, and Lathrop.

Sacramento County had 14,000 in 1860. Today it has 1,576,618 people.

San Joaquin County had 10,000 people in 1860. Today it has 771,560 people.

Yes, there were less dams — as in almost nonexistent — back in 1862 and the levees system was in its infancy.

But at some point if you put up enough rooftops, pave enough ground, you are sustainably increasing the frequency of serious flooding and serious droughts.

When Mormons tried to settle a farming colony dubbed New Hope near the confluence of the Stanislaus and San Joaquin rivers in 1846 south of Manteca and west of Ripon, there wasn’t a single house in the 1,426 square miles that constitutes modern San Joaquin County.

Likewise, when the devasting drought of 1924 hit the region and wiped out almost every crop and orchard as well as led to the death of livestock because of the lack of water, farmland in San Joaquin County wasn’t helping feed as much of the nation — which was less populous back then — as it is today.

The fairly typical runoff in  the winter of 1846 prompted the San Joaquin River to flow more than six miles wide as it neared the Delta forcing the Mormons to abandon New Hope.

Levees have since reduced flooding.

But even with levees the area that New Hope sat south of Manteca has flooded 11 times since 1929 forcing significant evacuations when levees along the Stanislaus  and San Joaquin rivers have failed.

The construction of the original Melones Dam by South San Joaquin Irrigation District and Oakdale irrigation District helped avoid a repeat of the devastating 1923 drought including the drought between 1928 and 1937.

It is not responsible, however, for the region squeaking by in subsequent droughts after 1937 that have numbered six. Contribute that fact to SSJID and OID building three more dams — Tulloch, Beardsley, and Donnells. Also credit the Central Valley Project new Melones Dam inundating the original Melones Reservoir.

But the big difference between devastating drought and being able to get by has been with technology as simple as lined canals, buried pipelines, low-flow shower heads, low-flow toilets, water efficient washing machines and cutting-edge agricultural irrigation techniques.

Yes, more reservoirs will help — to a point. But they must be off-stream reservoirs such as San Luis near Los Banos and the proposed Sites in Colusa County that will catch excessive winter runoff as opposed to snow melt.

Aquifer recharging using storm runoff plus recycled water is needed as well.

But in terms of short-term differences that will help us weather droughts on the near horizon it is changing how we use water in landscaping.

As far as flooding, we must change how we pave over paradise. More development patterns that allow for runoff that increases proportionately with the same amount of rainfall with the building of more rooftops to be absorbed into the ground on-site is needed.

And perhaps most importantly is the need to end our collective ignorance about water supplies and how we use what we have.

Merrily running lawn sprinklers in the middle of a major storm will come back to haunt us when nature turns off the spigot and reservoirs and aquifers drop precariously low.

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com