Billions of dollars in damage has already been done, but of even greater concern is what all of this water could mean for southern California's fault lines.  As you will see below, geophysicists have discovered that the additional weight that flooding puts on fault lines can help trigger earthquakes.  Of course we have been warned for many years that "the Big One" is way overdue in southern California, and when it finally happens it will be a disaster unlike anything we have ever seen before.

Water is very heavy.  If you doubt this, just try lugging a couple of gallons of water around with you for a while.

Now trillions of gallons of rain have poured down on California, and all of that added weight is going to put additional stress on the fault lines in the southern portion of the state.

A number of years ago, a team of geophysicists determined that flooding helped trigger major earthquakes in southern California "at least three times in the past 2,000 years"…

Geophysicists have linked historical earthquakes on the southern section of California's famed San Andreas fault to ancient floods from the nearby Colorado River.

The work has broad implications for understanding how floods or reservoirs relate to quakes — a topic that gained new relevance in 2008, after a massive earthquake in China's Sichuan province killed more than 80,000 people. Some geologists have proposed that impounding water behind a newly built dam there helped hasten the quake.

Now, new work in southern California suggests that at least three times in the past 2,000 years, the weight of river water spreading across floodplains seems to have helped trigger earthquakes in the region.