Keep as much water as you can held at the highest elevation you can.

How? Damns Damns Damns. You can't have too many damns. Damn I love saying damn. So much so I'm going to spell it this way the whole time. Damn.

This maximizes something I call state capacity. State capacity is your ability to achieve different states easily. Some of these might be beneficial in an emergency. Hopefully are. One example of a state is having water to fight fire with. If you want to achieve that state and many more you are going to need state capacity.

Like if you if you needed water in a particular town you could do it.

Here are another two realities to consider. 1. We exchange water height for electricity all the time. 2. Water is a bottleneck on reliable agricultural scale.

What these means is that electrical power, water storage, and agriculture really exist in the same resource pool. We are currently doing research into bulk lithium battery power storage for the grid. That and fly wheels. But an existing technology exists. Reservoirs in which water can be pumped to a greater height to store power and then down pumped to produce electricity.

That currently accounts for 90% of our stored power currently. It's an extremely good fit with nuclear which critics claim is too reliable, and not able to adjust to changes in demand.

But besides what we've made artificially this same set up exists defacto as a matter of economics and logistics. If for example and area is powered mostly by fossil fuels and hydro and it's demanded that the fossil fueled power plants produce less electricity.. but people's demand remains the same. Then the reservoir in the area will be drained faster as power plant operators increase the flow of water past turbines.

Water head height is the nation's battery.

Now for agriculture. When farmers are upset they can't get enough water and feel like they are being held back from it's because a reservoir has lost enough height that the operators and or government worry that further loss won't be sustainable.

So ok, electricity, water head height, and agricultural capacity are in the same exchangeable resource pool.

So then why in hell would anyone throw away perfectly good water without making it do some useful work first? It makes no fucking sense. You are literally throwing away money, electricity (read carbon if you want), food, quality of life, safety.

Why wouldn't we damn up all the water we can when it's basically free electricity? Even if it's hard to trace exactly how that particular damn produces electricity it does. It forms a resource that will help you manage other water needs at minimum. Freeing up other reservoirs to be further balanced against other needs. Reservoir management is probabilistic and risk oriented. If you have upstream reservoirs you can use them to partially refill a main reservoir in an emergency, and thus the more confidently use you can make out of the main reservoir in favor of other needs.

You also reduce risks of floods even with a passive damn where you just set the height at which the flow increases strategically. Even a less strategically planned damn does this by evening out flow, unless you do something truly stupid with a damn. Any upstream damn reduces the swings on down stream damns no matter how simple.

Let's just damn up everything. Even catch water on your property. That's just a personal damn.

If it were up to me not a single molecule of H2O would ever be allowed to reach the ocean without going through multiple power plants and at least one farmer's field.

In fact fuck all other forms of power. We only need nuclear and hydro. Everything else can get fucked right now.

In fact if California would just go all in on Nuclear they could pump all their water back and just reuse it over and over? They could have at least had the energy to pump water straight out of the ocean onto those fires. What, you don't think nuclear could ever operate at a scale where it could turn back rivers and operate them in reverse? Great. Good job. You just proved that hydro has more scale than even nuclear. We just fail to tap it. A drop of water falls in Colorado and hits the pacific ocean. For what elevation do we actually extract it's power? What, like a few hundred feet?

We have infinite free energy pouring out of this country like water through a sive. And it has more direct (practically automatic) convertibility to agricultural capacity than any other form of energy. For most other forms of energy the route is turning it into electricity and then that into artificial fertilizers (which you can still do with hydro).

All you have to do is slop letting water flow down hill without stopping it.

Some people say money really represents energy. Water elevation really is the nation's energy state, and so it really is the nation's wealth. Dry reservoirs means we're about to be poor. But importantly by maximizing water's state capacity you make it so you can use it to fight fires when you need it.