California's state watchdog has warned that poorly maintained dams and levees continue to pose a risk to public safety, in an audit of oversight by the Department of Water Resources, the Governor's Office of Emergency Services and the Central Valley Flood Protection Board.

Source: California State Auditor

The audit, report 2025-603 published on October 13, found that as of May 2026, 57 of California's 1,222 dams were in poor or unsatisfactory condition, including 40 with high or extremely high hazard classifications. The auditor warned that failure of just one of those 40 dams could harm as many as hundreds of thousands of people and cause billions of dollars in property damage.

Source: California State Auditor via CP&DR / Epoch Times reporting

Levees: $400 million spent, $165 million a year still short

For Central Valley flood levees, state water managers told the auditor they have provided $400 million to local agencies for levee maintenance over the last 10 years, but that it would take at least $165 million more per year than is currently spent to fully address maintenance over the coming decades, CalMatters reported on October 21.

Source: CalMatters via Palo Alto Online

The audit said state water managers have been unable to complete repair projects, as of August 2026, for 14 of 48 critical levee sites — sites where problems could reasonably cause a levee to fail during a flood or high-water event — and that most of those sites had been on the repair list since 2023. The repair programme's money is running out, the auditor added.

The findings matter directly for Central Valley communities including Fresno, Sacramento, Stockton and Modesto, where Punjabi farming and trucking families live and work behind levees built generations ago. Governor Gavin Newsom earlier this fall vetoed a bill to create an annual repair fund for 1,100 miles of aging levees in the Delta, saying funding in this year's budget made the measure redundant — a position the audit's figures call into question, CalMatters reported.

The Department of Water Resources pushed back in its response: its director accused the auditors of a fundamental lack of understanding of flood management in the Central Valley and dam safety statewide, and cited an Association of State Dam Safety Officials analysis that found California's dam safety programme the leading one in the nation, Courthouse News reported. Repairing all of the state's dams over the next five years would cost more than $28 billion, according to the department.