The creek
Butte Creek near Chico
USGS 11390000 / CDEC BCK · 15-minute telemetry
−9 cfs over 24 h · 7-day range 92.5–122
Against 95 years of September 21 records (1931–2025): today is the 51st percentile. Median 112 cfs.
Daily swing 59–66 °F · 2.5 °F below the holding-stress line
Thresholds are the proposed working values in the alert table below — they need a biologist's sign-off before they drive anything.
De Sabla
68.09 in
season to date · 2,710 ft
Carpenter Ridge
66.87 in
season to date · 4,812 ft
Rain above the canyon is what turns into creek rise 6–18 hours later. These two gauges are the early warning.
The canyon
Fire weather & hazards
NWS zone CAZ129 · Butte County CAC007
Fire weather
No Red Flag Warning is in effect. Fuels are at the dry end of the season and the next two days are hot and clear, so this stays on the watch list.
The Jarbo Gap RAWS — the station that recorded the wind on the morning of the Camp Fire — belongs on this panel as the canyon's northeast-wind tripwire.
Watches & warnings
Every National Weather Service product that covers the canyon, the valley floor, and the upper watershed, plus anything drawn as a polygon over Butte Creek.
NWS Sacramento renumbered every zone on 16 Apr 2026 and merged its public and fire zones. Any older reference to CAZ017 for Butte County is now wrong.
Next five days
Creek and sky together
NWS grid STO/44,123 · CNRFC forecast point BKCC1
Downstream at Durham, the forecast reads Normal against its published thresholds — 180.03 ft now, action stage 190.5 ft, minor flood 198.0 ft. Chico has no published flood stage, which is the single biggest gap on this page.
Every gauge
Import, mainstem, and tributary
The eight stations FBC already links, plus two the site is missing
| Station | Flow | Stage | Water temp | 24 h | Reported |
|---|
Butte Creek near De Sabla (BBD) and the Hendricks Canal diversion record (HDC) are both live on CDEC and both absent from buttecreek.org. BBD is the most upstream gauge on the creek; HDC is the PG&E diversion ledger.
The watch list
What this page is watching for
Nine rules · four already authoritative, five need calibration
This is the part to go through with Allan. Four of these rules run off thresholds a public agency already publishes, so they can go live as written. The other five are my proposed numbers — the kind of thing Allan, a CDFW biologist, or a canyon neighbour who has watched the creek for thirty years should set. Getting them right is what turns a dashboard into a warning system.
Worth its own panel
Is the water still being moved?
Diversions and imports, right now
Butte Creek's flow is not just weather. Water is imported into it from the West Branch Feather and taken out of it at several points, and those operations move the creek more than a rainstorm does in summer.
An open question, not a claim
On 3 December 2024 PG&E affirmed it would no longer operate Butte Head Dam or Centerville Head Dam — the change FBC has worked toward for decades.
The CDEC record does not obviously show it. Hendricks Canal has a complete daily series straight through the cutoff, and January–September means sit at 63 cfs (2023), 52 (2024), 50 (2025), 58 (2026) — no step change. The West Branch import tracks the same shape.
That is either a real story or a facility-mapping misunderstanding on my part, and I am not going to publish it as either. It needs someone with the FERC 803 project drawings to say which gauge sits below which dam. If a change did happen, a panel like this is how the org would have seen it the week it happened.
Why any of this matters
The run this creek is famous for
CDFW snorkel & carcass surveys, as published by FBC
The 2021 season is the reason a water-temperature alert is not academic: 21,500 adults returned and 19,773 of them — 92% — died before spawning, in a hot, low-water summer. The 2024 snorkel count was 51. A page that had been watching temperature and flow through those months would have been able to say, at the time, that it was happening.
Under the hood
Where every number comes from
All keyless, all public, all server-side through the Worker
Live. This page reads the feeds above through a Cloudflare Worker that caches for fifteen minutes, so it is showing the creek as it is right now, not a picture of it. The stamp under the headline says how fresh the numbers are and names any source that is not answering. If every feed goes down at once the Worker serves the last good reading and labels it — a creek watch page that goes blank in a storm would be worse than one that tells you how old it is.