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From Town Tools. For the current version, visit https://www.towntools.org/bakersfield-california-us/how-full-is-isabella
Lake Isabella is the reservoir on the Kern River, about 40 miles up-canyon northeast of Bakersfield, behind the two dams the Army Corps of Engineers operates. How full it is shapes what water is available downstream — and it's the upstream half of the story the dry riverbed through town tells. This reads the live daily figures from the state's data service.
25%
143,786 acre-feet of gross pool
Latest daily figure, October 11, 2026 (yesterday) · 568,100 acre-feet gross pool
Down about 3,400 acre-feet over the past 6 days.
CDEC figures are provisional — collected automatically and subject to later revision — and the daily figure usually lags a day or two, so the date above is the day it was read for, not today.
Live · . Live storage from California’s Data Exchange Center (CDEC), station ISB, daily reservoir storage sensor. Provisional data.
What this does and doesn’t tell you
This is how much water the reservoir is holding — not a promise of water in any particular canal, river or tap downstream, which depends on releases, rights and diversions. It is a provisional reading, not an official determination; the operators linked below decide what the water is used for.
Worth knowing
Why the Kern is dry through Bakersfield
Water released from Lake Isabella flows down the Kern to the "First Point of Measurement" near Hart Park, where it is gauged before being diverted into canals for Central Valley farms and city supply — the City of Bakersfield holds rights to about a quarter of the river's yield measured there. That's why the bed through the middle of town is usually dry: in a typical year the river only reaches downtown in the wettest stretches, roughly one year in five. So a full or empty Isabella is not the same question as whether there's water in the channel you can see.
A 150-year water fight, now at the state Supreme Court
Who gets the Kern's water has been litigated since Lux v. Haggin in the 1880s. The current case, Bring Back the Kern v. City of Bakersfield (California Supreme Court No. S290840), asks whether enough water must be left in the river to keep fish alive below the diversions. The court agreed to hear it in July 2025 and it is still under review — no decision yet.
The dam that had to be rebuilt
For safety reasons the reservoir was held to about 361,000 acre-feet from 2006 on. The Corps' Isabella Dam Safety Modification Project — raising the main and auxiliary dams by 16 feet and adding a new emergency spillway — finished in 2022 and restored the reservoir to its full 568,100 acre-foot capacity. The percentages here are measured against that restored gross pool.