Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) spent a decade developing world-class modeling and monitoring capabilities to pinpoint factors behind the success of Sonoma’s riverbank filtration system. They were turning their attention to investigating the potential impact of extreme events, such as storms and wildfires, when disaster struck. Suddenly, their experimental approaches to predicting how the system would respond to hypothetical situations are being used to explore real-life perturbations.