Flooding teaches hard lessons
We just returned from a marathon road trip to Eugene, Ore.
Friday night to Tuesday afternoon, 1,500 miles, bad road food and
good road food. It rained, it snowed, and
– briefly – the sun shone on impossibly green landscapes.
We just returned from a marathon road trip to Eugene, Ore. Friday night to Tuesday afternoon, 1,500 miles, bad road food and good road food. It rained, it snowed, and – briefly – the sun shone on impossibly green landscapes.
But that’s not the news. The stunning revelation for all three of us accompanying one another on this springtime safari is what California’s soggy spring means.
We are awash in water.
“Wet” is something that’s difficult to understand in southern Santa Clara and San Benito Counties. We live in a temperate desert, with Hollister receiving an average of just 13 inches a year, and some locales receiving less than half of that in a typical year.
But as we traversed the Sacramento Valley, river after river had spilled its banks. Ships in Stockton were filling their holds with rice produced in the Sacramento Valley. As we passed north of Sacramento, flooded fields of rice stretched to the horizon, a staggering monoculture that almost defies comprehension.
In far northern California, snow remains as low as 3,000 feet. When the skies briefly opened, the titanic presence of Mt. Shasta was sheathed in a glowing blanket of snow. We were reminded – again – how vast this state is, and how vast its array of landscapes and climates. It’s difficult to conceive that Shasta shares an address with Gilroy and Hollister.
As the Sierra and Cascade ranges begin their spring melt soon, things are bound to get wetter, because most of the state’s reservoirs are at or very near capacity.
That’s perilous, to be sure, for those whose homes are in low lying areas of the state.
More than a century ago, California commissioned the first comprehensive evaluation of its waterways. The report concluded that there are two types of levees: those that have failed and those that will fail.
Flooding in the San Joaquin Valley last week would seem to bear that notion out, as small communities were quickly inundated after private levees failed.
The Sacramento Bee this week advocated flooding an area of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The 4,000-acre island near Lathrop is known as the Stewart Tract. A levee failure in 1997 flooded it once. The Stewart Tract lies along a portion of the river that is unnaturally confined, thus forming a bottleneck that causes flood waters to back upstream. Using the area as a buffer would increase flood capacity tenfold, but there’s a hitch.
Today, fewer than a dozen farmhouses are on the island, but a British corporation has big plans for the Stewart Tract. They hope to build 15,000 homes there.
Fifteen thousand homes located below river level, and protected by a berm that is certain to fail some day. That’s plain crazy.
California commissioned its water study after devastating floods resulted in widespread loss of property and life. California’s rich Central Valley has the habit of reverting to a seasonal lake from time to time, and no number of levees has changed that.
It seems we’ve learned little in the last 125 years.
Mark Paxton is publisher of The Pinnacle. His e-mail address is mp*****@pi**********.com.
