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Concern over levee collapses growing As soil blows away, islands sink up to 4 inches each year

Published in the Stockton Record on 12/30/04

Concern over levee collapses growing
As soil blows away, islands sink up to 4 inches each year

By Dana Nichols
Record Staff Writer
Published Thursday, December 30, 2004

STOCKTON -- Nearly every microscopic particle of brown dust on top of your refrigerator is a sign that the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta is doomed. That doom is also present -- though invisible -- in the Delta breeze that sways treetops most summer afternoons in Stockton, scientists say.

That's because the rich, peat soils of the Delta islands are blowing away. About a quarter of it is the visible particles familiar to Stockton residents as dust. The rest converts directly to carbon dioxide as it is exposed to air and is broken down by bacteria.

As the soil blows away, the islands are getting lower, by up to 4 inches a year in some places. Parts of some Delta islands are now more than 26 feet below sea level and still sinking.

The sinking islands, combined with rising sea levels, earthquake risks and the long odds against the government spending the billions of dollars necessary to build ever-higher levees, mean it is inevitable that sooner or later a lot of Delta levees will collapse and flood a lot of Delta islands, said Jeffrey F. Mount, a professor of geology at the University of California, Davis.

Mount says the odds are pretty good that the collapses will come soon. He calculates the chances as about two in three that multiple islands will go down at once before 2050.

That's a problem, because thousands of people earn their livelihood farming the Delta, and millions of people from San Joaquin County to Los Angeles depend on water from the Delta for drinking and watering their lawns. The collapse of several islands could suck ocean salt water into the Delta, stir tons of organic muck into the water and prevent the flow of clean drinking water to export pumps near Tracy.

Despite more than a century of levee breaks and repeatedly flooded islands, California water politics makes it difficult even to talk about the Delta's fragility, Mount said.

In recent months, he has taken his predictions of doom to state water officials and to CALFED -- the consortium of state, local and federal agencies trying to secure clean water supplies and restore California's rivers and the Delta.

Some Delta-policy insiders see Mount as little more than a stealth agent trying to promote a peripheral canal -- a way to pipe water around the Delta so Southern California could get clean water even if the Delta waterways collapse.

At stake is the commitment of state and local authorities to maintain Delta levees -- something they have to do as long as water is sent south across the Delta to export pumps near Tracy.

So even some who spend their lives working below sea level discount Mount's gloomy predictions.

"You can have all the science you want and have all the predictions you want, but we've figured out ways here on McDonald Island to preserve the lands that we have," said Ed Zuckerman, whose family has been farming in the Delta for generations.

One way to preserve that operation is to make sure the state and federal governments do what is necessary to maintain levees.

"It is not rocket science. We need material, and we need rock, and we need to bolster the levees," Zuckerman said.

McDonald Island is somewhere between 13 and 16 feet below sea level, according to a 2000 study by Mount and other geologists.

Zuckerman is not naïve about the situation. He watched the island flood in 1982 when a levee broke, and later that year he risked his life fighting a flood on another island.

"I got sucked through a levee break on Mildred Island when it broke on a tugboat," Zuckerman said.

"We were surveying the break from the tugboat when about 400 feet of levee peeled away in four seconds. ... We were sucked through backwards. The boat almost capsized," he said.

The latest levee break happened June 3 on Jones Tract near Holt. It's still not clear what caused a 400-foot section of levee to break and flood the 12,000-acre island. It took state officials six months to pump the island dry once the levee was repaired and the water was stuck inside the sunken island. Water still is leaking through the plugged levee, farmers say.

State Sen. Michael Machado, D-Linden, formerly chaired the Senate's Agriculture and Water Resources Committee. He said Mount's warning implies that a peripheral canal would be the way to protect drinking-water supplies for Southern California.

But building such a canal would make it possible for Sacramento leaders to quit maintaining the Delta whenever the "political winds" change, because Southern California's water no longer would be at stake, Machado said.

So even if science says it is the riskier strategy, water officials are committed for now to shipping drinking water through the Delta's maze of channels. In fact, the CALFED agreement now in effect commits them for seven years to study only a through-Delta transfer of Sacramento River water and not to look at other options.

And yet Machado admits he and other lawmakers have been unable to deliver enough money to improve and maintain Delta levees.

Machado has written bills and bond measures over the past decade that steered tens of millions of dollars to levee repairs. But the work that needs to be done measures in the billions, and the federal government hasn't offered its share, he said.

"There really isn't the money, the public money," he said.

Both Machado and Zuckerman say they expect changes in the Delta, including shifts away from today's farming methods to rice growing or wildlife marshes that could replenish organic matter on the islands.

Mount, however, says such solutions would take thousands of years to restore the Delta even under the best conditions.

Mount insists he is not an agent promoting a peripheral canal. He just wants officials to plan for the likelihood of a massive Delta levee failure before it happens. He says there are other ways to deliver drinking water to Southern California, including taking water from Sierra rivers south of the Delta. Another option is to flood some Delta islands deliberately and engineer a more-robust cross-Delta channel by focusing resources on fewer levees.

"Everybody has this notion that there is only one alternative, which is a peripheral canal," Mount said. "There are an infinite variety of other alternatives if everyone will just discuss them."

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* To reach reporter Dana Nichols, phone (209) 546-8295 or e-mail dnichols@recordnet.com

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