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Years of neglect help put Valley's levees at risk

Published in the Modesto Bee on 09/04/05

Years of neglect help put Valley's levees at risk
By Matt Weiser -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PDT Sunday, September 4, 2005

On a frontage road along Interstate 5 near Freeport, a construction crew pumps concrete into steel forms to build a flood wall. Nearby, tractors are pushing dirt to raise a levee by 4 feet. One side of the levee faces Stone Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, an area intended to absorb floodwaters. On the other side, new housing subdivisions are planned. This $85 million project, which is intended to protect south Sacramento from flooding, illustrates the paradox of Central Valley flood control. The project is crucial to protecting existing homes from increasingly vigorous floods. On the other hand, some say it creates a false sense of security that such floods can be avoided.

It's the same paradox that got New Orleans into trouble when Hurricane Katrina struck, causing what may become the worst disaster in American history.

Jeffrey Mount, a member of the state Reclamation Board, which is charged with controlling floods, put it simply. He said there are two kinds of levees: those that have failed, and those that will fail. "It is a fact of life that people see levees as part of a scheme of flood prevention," said Mount, also a geology professor at UC Davis. "Rather, levees are simply flood reduction structures."

In California's Central Valley, even this levee function is becoming increasingly suspect. Some flood experts, in fact, think the Valley is becoming a "perfect storm" of flood problems:

* Levees built on unstable ground out of unknown materials.
* More people moving into new homes behind those levees.
* A changing climate delivering higher sea levels and worse storms.
* State and federal money for levee maintenance declining, making more levees vulnerable to failure.
* Less money and manpower for fixing levee breaks, meaning future floods will be faster and deeper.

It's not a what-if scenario. This is reality, California flood experts say, as real as the waters that buried New Orleans this week.

"These levees are going to fail. They are going to fail more frequently," said Steve Hall, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies.
"I have a real fear the problem will be ignored by policymakers, and we will find ourselves dealing with a very serious problem that will make even Hurricane Katrina look small in comparison."

The Central Valley has 2,600 miles of levees that are vital to flood protection and water quality. Yet the integrity of those levees has been neglected for decades, as described in a January report to the Legislature by the state Department of Water Resources.

Among the problems are a 35 percent reduction in state levee maintenance workers since 1986 and an 80 percent decline in sediment removal from flood channels since 1993.

There are nearly 200 critical erosion sites on the Sacramento River levee system. Yet the report also notes that the criteria used to identify those levee problems were inadequate, so the number of problem sites may be much higher. Money available for flood management has declined to a fraction of what was available just five years ago. All these problems have cropped up since the floods of 1986, an event many considered the Central Valley's wake-up call.

"The system is in crisis today because of decades of neglect, and it can't be fixed tomorrow or in one year," said Les Harder, chief of the division of flood management for the state Department of Water Resources.

The department recently received an additional $9.7 million to hire 27 people for levee maintenance. But, said Harder, "You still need millions of dollars to prepare levees that have deficiencies." The state report calls the Valley's flood risk nothing less than "a ticking time bomb."

Its key recommendations include restricting floodplain development, creating a single Valleywide flood control district to raise money for levee upgrades, and changing the state constitution so levee districts can more easily raise taxes to fund repairs. So far, none of this has been done.

Economist Robert Fountain estimated in 1999 that Sacramento, capital of the nation's fifth-largest economy, could suffer $7.7 billion in direct damages from a flood, and 242,000 jobs would be affected. In contrast, the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency figures the city needs about $1 billion to double its flood protection, both for levee projects and to improve Folsom Dam. This number may increase, but it's still a bargain next to potential flood losses.

"The damages, when you try to add all those numbers up, makes a levee construction project seem like small change," Fountain said. "We really have to view the levees and flood control as a fundamental protection for everything we have."

A major flood in the Central Valley and Delta would bring much bigger economic impacts, because the region serves as a funnel for a domestic water supply serving more than 22 million Californians. A major flood could contaminate this vital water supply for months, wipe out railroads and highways, and submerge millions of acres of farmland.

The Department of Water Resources estimated in its January report that it needs about $2 billion to improve the Central Valley's flood control system (above and beyond Sacramento's needs) and $100 million annually for maintenance.

The department also is undertaking a major study of the Delta to find out if the region should be reconfigured to withstand a major flood.

"What I hope will happen is that people will see the broader implications of what's occurred (in New Orleans), and that we will have some rethinking of state and national priorities," said Sacramento County Supervisor Roger Dickinson.

"We need to devote sufficient federal attention and resources to insuring that we do not have these kinds of national tragedies if they can be avoided."

Most of the Central Valley's levees were originally built not by levee experts, but by farmers to dry out land for crops. Many were built on sand washed out of the Sierra by hydraulic mining, which creates an unstable surface subject to seepage.

Worse, many of the major Sacramento River levees were originally built to scour out that Gold Rush-era sediment. Today that scouring power adds to erosion problems in the levee system.

Many levees have been re-engineered and upgraded to modern standards. But there are unknowns about whether the standards truly match modern flood conditions, and whether the subsequent maintenance is up to snuff.

A big question mark for Sacramento is the rapidly growing Natomas area, where a study is expected to be completed next year to determine if levee upgrades are needed. Though levees have been improved and shored up there, Natomas lies in a deep floodplain, leaving it particularly vulnerable in a levee break.

In urban Sacramento, tremendous progress has been made in upgrading levees in recent years. Today, most of the city enjoys 100-year flood protection, meaning there is a 1-in-100 chance that a flood will overwhelm levees.

But there is still more than $122 million in work to be done in the city on weak spots in Sacramento and American river levees. Much of this is unfunded.

One critical erosion site in Sacramento lies on the east bank of the Sacramento River, just downstream from Miller Park. The Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency had hoped to get $4.9 million from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers this summer to shore up the levee.

"In the current fiscal climate, it's extremely difficult to get funding," said Stein Buer, executive director of SAFCA. "We are competing with projects all over the country, but this is a public-safety priority. If you had a failure and managed to eat through the levee, you'd have water pouring into the whole south Sacramento area."

Money for the project finally came through on Friday, thanks to pressure from Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento. But it was too late for construction to start this year, and now the project must wait through another flood season.

While the needed projects await funding, more homes will be built in the path of floods, not just in Sacramento but also throughout the Central Valley. Mount of the state Reclamation Board said halting this development is a first line of defense that is also the first to be ignored.

"The desire to build homes on floodplains is an irresistible force, greater than the floodwaters of the Sacramento and the tides of the Delta," he said. "Yet this force ensures that in the future, the human suffering will be incalculable, as it currently is in New Orleans."

The Bee's Matt Weiser can be reached at (916) 321-1264 or mweiser@sacbee.com.

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