Who deserves a levee? The fight to save California communities from flooding

The tiny city of Hamilton Metropolis sits within the direct path of the mighty Sacramento River, muddy and swollen by this week’s storms.

However a brand new $125 million levee system – the product of the neighborhood’s 35-year-long struggle to make one thing large from one thing damaged — is defending its 1,900 farmworkers and their households.

This week, as a levee failure drowned the city of Pajaro, Hamilton Metropolis’s river additionally overflowed. However then it gently unfold throughout a landscaped floodplain, dropping its fury. The levee held agency. The system, the primary of its kind within the state, provides a brand new paradigm for the way to reply to flood danger in an period of harmful local weather change.

“It’s doing what it’s imagined to do,” stated former hearth chief Jose Puente, who proudly watched the undertaking excel in its large check.

There are 1,758 levee techniques all through California listed within the U.S. Military Corps of Engineers database, constructed to carry again rivers and defend cities, houses, companies and crops from flooding. Sixty years previous on common, many are previous their design lives. However the highest precedence for changing the buildings is awarded to prosperous city areas, not small, rural and deprived communities.

The story of this city, two hours north of Sacramento, exhibits the problem of defending these modest locations. Underneath a federal formulation that weighs property values, the price of constructing a levee to guard a small neighborhood far exceeds the financial profit.

Like Pajaro, Hamilton Metropolis lives on the sting of a risky river. Like Pajaro, its residents are largely low-income Latinos. Like Pajaro, it repeatedly sought federal funds to repair its levee, and was repeatedly rebuffed.

However there are variations, and that’s what saved Hamilton Metropolis. A group of six farmers, most of them now lifeless, began the development marketing campaign a long time in the past. It stayed unified and relentless in its focus. Volunteers, supported by homespun “Levee Festivals,” made 15 journeys to Washington, D.C., knocking on doorways in Congress to win the hearts of political heavyweights reminiscent of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, former Sen. Barbara Boxer and others.

A Bay Space Information Group evaluation of the U.S. Military Corps’ Nationwide Levee Database discovered that 48 California levee techniques are categorized as average to very excessive danger, 743 miles out of 5,400 whole levee miles within the state. In best peril, it discovered, are 4 levees within the Sacramento Valley: one in Natomas, alongside the Sacramento River; two alongside the American River, above Sacramento, and the fourth alongside the Feather River, threatening the cities of Yuba Metropolis, Dwell Oak, Gridley and Biggs.

Many have been improved over the previous decade, however others don’t meet trendy engineering requirements, in accordance with the 2019 Report Card for California’s Infrastructure by the American Society of Civil Engineers, which provides the state’s levees a “D” ranking. They will’t address the pressures of a altering local weather, strict environmental laws, rigorous upkeep wants, up to date security requirements and rising development prices.

“We have now to repeatedly put money into California’s levee infrastructure. In any other case, it goes away. It fails,” stated Glendale civil engineer Yazdan Emrani, chair of the Society’s infrastructure coverage committee.

However who deserves safety? Whereas the accountability to stop floods lies with native communities, the funds to interchange levees come largely from state and federal budgets. The federal government can’t afford to interchange each levee. With fierce competitors for cash, tasks have to be prioritized.

To win funding, a city should show that for each greenback spent on the undertaking, there’s at the very least a greenback of profit. Whereas the impacts of six elements — wholesome and resilient ecosystems; sustainable financial growth; floodplains; public security; environmental justice; and watershed — are weighed, a neighborhood’s financial worth weighs closely, as a result of it’s straightforward to measure and examine tasks, he stated.

“The methodology measures: ‘How a lot is it going to price? And the way a lot are we going to save lots of?’ ” stated flood professional Scott Shapiro of the Sacramento regulation agency Downey Model, who serves as common counsel for the Central Valley Flood Safety Board.

This cost-benefit method is way more equitable than the historic custom of “earmarking” funds, the place highly effective members of Congress steered cash to their pet tasks, he stated. Nevertheless it favors extra affluent areas.

San Jose, for example, has 100-year flood safety from the Guadalupe River, because of a $350 million undertaking from Interstates 280 to 880. A more moderen $256 million undertaking from the Kids’s Discovery Museum south to Blossom Hill Highway protects in opposition to the higher river. On the peak of final Tuesday’s storm, the river’s channel was crammed to solely 20% of capability.

Smaller however fast-growing locations, just like the Central Valley city of Lathrop, can afford to “self-fund” plans by way of growth charges, property taxes and particular assessments. Dwelling to the dear actual property of Tesla’s large “megapack” battery manufacturing facility, a brand new VA hospital, two rail strains, the I-5 Interstate freeway and burgeoning subdivisions, Lathrop has positioned itself to win authorities assist for a levee so sturdy that it’ll defend in opposition to a mighty 200-year flood.

However for small agricultural cities, the chances are stacked in opposition to them.

In Pajaro, “it’s been an actual wrestle to maneuver the undertaking ahead with the Military Corps,” stated Mark Strudley, govt director of the Pajaro Regional Flood Administration Company.

Pajaro’s issues began 50 years in the past with a foul levee design. An enchancment plan was proposed, then rejected within the Seventies by the area’s civic leaders and farmers, who resisted promoting their land. There was uncared for repairs within the Nineteen Eighties and Nineties. Lastly, in 2019, the Company secured $400 million in federal funding to rebuild the levee. [The start of construction was 1-2 years away when a relentless series of storms hit this winter.

Hamilton City’s levee was even worse. Built from sand in 1906 by the Holly Sugar Corporation to protect its sugar beet processing plant, since demolished, it was eroding. The town flooded in 1974 and was dangerously threatened in 1983, 1986, 1995, 1997 and 1998.

“Our farmers banded together and said ‘We need a solution. This has to change. We’re losing our crops. We’re losing our jobs. We’re losing our homes,’ ” said Lee Ann Grigsby-Puente, a local businesswoman and volunteer president of the effort, called Reclamation District 2140.

But the obstacles were great.

“The cost of the project dwarfed the value of nearby property and structures, so it made it nearly impossible to justify federal participation,” explained Paul Bruton of the U.S. Army Corps.

Meetings with officials were infuriating. “They told us: ‘You’ve got to help yourself before we can help you,’” recalled Jose Puente, Lee Ann’s husband.  “OK,” he vowed. “We’re going to be a thorn in your butt.”

So the town recruited donors and the best carnitas cooks in town to help raise funds for lawyers, lobbyists and annual trips to Washington, D.C.

“Wherever we could get in the door to talk about our project we went,” said Grigsby-Puente, dubbed “The Queen of Levees” by U.S. Rep. John Garamendi. “There was a constant push.”

Almost imperceptibly, the tide began shifting. Faced with climate change, funders were increasingly willing to consider nature-based systems.

Encouraged, Hamilton City hatched a new plan. Partnering with The Nature Conservancy, it reimagined what the project could be. Rather than confining the angry river, it would give it more room. The levee could be moved far from the river’s edge. A wide floodplain could create habitat and let the river widen.

Seeing proof of both environmental and economic benefits, the Corps agreed to fund most of the project. State and other organizations paid for the rest.

“It seemed like it took forever. We wanted to quit many times. But perseverance — plain old stubbornness — kept us going,” said Grisby-Puente.

Facing a week of more rain, the town rests easy. But it is haunted by Pajaro’s devastation, reminding it of what could have been.

“Our heart just breaks for Pajaro,” she said. “Because we know we know what it’s like.”