Urban Flooding: Sandy in Sacramento

Hurricane Sandy did a good job showing America that natural disasters are both common and powerful and with a little bad luck, very destructive. Sandy hit the coastline during a high tide so its storm surge was as tall as it could be. This flooded a lot of places, a lot of suburbs and urban areas were lashed by horizontal rain and its drain grates plugged with fallen leaves or other debris. A real mess. They'll be cleaning that up till next spring.

In California we get heavy snow storms in the Sierras, enough to give us 25 feet of snow on the ground in the high Sierra. I've seen 40 feet of snow at Donner Pass and at Mammoth Mountain. That's the cumulative result of many storms but so long as it stays below freezing it doesn't melt till Springtime. Sometimes these snows are interrupted by unexpected warm wet storms coming up from Hawaii in early Spring, so called Pineapple Express events aka Atmospheric Rivers. These storm events nail the Sierras with rain and melt all the snow, all at once, so the rivers flowing down from the Sierras quickly rise to flood stage. If water isn't let out of reservoirs well in advance of the storm (possibly leaving the state with crippling drought if they're wrong) to catch what's coming then emergency overflow lets the floods downstream during the worst possible time, when rivers are all at their peak flood stage.

Pineapple Express

These floods put the aging and not well maintained Levee system under physical strain. Some are already leaking. Others are being eroded by the river and have noticeably slumped. There are many places along Highway 160, which runs along the Sacramento river through the Delta, where the road dips and leans when it is supposed to be flat and level. These are places where additional stress will make the levees fail. Failure of the levees would obviously flood the delta. The undeveloped fields surrounding the Causeway running to Davis is a huge area meant to take overflow from the rivers that meet in Sacramento and push that water out onto a huge flood plain instead of valuable farmlands or homes. And the homes are behind levees too. Interstate 80 goes on and over and down between several levees north of the City before gradually climbing out of flood areas into Citrus Heights and Roseville.

Localized flooding is annoying, mostly caused by leaves in the drains. Levee breaks flood neighborhoods, block roads, and can drown people. The previous Governor Arnold had a serious funding plan in place to repair the levee system till a vote could be taken to do something more serious and durable, but Emergency budget mess, an annual problem, prevented that. The new Governor Moonbeam would rather talk about funding a high speed gerrymander rail system. Levees affecting several million people including the capitol itself, I guess they aren't flashy enough for Moonbeam to care about fixing. A Sandy-level flood event next spring, if it happened this year, would put paid to the levees in Stockton and the Delta and probably Sacramento too. We'd probably see Hwy 160 close, washed away by the raging river, and the Army Corps of Engineers take the blame again. The cost of the damages will be in the billions, mostly because of the homes affected and the people who have to move.

I really wonder if we might all be better served by gradually moving our urban populations, suburban in particular, into rural agricultural towns that are nearly abandoned in the Central Valley and build our businesses there instead of concentrating them in the Bay Area, which pumps its drinking water from downstream of all those sewer systems and agricultural fields. Water treatment plants DO NOT get all that crap out of the water before it goes into the pipes. They very strictly follow Federal regulations, which very specifically DO NOT include common destructive toxins which would be costly or difficult to remove from effluent. Think about that the next time you wash your dishes or drink some water in San Jose or Oakland. Toilet to Tap. Flooding events introduce even more fun things into that water supply. Sometimes it flushes a lot of crap out to sea, which is a good thing. Sometimes it just pushes new chemicals into the system, new toxins spilled, new runoff. We aren't hearing about that from Sandy because most of the flooding is from seawater storm surge or rain from the hurricane. In California, flooded rivers have been recycling wastewater used dozens of times. Around and around.

If the levees break, as they will if they're stressed enough, farmland will absorb much of the flooding. Where homes and neighborhoods flood there will be all sorts of outcry. If its one ethnic group in that neighborhood that gets flooded we'll hear the same claims as we did in New Orleans. Claims of Conspiracy, of racism in the Army Corps of Engineers. Deliberate attack on black or Mexican people. Sigh. The trouble with tough economic times like this, now that we've shipped all our jobs to China, is that finger pointing is the traditional response. The Us-Them divide is human nature. It doesn't matter if its true or not. The finger pointing will happen. Mob mentality, and rioting, well, they cause repercussions. It can spiral out of control.

In light of that kind of violent result, fixing the levees so there's one less excuse for race riots looks relatively cheap. Providing community organizers with information, well in advance, about how flood waters are handled, and where overflow will go, is key. Providing them with the means to identify failing sections of levee so it can be repaired also helps, as does legitimizing their positions and making the organizers elected gives them reason to follow the law and motivated to see those laws in turn followed by their communities to gain the benefits. This cuts down on the rioting.

Scientific research into erosion shows that levees tend to be self defeating anyway, but spillway areas help a lot. There's no substitute for a flood plain. After decades of annual flooding in old Sacramento, the city largely gave up and paved over the first floor and turned the second into the street level. There are still places where you can see the original street level 15 feet down, in Old Town Sacramento. Oakland did this too, for the same reason, thanks to high tides the correspond to springtime floods of the Sacramento River. You see the waters rise in Marin as well, same reason.

When the next Ice Age restarts, possibly in our lifetimes or our grandkids, I don't know if we'll see bigger floods, smaller ones, or roughly the same. Less snow will melt than falls, however. The summer snowpacks will rise, perhaps gradually, perhaps not so gradually on the North-Eastern face of mountains, in the high country. Perched aquifers will fill and probably freeze into permafrost while other parts will continue to flow out and down, feeding streams and the trees living along them. We might see a surge of natural reforestation. We will probably see some changes in wind patterns. Maybe the North Wind will change its direction, going inland. Maybe it will get stronger, pushing cold water further South. Maybe it will weaken, allowing more Pineapple express events to fall on the Sierra during more of the year, lowering summer temps just enough that the snow packs don't melt, allowing the accumulations to grow into glaciers again. There are still several glaciers in California, in the Sierras, high up.

While the imagery of Venice flooding captures the imagination of iPhone users everywhere, no amount of Carbon Trading is going to stop the return of the Ice Age. I'm sorry. Its not. The whole planet is locked in that cycle. This happens to be one of the warm cycles. Light skinned people like me are specially evolved to living close to or on the ice. We get our Vitamin D showing less skin, and we resist frostbite through a few tricks in our blood and noses. When they get around to curing my Diabetes, I have every intention of taking up snowshoeing and cold weather photography. The Eastern Sierra are my kind of Lonely. Maybe I'll take up Telemarking (real cross country skiing) if I can find friends tough enough to keep up with me. Or maybe I'll do the more modern but noisy snowmobiling, possibly electric. I like my Western horizons big. You have to go out into it for that to properly sink in.

Easterners can adapt to increasingly vicious snow storms coming off the Arctic and more hurricanes thanks to living so close to the Gulf Stream current, but here in California I wonder if we'll be seeing hurricanes of our own or more Pineapple Express events? Or will we watch the storms of the Triple Junction (Eureka) drifting South bringing back that 125 inches of rain a year we had a few thousand years ago? The increased water supply will wash out roads and levees, and flood Sacramento something fierce before filling the Sacramento river delta with migratory bird habitat, once the island levees fail. Davis will be a great place to live to observe that being 40 feet above sea level if I remember correctly, yet close to the flood plains and Delta. That's the main reason for the remaining groves of Redwood trees, btw. They're flood tolerant. They love water. High Ground matters. If you're dumb enough to buy a house below a river, should I pity you and be forced to pay to rebuild it or should I point and laugh?

The levees around Sacramento and Stockton were engineered for specific levels of storm event, for certain heights of flooding, and for certain frequencies of maintenance which haven't been done. When the levees fail under the right/wrong levels of stress, we can point fingers but we're still left with the question of what to do next. Do you rebuild a place that's already flooded? Do you move to higher ground because we, as a nation, are broke? Do we fix the levees and keep our fingers crossed that a similar flood event won't break a levee somewhere else? At what point do we admit that living below our rivers might be a bad idea? And that's the real question. When do we take responsibility for our bad decisions?