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By Greg Lucas, Chronicle Sacramento Bureau
Friday, September 9, 2005
Sacramento -- New Orleans ' levee ruptures have sparked fresh worries about the Central Valley 's 1,600 miles of deteriorating levees, which protect half a million people and property valued at $47 billion.
A "ticking time bomb" is how a January assessment by the state describes the network of levees, dams, bypasses and weirs that protects the valley and Sacramento , the most flood-vulnerable metropolitan area in the country.
The fuse keeps getting shorter as state and federal governments reduce investment in maintenance and improvement costs that are pegged at $2 billion over the next decade.
California has waited a year for $90 million in federal money, a fraction of what's needed to shore up levees in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. If it's lucky, California will receive a third of the money next year.
" New Orleans should be a wake-up call, particularly when you remember it had a much higher level of flood protection than Sacramento ," said Rita Sudman, executive director of the nonprofit Water Education Foundation.
After floods in January 1997 caused water to lap levee tops in Sacramento and drove more than 120,000 Californians from their homes, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the state made widespread improvements to the valley's flood control system.
"The levees are in much better shape than they were before, but there's still work to be done," said Ray Costa, an engineer at Kleinfelder Inc. in Sacramento . "If you restore 99 percent and leave 1 percent, and that's the 1 percent that breaks, you get just as wet."
In most cases flood control projects are split between state, federal and local governments. Federal money usually represents 70 percent of the cost. Levees in the flood control system are built to federal standards.
But repeated budget shortfalls have sharply decreased the state's flood control spending, particularly on maintenance.
For example, between 1983 and 1991, the state removed about 10 million cubic yards of sediment obstructing various flood control channels. >From 1994 to 2004, less than 3 million cubic yards were removed -- a decrease of nearly 80 percent, according to a state Department of Water Resources report issued in January warning of the flood system's perilous condition.
The state spent $14 million on Central Valley flood protection during the fiscal year that just ended, and the only state money being spent on delta levee maintenance is the last $19 million of $70 million contained in a state bond measure.
A transportation bond that state lawmakers expect to take up next year contains $1 billion for inspections and strengthening of flood control levees. If approved, it would appear on the November 2006 ballot.
In 2004, Congress authorized $90 million for levee improvements in the delta. The money has not been appropriated yet, and in their versions of the federal 2006 budget, the House proposes spending $35 million of the $90 million, the Senate $37 million.
How much money California ultimately gets next year depends on how much Congress sets aside to alleviate Katrina's devastation, observers say.
U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked the Army Corps of Engineers in a letter how it plans to spend the money that was approved last year. But the corps has yet to tackle that question because it hasn't received any funding for studies.
"If we don't address this problem, we may suffer the same fate as Louisiana -- it's just a matter of time," Feinstein said in the letter.
Part of Sacramento 's vulnerability comes from its location -- at the confluence of the American and Sacramento Rivers . One of its fastest-growing areas, Natomas, is a basin ringed by 40 miles of levees.
Downtown has flooded many times over the years. In 1861, Leland Stanford was rowed to the Capitol to take his oath of office.
In 1997, if a storm had not shifted course away from the at-capacity American River , the city probably would have flooded again.
Most flood control professionals believe the biggest threat to the city comes from the American River watershed. Unlike the Sacramento River , the American has no bypasses or weirs to siphon off overflow.
There are a number of dams on the Sacramento and the rivers that feed it, Shasta and Oroville among them.
Only one dam protects those downstream on the American, and it wasn't designed to do the job. Folsom dam was built with the expectation there would be another dam upstream in Auburn . Attempts over the years to build that dam have failed.
Now, the corps of engineers proposes to raise the dam more than 7 feet to increase capacity and add two new outlets and enlarge the dam's existing eight so that it can pump out water faster in anticipation of a major storm.
"We will continue to improve the strength and integrity of the levee system, but a central part of our strategy is to temper the flows that come down the American River ," said Stein Buer, executive director of the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency. "Modifying Folsom Dam is the only practical tool for doing so."
Raising the dam is still in the design phase. Bids from contractors to enlarge the outlets came in higher than the $229 million Congress authorized for the project. The corps is negotiating with bidders to bring the price down. If those talks fail, the entire project would be redesigned, a process that could take three years.
Levees are being raised and channels deepened on several Sacramento creeks to buttress the city's southern flank. But the money to make wholesale improvements -- and keep up with necessary maintenance -- is nowhere in sight.
"It's hard to be proactive in government. Everyone says, "Oh, that can wait,' " said Carol Whiteside, president of the Great Valley Center in Modesto . "There's no credit for averting a disaster, only credit for fixing it."
E-mail Greg Lucas at glucas@sfchronicle.com
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