Experts prepare for next delta levee break

Issue Date: June 15, 2005

By Christine Souza
Assistant Editor

Experts say the next big levee break could be right around the corner. So, one year after a Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta levee unexpectedly gave way and caused millions of gallons of water to flood San Joaquin County farmland, people interested in preventing a similar incident gathered in Stockton to find solutions.

A variety of people‎including water agency officials, water district attorneys, farmers, geologists, engineers, ecologists, legislators and others‎gathered at the University of the Pacific in Stockton last week for the "Delta Levees Workshop" to share information and find answers to avoiding future levee breaks.

"If we were to have picked on June 2 of a year ago which levee might fail, no one in this room would have ever picked the levee that failed, which gives us an indication of the risk and uncertainty we are dealing with," said California Department of Water Resources Director Lester Snow.

Speaking to a standing-room-only crowd, invited guests who have been working on the delta levee issue for at least the past year gave varying points of view regarding the past, present and future of the levee system.

While many ideas were tossed around about how to protect the water conveyance system that is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, speakers cautioned that there is very little funding available for levee improvements or to prepare for future disasters.

State money to aid the repair of delta levees runs out in a year, and federal money that was approved by Congress has not arrived.

"Getting anything done depends on being able to get a funding stream that isn't subject to the whims of appropriations by either the state or federal legislators. Without the funding, you can't do anything," said Alex Hildebrand, a South Delta farmer in Manteca. "I, in principal, agree that you have to come up with something of the beneficiary-pay point of view so that it doesn't depend on appropriations, but that is extremely difficult to do."

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger included some funding for levees in his budget proposal, but it would only put a small dent in a much bigger problem. The Department of Water Resources estimates that fixing all 1,100 miles of levees along delta islands would cost more than $1.3 billion.

"What can be found in the governor's May Revise (of the state's 2005-06 fiscal budget) is a short-term thing. We need to do what we can do in the short run, but we have to figure that this is probably going to take 10 years to make a lot of progress and that goes way beyond the current budget problems," Hildebrand said.

Delta farmer Jim McLeod, Banta-Carbona Irrigation District board president, said that a major benefit that the delta provides is agriculture‎450,000 acres in the delta is dedicated to growing food for the world.

"If you lose the levees, you lose the ability to keep salt out of the pumps. Talk about money spent, the cost of repairs is cheap, cheap to protect the food supply and to protect drinking water for 20 million people," McLeod said.

Aside from the lack of funding, water officials and others emphasized the need to implement an emergency response program.

"We are looking at a three-tiered emergency response program, the first being that Department of Water Resources acts and helps stabilize the emergency," Snow said. "Second, once the flood event has been stabilized there actually will be an assessment performed before we determine how much more the state will be involved, probably based on pre-set criteria."

Snow added that the third part of the program would be that if the state agrees to proceed, it will do so once contract and reimbursement agreements have been developed with other parties.

Although people at the workshop provided different points of view, they all want to achieve the same goal: to prevent a future delta levee break.

"I bet if we polled this room and asked people to write down their vision, we'd have at least two-dozen visions with different emphases on what the delta is and what we need to do to protect it. We have to overcome that. We have to come up with a shared vision," Snow said.

Hildebrand said he thought that the workshop achieved its goal.

"The meeting did a very good job of what it was intended to do, and it was to get a common understanding of the importance and the difficulty of solving this problem and the many facets of it," Hildebrand said.

On the morning of June 3, 2004, a 65-foot breach in a private levee that protects the delta's Upper Jones Tract flooded lower-elevation farmland. The breach expanded to 500 feet and the Middle River, a tributary of the San Joaquin River, flooded an estimated 12,000 acres of farmland. The levee breach caused 160,000 acre-feet of water to flow from farmland of Upper Jones Tract to Lower Jones Tract. Approximately $15 million worth of crops was lost, and the Department of Water Resources reported that the disaster brought an overall price tag of $90 million in damages.

Many repairs have been made and growers affected by the flooding have picked up the pieces and are moving on with farming. Meanwhile, others closely connected to the issue say they hope the levee system will be repaired and that the end result will satisfy all interests. (Watch for a one-year update on recovery of Jones Tract in an upcoming issue of Ag Alert®.)

"I'm confident that we really do have the tools and power to address some of the challenges in the delta today. I know there is going to be a lot of critical and maybe negative attitudes toward the delta levees. But I think overall, with the proper planning and proper teamwork, we can hold this delta together," said Chris Neudeck, civil engineer with Kjeldsen Sinnock & Neudeck Inc.

(Christine Souza is a reporter for Ag Alert. She may be contacted at csouza@cfbf.com.)

Permission for use is granted, however, credit must be made to the California Farm Bureau Federation when reprinting this item. Top