Flood Risk Looms in Our Own Capital

For many Americans, the silver lining in the New Orleans disaster is that it confirms some cherished stereotypes about Southerners in general and Louisianans in particular.

Bunch of corrupt, shortsighted crackers. Where else would people be dumb enough to live under the shadow of crumbling levees and do almost nothing to keep themselves safe? Where else would communities gamble that infrastructure serving millions of people won’t be blown away by a predictable storm?

Um, how about forward-looking, high-tech California?

“If you want a city that might look like New Orleans one of these days, look at Sacramento,” Les Harder told me.

Harder is acting deputy director for public safety at the state Department of Water Resources, which oversees the 1,600 miles of levees that provide flood control in the Central Valley and protect highways, aqueducts and pumping stations in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

This year, the agency submitted a bill to modernize flood planning and levee maintenance and to deliver a more stable revenue stream for local levee maintenance. Over time, the bill was stripped of its key provisions, including a mandate that property owners in the flood zone carry flood insurance. What remained was a call for the DWR to take inventory of all flood protection facilities and set a schedule for revising the Central Valley’s inaccurate flood plain maps.

That version came up for a vote in the Legislature soon after Hurricane Katrina made landfall. “Given the sobering reminder of what a major flood can do,” Harder says, “we were very optimistic that this rather modest bill would get passed.”

It failed. Supporters say that there wasn’t time in the last days of the legislative session to give it the attention it required.

The real mystery is why the Legislature needs a fresh reminder of the urgency of flood control. California experienced its own horrendous flood in 1997, when storm-driven levee failures forced 120,000 residents out of homes from Sacramento to almost as far south as Fresno. Last year, a huge levee in the delta gave way for no apparent reason (other than old age), inundating 12,000 acres of farmland, closing a major highway and posing a threat to Southern California’s supply of fresh water. The bill for emergency response, property damage and repairs comes to $100 million.

Such events, apparently, fade swiftly from the human mind. Indeed, the governmental response to the California flood may be a useful mark against which to measure the promises and pledges being offered to New Orleans. By the end of February 1997, six weeks after the Northern California disaster, the flood zone had been visited by squadrons of politicians from all levels of government. Gov. Pete Wilson appointed a Flood Emergency Action Team to draft long-term strategies. The Army Corps of Engineers spent $45 million repairing 35 levees. Bond measures were floated and new-fangled levee designs cascaded from drawing boards.

And yet, like a passing storm leaving nothing behind but a stupefied populace, the determination soon evaporated. The DWR reported this year that its maintenance staff had shrunk to 53, down from 81 in 1986. Thanks to funding constraints, the volume of sediment removed annually from weirs and other control structures has fallen by 80%. The vegetation cleared from clogged flood channels by state crews dropped from 7,000 acres a year to barely 1,000 acres.

In the 1980s, state and federal agencies repaired eroded levees as they occurred; today, there’s a backlog of 200 sites. Sacramento, Harder says, has the lowest level of flood protection of any major city in the U.S. -- perhaps one-third of what New Orleans had, relative to its risk.

As a measure of public complacency, consider that the residential population of the Central Valley flood zone has boomed -- from 1.7 million residents in 1980 to more than 3 million now. Local planning boards approve new developments at a relentless clip. Sometimes they console themselves with the thought that they’re requiring builders to comply with existing flood plain maps, but they must know that those maps are woefully outdated in terms of the extent and severity of the floods they forecast. If those homes get washed out by levee failures, the state’s legal liability could run to tens of billions of dollars.

The levee system is an ancient patchwork. Portions date to the 1800s, when they were devised to wash away mining sediments accumulating in the Sacramento River.

Equally archaic is the financing of levee repair and maintenance. Currently, scores of maintenance districts assess property owners within their boundaries for work within the districts. Any assessment hike requires a two-thirds vote. But property owners know that work they pay for may largely benefit landowners elsewhere, so they’re sometimes disinclined to pay. “There are very perverse economic incentives” in the system, says Mike Hardesty, president of the California Central Valley Flood Control Assn., which comprises 80 maintenance districts.

What’s truly perverse is the failure to recognize that the levees must be a statewide financial responsibility. They safeguard the water supply for 27 million Southern Californians, highways connecting one end of the state to the other and irreplaceable riparian habitats.

Upgrading the Central Valley system to a level commensurate with the value of what it protects will cost an estimated $2 billion -- well beyond the fiscal capabilities of Central Valley levee districts, and coincidentally about as much as it would have cost to build the New Orleans levees to withstand a Category 5 hurricane.

The consequences of penny-pinching on the Gulf Coast have earned worldwide scorn for the decision makers involved. If California doesn’t take a lesson from New Orleans, that scorn may someday be directed at us.

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Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.