Pajaro Flood Is the Latest Sign of River Levee Risks During Storms

PAJARO, Calif. — It began as a trickle seeping through a 74-year-old dirt levee in Northern California, droplets and drips from the Pajaro River, which swelled again Friday night from rain. Then puddles bubbled up behind the dike walls and spread out into dark fields of strawberries and lettuce. Four miles downstream the farming community of Pajaro slept.

According to Mark Strudley, executive director of the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency, sandbag crews swarmed to the scene in “full flood control” within half an hour. But in the latest example of California’s vast and aging infrastructure being tested by this year’s onslaught of extreme winter weather, crews couldn’t keep up.

As they retreated, the river burst through the worn levee with a mighty roar, inundating highways and farms, inundating the entire city of Pajaro and forcing thousands of residents in Santa Cruz and Monterey counties to flee.

“I have to start from scratch,” Antonio Arroyo, a 58-year-old farm worker, said Tuesday as he sat at an evacuation center at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds with about 300 displaced people from the same community known for strawberry picking. He had been sleeping in a Honda minivan when firefighters rescued him from the rising waters in Pajaro; The donated red sneakers, blue jeans, sweater and plaid shirt he wore were “all I have,” he said.

As a fresh atmospheric flow ravaged California on Tuesday, triggering flood alerts and alerts stretching from Southern California to the Oregon border, water experts warned the recent storms could be just a prelude to an even more challenging spring.

The landscape is already oversaturated after a winter that set or approached records for precipitation. Heavy rain hit the Los Angeles Basin on Tuesday afternoon, where officials warned residents not to drive through flooded streets, and firefighters said they rescued eight people and eight dogs from the San Gabriel River in Azusa late Monday.

Strong winds knocked down power lines and tall trees in the Bay Area and Central Coast. More than 350,000 utility customers were temporarily without power Tuesday, most of them Pacific Gas and Electric customers in hard-hit northern California, according to Poweroutage.us, which tracks power outages. Gusts of up to 74 miles per hour were recorded at San Francisco International Airport, where operations were briefly halted after the FAA issued a ground stop.

According to federal statistics, more than 1,500 dams and about 14,000 miles of dikes help control California’s waterways. And this year’s storms cap the driest three years on record, noted Gary Lippner, deputy director of dam safety and flood management at the state water resources department.

“California,” he said, “has had true climate whiplash this year.”

Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow specializing in water at the Public Policy Institute of California, a research organization, said the cumulative effect of this winter’s back-to-back storms has left California in “unexplored territory,” particularly in the southern Sierra Nevada , where the water content of the snow cover was the largest ever measured.

As snowpack melts, he said, and dam managers are forced to dump water from fast-filling reservoirs to make room for incoming rain, flood-prone communities could be overwhelmed.

“It’s worth remembering that almost all of our flood defense infrastructure is more than half a century old and designed for the climate of the past,” Mr Mount said in an email on Tuesday.

“While we have had many discussions about adapting to future droughts – and are making progress – we are still in the early stages of considering how to adapt to major floods.”

Across the state, winter storms since January have strained the state’s infrastructure, particularly in low-lying, river-crossed inland areas. Communities are still recovering along the Cosumnes River near Sacramento, where more than a dozen levee failures inundated streets and submerged homes during storms around New Year’s Day.

North of the state Capitol, the authorities that maintain the watershed around Sacramento International Airport said they realized their equipment was so old that the manufacturer no longer wore it when one of their pumps exploded during a strong storm this year Parts they needed to fix it.

“We managed to get it back online with a $600 part we found on eBay,” said Kevin L. King, the general manager of Reclamation District No. 1000, an agency set up to maintain levees and protect cropland from flooding. “We were within 12 to 24 hours of telling the airport to divert flights as the runways would have been flooded with water.”

Mr Strudley said federal, state and local officials had talked about the need to shore up water infrastructure around the Pajaro River since the 1960s, but property values ​​in the area were so low that they were the threshold for repairs did not meet the cost-benefit formula used by the federal government and Army Corps of Engineers.

That approach, which systematically disadvantaged poorer communities, has started to change, he said. A major project to upgrade and strengthen local levees, estimated to cost more than $500 million, was underway when the storm hit, and the flooding has prompted local officials to start talks with the federal government about speeding up the planned 2025 groundbreaking record, called Mr. Strudley.

Even so, he added, the project is expected to take eight to 10 years.

In Watsonville, across the river from her community of Pajaro, displaced farm workers said it was unclear how long they could keep their homes and the fields they depend on for their paychecks underwater. Some said they lived in their cars for days, not knowing where to go.

The working-class, agricultural region lies between the surfing beaches of Santa Cruz and the affluent Monterey Peninsula, known for its world-class Pebble Beach golf links. Near the shore of the Pacific Ocean, often shrouded in fog, workers in the Pajaro Valley pick strawberries and harvest lettuce and artichokes enjoyed by the rest of the nation.

Marina Hernandez, 31, said she received a knock on the door just after midnight Saturday from a county worker who said her family had an hour to evacuate. She called her husband, who worked a night shift about 20 miles away at a garlic packing plant in Gilroy, and then quickly gathered important documents like birth certificates and Social Security cards.

But she said county officials didn’t tell her where to find shelter, so she and her family lived in their pickup truck for a few days. “All they said was, ‘Get out! Exit!’ But they didn’t tell us where to go. Nothing.”

Eventually turned away from the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds because the evacuation center was overwhelmed, she found her way Tuesday afternoon to a small lodging set up in the gymnasium of a veterans’ facility in Watsonville.

Ms. Hernandez sat on a cot with her 14-month-old daughter while her 5-year-old son played with his phone on another cot. Ms. Hernandez said she was sad and frustrated and had no idea about the state of her home.

Weeks could pass, she said, before she and her family could return. Until then, she said, “There’s nothing I can do.”

Jill Cowan contributed reporting from Los Angeles.