But to lay blame on one entity is ignoring the complexity of the problem, according to a group in California that studied the aftermath in New Orleans. The group sees some of the same complexities in its own backyard and fears that those factors could conspire to re-create the horror of Katrina, or worse, in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
After analyzing Katrina’s aftermath, the University of California (UC), Berkeley’s Center for Catastrophic Risk Management turned its sights on the delta and embarked on a project that thoroughly examines its history, importance to California and vulnerabilities. After a year of GIS mapping and interviews with the multitude of players, the center confirmed what it thought: The delta is at risk. But it’s worse than that.
“Now we realize it may be the single most at-risk piece of property in the United States because the delta water alone that’s going through there basically fuels 22 million Californians,” said John Radke, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning. “If you had a catastrophic event there and you can’t get things built, you won’t just have people unable to go across a bridge, you’ll have people without drinking water — 22 million of them.
“I don’t think they like us going around saying that, especially homeland security,” he said, “because nobody really wants to know how at-risk we are.”
Photo: A major earthquake could wreak havoc on already weak levees, like this one on the Sutter Bypass in Northern California. Courtesy of the California Department of Water Resources.
The delta consists of a convergence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, forming the largest estuary on the West Coast. It’s a patchwork of nearly 60 islands and tracts surrounded by channels and sloughs, covering more than 700 square miles. And it’s a vital link in California’s water-delivery system.
Multiple studies have concluded that the delta is at risk and offer quantifiable remedies like patching a levee. But this latest project looks at the system and its interconnected infrastructures, how they relate to one another, and seeks answers for a holistic approach to protecting the delta and California from becoming the next Katrina.
A major breach in a levee, that couldn’t be fixed quickly, would flood populated areas with cold water, possibly causing more death than Katrina, where the water was warmer. “There’s a huge difference,” Radke said. “Here, if you had a catastrophic flood, people would be in 47-degree water. They’d last less than 20 minutes, then they’d die of hypothermia.”
On top of that, a major breach could reverse water flows, causing fresh water to subside and allowing ocean water to push its way further into the estuary, possibly destroying the whole river system.
“The combination of a Sacramento Delta failure where you’d have an earthquake followed by a flood where you’re sort of left powerless, not in terms of electricity but you’re fighting everything at the same time and you can’t even get there,” said Gerry Galloway, noted civil engineer and former brigadier general, who was assigned by the White House to lead a committee assessing the Great Flood of 1993. “It’s impossible to anticipate how bad that would be.”
Galloway said in New Orleans in 2005 nobody could get to the sites of the levee breaches because they couldn’t get from one side of the city to the other, “because the roads had not been designed to permit this sort of cross-city transit.”
Laying Blame in New Orleans
The Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, fueled by a National Science Foundation grant, analyzed the New Orleans area shortly after the hurricane hit, before the evidence was gone. What it found changed the way researchers perceived the unfolding of the catastrophe.
“I was angry after Katrina. Why couldn’t they do this? Why couldn’t they do that?” the center’s Radke said. “I’m not angry anymore. Wow, I’m amazed they did anything given how complex it was.”
The center also saw alarming similarities in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, and embarked on a project to study the delta and all its complicated parts. The group’s researchers say it’s no wonder that Katrina happened as it did considering all the variables, the multitude of stakeholders and the lack of coordination among them.
“If you look at New Orleans, I don’t think anybody messed up,” Radke said. “Agencies get developed, people get good at what they do but they don’t coordinate very well, and they don’t really understand the impact of what they do on others. People made good decisions, but the decisions were based on bad information or their lack of knowledge to react in the field in a gallant or noble way.”
For instance, there are parts of the levees in New Orleans, overseen by independent levee boards, that didn’t adjoin properly and those were never fixed because the boards didn’t collaborate. The group found that other layers of the system were built and managed differently from each other. The navigation channel was managed differently from the levee system, houses and roads were built, and each layer of development had shortcomings in terms of flood management. The whole package added up to what was termed a “chokepoint” — an area with multiple weaknesses, managed by different entities that didn’t collaborate, which facilitated multiple system failure.
“In essence, the whole levee system is not a coherent design,” said the center’s Howard Foster, an analyst at UC Berkeley’s Geographic Information Science Center. “It’s a history of various efforts done by various groups of people at different times to different standards. The historical way in which these systems came about was completely underappreciated.”
Similarities in the Delta
There are similarities in the way California’s Sacramento River Delta developed. Farmers started building the levees more than 100 years ago to protect crops. The construction of the levees was an unscientific conglomeration of dirt and whatever else was available for farmers to throw into the pile. They added on as necessary as the years went by. Now there are 1,100 miles of levees in the area that are 100 or more years old, the quality of which is suspect.
“They did it for 100 years and now you have subsidence, which means the land is going down farther and farther and all they did was continue to patch it,” Radke said. “Nobody has any idea of the stability of that levee.”
There are five operational area managers from five counties who oversee delta levees and who have worked together on policy issues. But they've kept that collaboration at the local level. State officials say those policies would dovetail with state policies and they'd like to have the locals at the table to combine strategies. That collaboration is critical to an effective response to a catastrophic event and needs to take place.
Photo: Sherman Island is considered a "chokepoint," where multiple layers of infrastructure exist. Courtesy of the California Department of Water Resources.
The delta levees are weak in places, some known, some surely unknown. There have been more than 160 levee breaches since 1900, including one in 2004 in an area called Jones Tract, where on a sunny day, part of the levee inexplicably gave way, drowning 12,153 acres of farmland and causing $100 million in damage.
The breach at Jones Tract was relatively small. And that’s alarming when you consider a report by the U.S. Geological Survey that found a 63 percent probability that the San Francisco Bay Area would experience a magnitude 6.7 or greater earthquake within the next 25 years.
An earthquake is one of the dangers. Another is seepage brought about by the various materials with which the levees are constructed. Yet another is the levees’ height — many aren’t high enough. All of these could be compounded by climate change, which would produce or already is producing earlier, warmer springs, leading to more runoff.
The delta comprises hundreds of square miles of levees, more levees than the rest of the United States combined, many of which are weak and some located near major roadways and power, and telecommunication and gas lines. A failure of one of these infrastructures could affect one or more of another one.
Mapping Chokepoints
One goal of the center’s project is to discover and quantify probabilities of failure. The group is using GIS to map the many “layers” of data that might contribute to an area becoming a chokepoint. “If we’re going to predict catastrophic failure, where the ignition might be, we need to be able to predict the probability of a catastrophic event starting — levee break-prone areas, earthquake-prone areas — and we have to be aware of how that catastrophe might spread,” Radke said.
That means identifying interdependencies between agencies or interconnected infrastructures.
“We went out and gathered about 2,500 layers of data — one might be the electric grid, another might be the transportation highway system, gas, ecological, etc.,” he said. “We’re trying to understand what layers are critical, what layers are redundant and the quality of those layers.”
What they’re trying to measure, Radke said, is the “intensity” of where infrastructure is located in space, and their interdependencies on one another — chokepoints. “If you get that wrong, you could be making some big mistakes when planning for emergency response,” he said.
Sherman Island is an example of a chokepoint. It’s at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and located less than two miles from the city of Antioch close to the populous (nearly 7 million people) San Francisco Bay Area. It’s the meeting point of Sacramento, Solano and Contra Costa counties.
The center has pinpointed Sherman Island as a chokepoint that includes a major thoroughfare (Highway 160), crucial regional power lines for the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E) and the Western Area Power Administration, under which lie major natural gas lines that run from the United States to Canada. These are what the center describes as “interconnected critical infrastructure systems.”
All these infrastructures are managed well by their respective entities, but those entities don’t look at management from a system level and they don’t communicate as they should, center members say, about managing the whole infrastructure system.
So what if an earthquake caused a breach of the levee, and the seepage made the highway unstable and a gas line ruptured or power was interrupted? How would that affect the other infrastructures and how would it all get fixed?
“One of the things we’ve done is look at national and international studies on critical infrastructures, like water, energy, financial services, transportation, electricity. There are lots of loops and everything is related to everything else,” said the center’s Emery Roe, lecturer for the Public Affairs and Administration Program at California State University, East Bay. “It’s not surprising that some infrastructures are more important than others. When electricity and telecommunications fail, it’s a big whammy on the rest. It makes emergency response harder, financial services begin to collapse and so on.”
The center praised the ability of California’s first responders to manage a catastrophe, but questioned whether the critical infrastructure “owners” can coordinate and plan to prevent one hazardous situation from becoming a catastrophe for much of the state.
“We’re asking, ‘Is there interagency cooperation, coordination between the physical infrastructures to prevent accidents waiting to happen at this interconnected level?’” Roe said. “And there isn’t. PG&E manages the power lines and the gas lines, Caltrans [the California Department of Transportation] manages Highway 160, the levees are part of the responsibility of the Reclamation boards, as well as the Department of Water Resources. And there is no legal or regulatory mandate that they talk to each other.”
There are many stakeholders in the “system” that are reluctant to work together or are unaware of the need for a systemwide approach to the problem.
Making Connections
Bill Croyle, chief of the Flood Operations Branch of the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), said the department has benefited from an increase in grant monies since Katrina, and a lot of that money is going toward improving communications within the department and with other stakeholders. But making those improvements is a long, detailed process that involves working groups and a lot of reaching out.
“The major emphasis for our Delta Risk Reduction Project is really the major earthquake threat,” Croyle said. “It’s an interesting scenario because it does require all the parties that have resources — the environmental side, the infrastructure side — really need to be aware of what we are all doing. In other words, we need to know what the pipeline and railroad people are thinking.”
Those efforts by the DWR and California in general, though in their early stages, are praised by outside experts. The state’s FloodSAFE program paints a picture of the various risks, the different stakeholders, the various solutions each stakeholder can take and how they are all important toward a common goal.
“You’ve got to do all those things,” Galloway said. “California recognizes that you’re not going to solve all the problems by levee repairs. It’s a message in my view that they get it.”
The state allocated $500 million in 2006 for Central Valley repair projects and voters approved $37.2 million in bond issues for infrastructure improvements, including levee maintenance and repairs.
The levee repairs are an “emergency,” according to Jeffrey Mount, director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis, and are akin to “patching an old tire.” The effort to protect Californians also will have to involve other measures, including setting aside land, such as farmland, to store water and limiting construction in flood-hazard areas, which are very difficult things to accomplish.
Compensating farmers for the land and convincing developers to build in areas that aren’t in danger of disastrous floods are two critical components that are difficult to carry out. Building a proposed Auburn Dam in the foothills above the delta would provide more flood control capacity — but would be difficult to accomplish politically, damaging to the environment and probably just too expensive. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is advocating for a peripheral canal designed to route fresh water around the delta to assure the flow of water in case of an earthquake.
The Wary Stakeholders
The DWR is working toward breaking down some of the long-standing barriers between the stakeholders related to the delta and burnishing the message that it’s worth working with them.
“When you actually reach out to talk to some of the farmers, they’re frustrated because our agency provides water as well as flood response, and they assume when I walk into the room that my end game is water to Southern California,” Croyle said. “That’s not my job. I’m supposed to respond to any and all flood responses throughout the state. The delta is a critical piece of the whole state.”
Like the farmers, some of the other key players in the whole interconnected infrastructure realm operate in stovepipes or are a bit wary of outsiders. “We haven’t actually talked to the gas main people and the railroad people are a little bit off to the side and seem to be, we’ve heard, monitoring our discussions,” Croyle said.
Along with trying to locate more chokepoints, the center is attempting to interview some of what they call the “real-time” workers, those who work daily in the field and might understand the vulnerabilities of the infrastructure better than the policymakers.
Croyle acknowledged that there are people with knowledge who aren’t being heard. “The fear is that you miss somebody who’s been around forever, who has some great ideas or a perspective we haven’t thought about, but we haven’t provided a forum that is comfortable for them to engage us.”
Some of the different agencies are concerned about who will get resources first in case of a disaster. There are only so many barges and cranes to go around and those need to be allocated to the areas with the greatest need, regardless of who has a contract with whom, Croyle said.
And he said some don’t understand the magnitude of a delta disaster if a major earthquake were to occur or a major levee to breach and what it would mean for the state.
“I’m a little concerned that they don’t actually fully appreciate that if this happens, this is going to be a Katrina-type response,” Croyle said. “Everybody in the world is going to be dropping into the delta.”
Delving Into the Delta
Some key points about the delta and its importance to California:
- The delta receives runoff from more than 40 percent of California’s land area. Major rivers that drain the state’s Central Valley — including the Sacramento, San Joaquin, Calaveras, Cosumnes and Mokelumne — eventually meet and flow through the delta on their way to the Pacific Ocean.
- The delta supports more than 80 percent of the state’s commercial salmon fisheries, as well as 750 distinct species of plants and wildlife.
- It’s a key source of water for 23 million Californians and more than 7 million acres of farmland.
- The delta includes more than 730,000 acres of farmland and wildlife habitat.
- About two-thirds of delta islands and tracts are below sea level.
- The delta relies on more than 1,100 miles of levees — many of which were built more than a century ago — to keep islands and tracts dry and protect other key infrastructure from floods and high tides.
- Delta levees protect more than 520,000 acres of farmland and three state highways, a railroad, natural gas and electric transmission facilities, and aqueducts serving water to parts of the San Francisco Bay Area.
- Delta levees help safeguard the lives and personal property of more than 400,000 people living in nearby towns and cities. Some delta towns are among the fastest growing areas in the state.
- Two of California’s biggest water projects — the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project — rely on the delta to convey water from Northern California rivers to project pumping facilities in the southern delta.
- Delta levees play a critical role in preventing salty water from the San Francisco Bay from intruding into critical parts of the delta and contaminating the fresh water that supplies communities and farms.
- Most delta levees are maintained by local agencies, such as reclamation and levee districts.
Source: Association of California Water Agencies
