Flood Solution? Stop Building Water Experts Say Only Way To Break Cycle Is To Let River Go

With more than half of California declared a disaster area after the punch of a 10-day storm, water experts are questioning why this state remains stuck in a predictable cycle: devastation in a known flood area, followed by federal relief, then rebuilding in the same places.

Saturday, the storms for the most part started to recede after causing 11 deaths and about $300 million in damage.

It is no surprise to anyone who has lived here in Northern California for any length of time that the flat land near the Sacramento River and its tributaries has flooded once again. The bigger surprise, say some water experts, is that new housing developments continue to rise in the flood zone and that the federal government continues to indirectly encourage building there.

Some of the worst flooding was here in Rio Linda, a community just north of Sacramento, where a tiny channel called Dry Creek swelled into a lake, covering hundreds of houses.

“Every time they build another home up north of here, the water comes down here on top of us,” said Tom Ray, manager of the water district in Rio Linda.

Parts of Rio Linda and other areas around the Sacramento River here have flooded so often in the last century - each time leading to more costly flood-control measures financed by taxpayers - that Ray has now reached a somewhat radical conclusion for a water district manager.

“The only way you can get these people out of the flood zone is to buy them out,” he said. “For the taxpayers, that would be the best deal.”

That is the same conclusion reached last year by a panel put together after the Mississippi River floods of 1993, the worst in a century.

The Sacramento River system is the most heavily engineered in America, except for the Mississippi. For more than a century, federal policy has been to build up a series of dams and levees, intended to keep the water from spilling over into its natural flood plain.

But on the Mississippi, much of that policy was declared a failure after the 1993 flood. The river has since been given room to reclaim some of its natural channel, about 35,000 acres, and more than 7,000 people have been moved.

California, by contrast, has contin ued in the opposite direction, water experts say.

The Sacramento is one of the biggest beneficiaries of 70 years of federal dam and levee-building, at a cost of $25 billion nationwide. Despite the massive federal investment, per-capita flood losses, adjusted for inflation, have more than doubled since 1951.

A new national flood policy, less reliant on dams and levees that channel water into fast-moving drainage systems was proposed last year as part of a study on the Mississippi.

Federal flood-control efforts would be more effective if they tried to move people out of risky low-lying areas, and allowed more water to drain off into natural reservoirs, the committee reported.