California's "Katrina" Just a Matter of Time
Wake up call: the California Sacramento Delta is vulnerable!
California spent millions of dollars shoring up its levee system but many feel the effort is not enough to protect people and property.
In June 2005 a levee break in the San Joaquin Valley caused many to wake up and smell the cofee. There are thousands of levees in California, and some of them 100 years old. Many engineers worry that they will not withstand the next big flood. The catastrophic flooding of Katrina should hopefully also serve as a wake-up call to Californian politicans who are very lax in their efforts to maintain their rapidly-aging levee system.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is the federal agency charged with trying to prevent disasters in this highly-populated areas. Clark Frentzen Of the Corps: "The dilemma is that most of them were originally designed and constructed to protect agricultural areas, and what we're seeing is more and more commercial and residential development behind these same levees."
Of the 1,100 miles of levees that run along the delta, the Army Corps has identified nearly 200 eroded sites in serious need of repair. Some sit not far from sprawling residential developments, built smack in the middle of flood plains. Despite efforts by Senator Dianne Feinstein and others, the federal and state governments have yet to appropriate about a billion dollars needed to make the repairs.
To give you an idea of what's involved to fix a levee, once it broke in San Joaquin, it took crews 25 days, working round the clock to fill the 500-foot breach that caused the flooding there. That doesn't take into account replanting all the crops and repairing the structures lost.
California spent millions of dollars shoring up its levee system but many feel the effort is not enough to protect people and property.
In June 2005 a levee break in the San Joaquin Valley caused many to wake up and smell the cofee. There are thousands of levees in California, and some of them 100 years old. Many engineers worry that they will not withstand the next big flood. The catastrophic flooding of Katrina should hopefully also serve as a wake-up call to Californian politicans who are very lax in their efforts to maintain their rapidly-aging levee system.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is the federal agency charged with trying to prevent disasters in this highly-populated areas. Clark Frentzen Of the Corps: "The dilemma is that most of them were originally designed and constructed to protect agricultural areas, and what we're seeing is more and more commercial and residential development behind these same levees."
Of the 1,100 miles of levees that run along the delta, the Army Corps has identified nearly 200 eroded sites in serious need of repair. Some sit not far from sprawling residential developments, built smack in the middle of flood plains. Despite efforts by Senator Dianne Feinstein and others, the federal and state governments have yet to appropriate about a billion dollars needed to make the repairs.
To give you an idea of what's involved to fix a levee, once it broke in San Joaquin, it took crews 25 days, working round the clock to fill the 500-foot breach that caused the flooding there. That doesn't take into account replanting all the crops and repairing the structures lost.
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