Winter Storms Strain CA Levees; Up To $50 Billion Investment In Water Infrastructure Needed
As the wet winter forces operators of dams to send more water roaring downstream, the struggle to spot and shore up weak spots in nearly 1,600 miles of levees in the Central Valley is unrelenting, said Rex Osborn, spokesman for emergency operations in San Joaquin County, one of the nation’s main farm and dairy counties.
Hundreds of workers with the state conservation corps, engineers, water experts, emergency-management officials and others were scrambling again Thursday to lay down more rock and earth on levees where flood water was threatening to burst through saturated berms. “There’s a flood fight taking place at a dozen different places right now,” Osborn said about the levees in his county. “If they just hold and do their job,” Osborn said. “But if one thing throws it off ...”
Once the waters ease sometime this summer, California lawmakers will look at releasing $500 million to patch and upgrade the state’s strained flood control system. But Jeffrey Mount, a flood-control expert and senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California think tank, and other experts say Central Valley levees alone need billions of dollars in work.
Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday asked state lawmakers to quickly approve $387 million to speed up flood control projects in the Central Valley, using money from a water bond approved by voters in 2014. He said the state has nearly $50 billion in unmet needs for flood-management infrastructure. “What’s required is to take some immediate action and then over the longer term we have to invest billions of dollars in California infrastructure,” said Brown, a Democrat. “We’ve got to belly up to the bar and start spending money.”
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/rural-california-levees-besieged-by-pounding-wet-winter/2017/02/24/913cdb62-fa61-11e6-aa1e-5f735ee31334_story.html?utm_term=.52178f017227
