Flooding Reality Check

When it comes to flooding, the Sacramento region needs a reality check. 

Let’s face facts.  While there has been some recent progress in acknowledging the severity of the risk faced by the Sacramento region, there has been almost no recognition among elected officials that minimizing the risk will require major policy and land use changes — in existing neighborhoods and undeveloped areas.  Many of Sacramento’s most flood-prone neighborhoods, such as The Pocket and other areas south of Downtown as well as most of the southern portion of the Natomas Basin, are already developed.  Given the numerous challenges we face in minimizing the risk faced by existing neighborhoods, how can we even consider putting more people in harms way in undeveloped parts of the Natomas Basin?

In spite of longstanding concerns about the state of the levees protecting the Natomas Basin, the City and County of Sacramento relied on the legal fiction of compliance with an inadequate federal “100-year flood” risk standard to approve extensive development in the Basin with no height regulations or insurance requirements.  As a result, thousands of Sacramentans now risk losing their homes, businesses, belongings, and even their lives.  If the levees fail, parts of the Basin will be 25 feet under water.  People who do not evacuate and are trapped may very likely drown.

In recent months, numerous elected officials and developers have touted the goal of achieving protection from the so-called “100-year flood event” by continuing to develop the Basin and linking levee upgrades to assessments on new construction.  The implication is that this is an “acceptable” level of risk and that the only way to pay for levee improvements is by putting thousands more people in harms way.  This is not acceptable; it is unconscionable.  Protection from the “100-year event” is a convenient and potentially lethal fiction.  Justifying development for tens of thousands more potential drowning victims by having them pay for the illusion of flood protection is fiscally unsound and ethically bankrupt.  There is no actual significance to “100-year” protection.  New Orleans had better than 100-year protection — before Katrina.

We simply can not afford to keep ignoring the real costs of putting humans in flood basins.  Real protection from flooding requires placing the public good above developers’ interests.  Real protection demands leadership in making difficult decisions.

Real protection means prohibiting development near rivers and levees so that rivers can flow more freely without risk of overtopping or breaking through levees and inundating neighborhoods.

Real protection means locating and designing human structures to minimize the likelihood of catastrophe should flooding occur — things like height requirements and not building in particularly deep areas.

Real protection means updated water management systems throughout Northern California so that the rivers and creeks running through and around Sacramento do not reach levee-threatening levels except in the most extreme circumstances.

And real protection means mandatory insurance in flood-prone areas so that when flooding does occur, people don’t lose everything.

Real protection will be expensive — but it will be an investment in our future.  The devastation of a major flood will be a much more costly — and avoidable — human tragedy.  This, in essence, is our choice.  If we continue ignoring reality, it will only be a matter of time before the rivers flowing around and through our region deliver a catastrophic reality check.

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