With the optimal flood protection option now on the table, Sacramento has the opportunity to see 500 year level flood protection within the next several years.
Our community and our Parkway will someday be fully protected from the devastation of flooding as long as we can keep this project moving forward.
We will certainly do our part.
An excerpt.
Dan Walters: Auburn dam, peripheral canal back on the table for discussion
By Dan Walters - Bee Columnist Published 12:00 am PDT Monday, September 18, 2006
Elvis Presley was a young man when bureaucrats and politicians began talking about two large projects to control and use the water that seasonal rain and snow storms dump on Northern California.
Building a high dam on the American River near Auburn, water engineers reasoned, would hold more of the seasonal flows for later use while protecting the Sacramento area from flooding. A "peripheral canal," meanwhile, was touted to divert water from the Sacramento River around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for delivery to San Joaquin Valley farmers and Southern California homes and industries.
Construction actually began on both. Site clearance and foundation work for the Auburn dam began in 1967 while the chunks of the 42-mile peripheral canal route were dug out in the 1970s to supply materials for constructing Interstate 5 south of Sacramento.
Both projects, however, fell victim to the rapidly expanding power of environmentalism in the 1970s and 1980s. The Jimmy Carter administration halted work on an Auburn dam, ostensibly to study its ability to withstand an earthquake, and while the peripheral canal project was pushed through the Legislature by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, a referendum sponsored by an odd-bedfellows alliance of environmentalists and San Joaquin Valley farmers led to voter rejection in 1982.
Ever since, intertwined flood control and water supply debates have proceeded on the assumption that an Auburn dam and the peripheral canal were as dead as a certain former rock 'n' roll star. But just as there are occasional assertions, albeit unsubstantiated, that Elvis is alive, neither the Auburn dam nor the peripheral canal ever completely faded away -- and both, in fact, are showing signs of revival in an era when global warming, Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans and other factors have changed assumptions about water.
John Doolittle, the Republican congressman who represents the Auburn area, never gave up on the dam. As he rose in the GOP House hierarchy, he continued to push appropriations for renewing planning the project, even as local officials settled on levee improvements and altering Folsom Dam to elevate flood protection for those near the American.
Those projects supposedly would raise the protection level to the 200-year level, but given what happened in New Orleans, local flood control officials are now talking about going beyond that, perhaps to a 500-year level. That could be achieved, most likely, only by construction of another dam upstream from Folsom -- such as the one at Auburn.
It's not going to happen any time soon, perhaps never, but neither is the Auburn dam as impossible as it appeared only a year or two ago.
