A result of not doing annual maintenance as required by the nature of levees, is the hurry-up-and-fix-it-now process that has resulted in rocks along the shore instead of vegetation.
Goes with the turf, Er, rocks.
Levees quickly fixed -- at environmental cost?
By Matt Weiser - Bee Staff Writer
Published 12:00 am PST Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Bill Shelton has lived in Walnut Grove since 1926. In that time, he's seen a lot of things in the Sacramento River.
But the retired pear farmer said he has never seen anything like this: the town's waterfront transformed into a bleak and forbidding corridor of rock.
"This is ridiculously offensive," said Shelton, 85, who supervised several local levee districts over the decades. "Some amount of rock might have been reasonable, but to put in a pile like that and destroy everything in sight, it's almost unbelievable."
When Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a levee emergency last year, state and federal agencies agreed to accelerate environmental reviews that had routinely delayed necessary levee upgrades. It was one of the trade-offs California made in its rush to hold together an ailing levee system for a few more winters.
From a flood-control perspective, the repairs appear successful. In less than a year, the state Department of Water Resources, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a swarm of contractors fixed 64 badly eroded levees from Chico to Rio Vista. Another 40 are under construction.
The results can be scenes like that in Walnut Grove, where residents say they had little warning about how the repairs would change their town.
State and federal flood officials say the damage from last winter made the aggressive, expedited work vital to public safety. Many of the eroded levees had been known as problematic for years, but last winter's storms caused an alarming amount of new damage.
Levee crews also say it is too early for negative reviews: Environmental improvements are planned in a second phase of work.
