(bright music) - [Narrator] This is a tale of one city and two rivers.

The Sacramento and the American have been good to the city they cradle, providing shipping lanes, clean water and recreation, but in the winter, their waters can turn cruel.

Severe storms in the 1850s and 60s nearly forced the evacuation of the state capitol, but a thriving port is a thing worth fighting for.

And the people of Sacramento went to great lengths to keep their city dry.

For more than a hundred years, they thought they had tamed the rivers.

- [Reporter] A storm that is continuing over Northern California.

We understand that there are a lot of people trying to get out of the area, but if you are, it is becoming incredibly dangerous.

- [Crew] Now, hopefully he's gonna jump on right now.

- [Narrator] This is a tale of one city, two rivers, and a half million people living on what was once a natural floodplain.

But the final chapter of this story is still being written.

(dramatic music) (waves crashing) - [Narrator] This episode of Viewfinder was produced in collaboration with The Sacramento Bee.

- [Narrator] On New Year's Eve 2005, Sacramento dodged a bullet.

(thunder rumbling) (rain pattering) Fireworks couldn't compete with the spectacular storms that swelled the rivers.

Down in the delta, some feared the worst.

- The Twitchell Island, the wind was blowing at close to 60 miles per hour for a while that we abandoned the flood fight and there was a concern that we may lose the island.

- [Narrator] Jay Punia runs Sacramento's Flood Operations Center, a high tech situation room that monitors the rivers and alerts local levee districts as the waters rise.

- [Jay] During high water situation, we are open 24 hours.

- [Narrator] If necessary, they can call upon the resources of the Army Corps of Engineers to conduct a flood fight.

- We have the system in place that we can respond quickly, but sometimes situations can get out of hand and there is a potential or the likelihood of the levee can fail.

And if the levee fails in metropolitan Sacramento, the consequences are pretty drastic.

- [Narrator] This time, the island and the city caught a break.

In fact, as bad as things got the New Years storms weren't even close to a worst case scenario.

- I kind of look at this flood as, I don't want to downplay it because some people suffered tragic losses, but in the big picture of magnitudes of floods, this was a fairly moderate to low flood event.

- [Narrator] But Sacramento had every reason to be scared.

After all, it had been only four months since another major American city was lost to flooding.

- What happened in New Orleans puts a real face of what urban flooding, deep urban flooding can do to a community.

And it makes it real for people.

And it's a lesson that shouldn't be forgotten.

(somber music) We are asked here in California, in Sacramento, can it happen here?

And the answer is absolutely.

- [Narrator] Les Harder toured New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina savaged the city.

- It's just sobering to see broken homes.

Homes floated and moved blocks away, furniture up in the trees 15 feet above your head.

The smell is overwhelming.

The tremendous amount of debris was sad and sobering to come upon a house that would have a mark where a body had been found.

And it's a very sober warning for Sacramento.

- [Narrator] Because despite what you might have heard about New Orleans, no city in America faces a greater risk of flooding than Sacramento.

- The highest risks much higher than New Orleans for example, New Orleans was thought to have 250 year protection.

Sacramento is hovering somewhere around a hundred year level of protection.

- [Narrator] 100 year protection.

That might sound like Sacramento is safe and secure for the next century.

But what it really means is that in any given year, there is a one in 100 chance that Sacramento will be hit by a storm more powerful than its meager protections can withstand.

So how is it that a major metropolitan area, one that supplies water for 2/3 of California has such inadequate protection even 150 years after it was founded?

- We forget, how quickly we forget.

And right now we're interested in flood control because of Katrina.

Katrina brought our attention back to the flood control issue.

We will forget, if nothing happens, we will forget by next summer.

Just look back on '97.

- [Narrator] You see, 2006 wasn't the first time that the Valley rang in the new year with the sound of thunder.

(dramatic music) The 1997 storms took nine lives, destroyed 20,000 homes and caused nearly $2 billion in damage, after eight days and 25 inches of rain 48 of 58 counties in California were declared disaster areas.

Jeff Mount is the director of Watershed Sciences at UC Davis and he's been sounding the alarm about the risk of urban flooding in Sacramento for years.

- There's multiple options for a worst case scenario in Sacramento, but all of them revolve around the equivalent of a Pineapple Express coming in.

And of course, that's tapping into moisture from all the way across the Pacific and the lower latitudes.

- [Narrator] Warm air compounds the problem.

Precipitation falls as rain at the higher elevations and existing snow begins to melt, sending water gushing down the American River.

- [Jeff] We sit at the base of a very steep mountain range with a very large watershed that collects water outta the North Fork, the Middle Fork, and the South Fork of the American River, and tries to ram it through a very narrow stretch right near Sacramento.

- [Narrator] That's where it connects with the longest river in California, the Sacramento.

It runs nearly 400 miles from Mount Shasta into the Delta, carrying more than 100,000 cubic feet per second right past Downtown Sacramento.

- [Jeff] There's many ways to create a disaster scenario, but all of 'em end up with the same outcome, and that is overwhelming our ability to hold these floods back with our existing levee systems.

So it is a levee break, whether it's along the American River or along the Sacramento River, which is our scariest scenario of all.

- The levees aren't designed for that kind of high water.

They can fail.

They failed in the past, they can fail again and flood Sacramento and Sacramento's areas.

Some of 'em can have just as deep flooding as New Orleans did.

- [Narrator] The capitol underwater?

It might seem surreal, but it was a problem that the city founders dealt with on an annual basis.

With such a severe threat to life and property, why did they stay?

- This is where the jobs were back when the rivers provided the only means to transportation the city at the junction of American and Sacramento Rivers was the jumping off point for all the economic activity in the valley, particularly gold mining.

- [Narrator] Drastic floods call for drastic measures and the city decided if the rivers kept rising, so would Sacramento.

- Very significant improvements were made by raising much of downtown.

Our predecessors actually hauled in enough material to raise the streets by about 12 feet or so, and that's why many parts of downtown, the streets are actually at the first floor level.

- [Narrator] For years, it was thought that Sacramento's flood problems had been largely solved.

The construction of Folsom Dam only bolstered the region's sense of security.

But Mother Nature was simply taking a rest.

- At the time using the standard methods we had, we had no idea what the range of variability in flows might be.

And lo and behold, we've discovered a pretty bipolar climate in this place with extremes of drought and extremes of wet.

And of course, Folsom Dam was built after a kinder and gentler period in our climate.

- [Narrator] When Folsom Dam became operational in 1955, storms filled it to capacity almost immediately.

As decades passed, it became increasingly clear that Sacramento was still a city at risk.

- The 1986 flood was Sacramento's wake up call.

Those who were here at the time felt very threatened and in fact, the city came very close to being inundated and levy erosion was a big problem.

- [Narrator] While the Flood Operations Center handled flood crises as they occur, the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency exists to prevent floods from occurring in the first place.

To meet its mission, it was given broad powers.

- To create assessment districts, sell bonds, plan, construct, maintain projects.

- [Narrator] The system they manage has three key components.

The most important of the three is also the most fragile.

(dramatic music) - We tend to think of the levees having been constructed in one shot.

They're not.

These are levees that have been built over time.

Starting as early as the Gold Rush.

- Sediment, silt and sand washed out of the mountains when people used hydraulic mining to mine for gold.

While that sediment was an environmental disaster and made it difficult for navigation on the river.

- [Narrator] To keep the waters clear, the city founders made a dangerous compromise.

- The levees were established right on the edge of the river, so that flows would be fairly constrained and you'd have high flows to flush out those sediments.

- Pressures on the dry side of the levees also contributed to their placement right on the river banks.

- They were built at a time when the major endeavor in the region was agriculture.

And so they were built right up to the rivers to maximize arable land in the region.

- [Narrator] The result?

No place for rising waters to go, but over or through the levees.

In many cases, farmers with meager construction skills built the levees themselves with whatever materials were at hand.

Today, the US Army Corps of Engineers spends much time and money rehabilitating them.

- What used to be okay for agricultural land no longer is acceptable to protect great populations, businesses, schools, homes that have been built behind the levees.

- [Narrator] The ultimate goal?

To raise Sacramento from a 100 to a 200 year level of flood protection.

- After the 97 floods, we learned a lot of things about the system.

We learned a lot of things about the levees.

We learned, for example, that under seepage was an issue to a degree that we didn't expect before.

- About 23 miles of levy in the American River system.

Most of that now has very deep slurry walls, a continuous curtain of concrete and slurry that extends 80 feet down so it can intercept water pushing through from the river to the land side.

- [Narrator] Vital work, but with a steep price tag.

- Levee work is expensive and what used to be maybe a thousand or $2,000 for a hundred feet or so now may cost several millions of dollars per mile.

- [Narrator] Here at Miller's Park, Colonel Light estimates the cost of improvements at between three and $5 million.

But that's a small price to pay to protect what lies on the other side of these levees, I-5 and Downtown Sacramento.

While the federal government will contribute 2/3 of the cost of a major reconstruction project, the day-to-day maintenance and repair of these levees is a local matter.

- The system is dynamic.

You see the river moving behind me?

Somewhere in the system, there's a part of the levee system that is eroding and that erosion has to be attended to every year.

And the federal government, the Corps, we rely on local reclamation districts, local levee districts, and the state to perform that routine operations and maintenance.

- [Matt] The area around Sacramento has a huge number of levy districts and most of 'em represent fairly small areas.

And if you look at these, the district boundaries on a map, it kind of looks like a jigsaw puzzle.

- [Narrator] Matt Weiser writes for the Sacramento Bee.

He's part of a team working on a series called Tempting Fate, weighing the chances for a Katrina Scale disaster in Sacramento.

- [Matt] Deb Collars has sort of focused more on the risk angle.

And then Carrie Peyton Dalberg is focused on preparing for a flood.

My normal beat is water and natural resources.

So I've sort of done stories about the structural aspects of flooding.

- [Narrator] Matt looked at the books of our local levy districts.

What he found was alarming.

- [Matt] Not just for readers, but for people in the flood control business.

I think everyone was surprised how bad their financial condition is.

A third of 'em don't have enough cash and reserve to cover even one year's operating expenses.

- There are some reclamation districts and levee districts who have a budget of maybe 52,000.

It often costs us more than a million dollars a mile to rehabilitate levees to any appreciable degree.

So the funds that exist to allow a local reclamation or levee district to do that work just aren't there.

- [Narrator] Ultimately, raising the levees may require raising taxes.

- Proposition 218 requires levy districts to get 2/3 approval for a tax increase.

And that's a high hurdle for any government agency to meet.

- [Narrator] The tax code was clearly written before the region experienced an explosion of development.

- [Matt] If it's a mobile home or a million dollar house, they get the same amount of tax revenue from it.

And that's a real inequity because obviously their burden increases when they're protecting a million dollar home compared to a trailer.

- [Narrator] State law requires these districts to file annual audits.

So how have their shortcomings been addressed at the capitol?

- Well, the state doesn't really review 'em and the state doesn't even follow through to make sure that they're filed every year.

And there's basically no mechanism in the law to allow them to enforce those things.

- [Narrator] The Bee's ongoing series ensures that the issue of flooding will remain in the public eye.

Whether it can affect change in policy remains to be seen.

- This has come up as a news issue, as a news story for decades, and there's been various attempts to deal with it, but few really substantive changes that would generate more money for flood control.

(dramatic music) - To get to 200 year level flood protection, we have to manage the flows out of the American River Basin, and that means completing the work at Folsom Dam, improving the outlet capacity and increasing the storage.

- [Narrator] The dam is currently able to hold 600,000 acre feet of water in Folsom Lake.

The Corps of Engineers had hoped to improve our ability to control the release of that water.

- We were operating off of a plan that was gonna modify the actual face of Folsom Dam.

We were gonna modify the eight gates that allow water out of that dam, make them larger, and we were gonna add two additional gates.

- [Narrator] Congress approved the funds for the project in 1999, but the work proved more costly than expected.

- When the bids came back, they greatly exceeded the expected amount, in fact, exceeded the authorization for the construction.

And so the partners in the process went back to the drawing board.

- [Narrator] A revised plan would increase the dam's capacity by raising its face some seven feet.

- The new proposed construction on Folsom Dam looks to be cost effective and likely to be successful at substantially improving our flood control capacity.

- [Narrator] But efforts to improve the spillways remain in limbo.

The third part of Sacramento's flood control system is relatively inexpensive to operate and remarkably effective.

The Sacramento Weir was built in 1916 to divert high river flows away from the city and into the yellow bypass.

- The yellow bypass that conveys water to the delta carries four times as much water as the Sacramento River does.

So that system was envisioned over a hundred years ago.

It was visionary at the time.

- [Narrator] Without this release valve, Sacramento's flood risk would be vastly increased.

- The Sacramento River downstream of the American River confluence has a capacity of about 110,000 cubic feet per second.

But when American is running full bore, before we had Folsom, it could exceed 200,000.

And then we also had a hundred thousand coming down the Sacramento River.

So to provide a release area, the Sacramento Weir is a critical part of that picture.

- [Narrator] But each gate must be opened manually and that's no easy task, especially in heavy rain.

- It's a fairly major mechanical endeavor.

You know, we don't push a button here at the Flood Center and it opens and closes.

It takes a lot of guys to go out and they open the gates and then it's even more work to close it as the river recedes.

- [Narrator] The recent New Year's storms marked the first time in nearly a decade that the weir had to be open.

- And we only opened a portion of the gates.

Not even half the gates were open this event.

So to put that in perspective, 97, all the gates were open.

- [Narrator] February 16th, 2006, familiar faces in attendance at a meeting of the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors and a bit more attention than usual from the local media.

It was the 20th anniversary of the 1986 floods.

Despite some improvements in our flood protection system, the celebrations were muted as it was revealed that the Natomas Levees did not offer even 100 year protection.

- Were it not for a very concerted flood fight by the Corps of Engineers and local flood control districts in 86, we would've certainly lost Natomas.

- [Narrator] In the two decades since the 86 floods, Natomas has exploded with development despite its damp history.

- About 150 years ago during the winter, the waters would come out of the Sacramento River and Feather River and San Joaquin River banks, and it would be basically an inland sea.

- Remember the Natomas area is a basin that was fed historically by overflow from the Sacramento and the American River.

So it has the potential to be flooded from both rivers.

You wouldn't normally choose that place to live.

- [Narrator] Yet thousands have and new houses continue to rise throughout Natomas.

Knowing the risks, why do we continue to build on a floodplain?

- It's all driven by money.

And I mean that, not greed.

I shouldn't equate money with greed, although they offer are, it's not greed.

Local communities are cash strapped.

Post Proposition 13, the only way they can get enough money to provide the services that they need to provide for their local populations is through development.

- [Narrator] And many home buyers in Natomas found relief from the exorbitant housing costs of the Bay Area.

When the Prices arrived in 2001, they were completely unaware that the region had nearly flooded just four years earlier.

- At the time we were looking for a home.

I was in the other part of Natomas and I asked them about floods at that time, I don't know what made me ask that question, but they said, oh no, we're all set.

You don't even need insurance.

Everything is good.

- We're not on a floodplain.

- [Narrator] When they learned the truth a year after moving in, they immediately wanted to know how bad could it get.

- There was a website that did a study of if there was a levy break, how much water your particular area in Natomas would be under.

It showed us we would be under 23 feet of water.

And at that point I thought, hey, it'd be a good idea to have some flood insurance.

- [Narrator] But families like the Prices are the exception to the rule.

- Look how many people have flood insurance in the Sacramento area.

15% or less have flood insurance.

- Despite the fact that flood insurance is federally subsidized for about $300 a year, you can cover your house for $250,000 and another a hundred thousand dollars worth of property.

The Prices have taken other precautions such as purchasing a generator for their home.

But despite the risks, Ryan and Andrea insist they're here to stay.

- I think every place you build has risk.

I mean, that's just like asking should they have built in San Francisco because of the earthquake risk.

You just take steps to mitigate that risk.

- [Narrator] And for Ryan, living on a floodplain might even have some perks.

- I just want an excuse to get a boat.

- [Narrator] Joking aside, the situation in Natomas isn't entirely bleak.

- The big difference for Sacramento versus a lot of other cities is there are places to go and you can get to high ground in Sacramento pretty quickly.

- [Narrator] But how many of us are familiar with the evacuation routes?

- If I would live behind a levee, I would want to know what's the potential depth of flooding, how much time do I have to get out of town?

I would attend the community outreach meetings that SAFCA and the city and others are putting together.

- [Narrator] Some 600 residents of Sacramento's Pocket neighborhood Did just that.

- Your neighborhood is of course the last remaining big piece of the puzzle.

- [Narrator] While most parts of the city are considered evacuation zones, the Pocket has been designated a rescue zone.

A major levy break could flood the area in just a few hours, giving residents little time to get out.

- [Jay] In the Pocket area, the depth can be more than 15 feet if the levee breaks.

- SAFCA has plans to repair and improve local levees, but Jeff Mount warns.

- Just fixing the levees isn't gonna solve the problem, that's treating a symptom rather than the cause.

And ultimately the cause is development of the floodplains behind these levees, which in turn asks these levees to do more than they ever were designed to do.

- [Narrator] But the push to develop the Valley shows little sign of slowing.

- There's proposals for more than a hundred thousand new homes in the Delta.

The Delta is different than say the Sacramento area.

The Delta is subsided below sea level.

It's much more like New Orleans.

- [Narrator] Remember Twitchell Island, but it wasn't the only spot in peril.

- During this recent high water incident, we have more than 50 incidents where there was either erosion or sea pitch.

And more than half of those incidents were in the Delta area.

- These towns, which are around the Delta, that's going to be a major problem in the future because they show no signs whatsoever of any restraint in developing these areas, including areas below sea level.

And basically that is not smart growth.

That's dumb growth.

(somber music) - If we look again at New Orleans after Katrina, 99% of levees there did pretty good.

But unfortunately with levees, if you just have one tiny failure, you're flooded.

- What happened in New Orleans could happen here in Sacramento, and that has helped raise the awareness and increase the level of concern among local governments and state governments.

So there is a renewed interest in this problem.

- [Narrator] In February, the governor declared a state of emergency for our levees.

The US House and Senate recently negotiated an additional $30 million for flood control in Sacramento.

But until the money arrives, some worry that history is doomed to repeat itself.

- In 97, there was lots of reports and hearings held in the legislature with lots of people saying, we've gotta reform this.

We've gotta put more money into our flood control.

And what actually happened in that time between 97 and now?

- [Narrator] We can all be thankful for what hasn't happened since 1997.

But recent events remind us that our risk of flooding remains unacceptably high.

That risk may never be eliminated, but through action and better planning, it can be significantly reduced.

This tale of one city, two rivers, and half million people may yet have a happy ending provided we take the right steps before the next storm arrives.

(peaceful music) - [Announcer #1] To order a DVD copy of this program, call 888-814-3923 or visit kvie.org/viewfinder.

- [Announcer #2] This episode of Viewfinder was produced in collaboration with The Sacramento Bee.

(bright music)