News

1/3/12

California water officials recommended a historic investment in the state’s aging flood control system Friday, saying more than half of the state’s levees do not meet standards and the system needs up to $17 billion in repairs and investment.

The Department of Water Resources’ release of the first statewide flood plan follows a call by Gov. Jerry Brown to refocus state efforts on preparing for the effects of a warming climate as floods from a faster-melting snowpack already place increased strain on the state’s aging levees.

Officials and experts say the state’s flood control system – a piece-meal collection of 14,000 levees and other infrastructure built along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers by farmers and local governments over the last 150 years – is no longer adequate.

Once a mostly agricultural region that was lightly populated, the Central Valley where the rivers meet has experienced rapid development and population growth.

Central Valley’s flood risk ranks among the nation’s highest. About 1 million Californians now live in floodplains and levees protect an estimated $69 billion in assets, including the state’s water supply, major freeways, agricultural land and the valley’s remaining wetland and riparian habitat, said Mike Mierzwa, senior engineer in the Central Valley Flood Protection Office.

The Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta is a freshwater source for two-thirds of California’s population and irrigates millions of acres of farmland throughout the state.

While officials have long known the flood control system was in disrepair, it’s the first time they have studied it as a whole, come up with long-term solutions and a priority for investments.

More than half of 300 miles of aged urban levees do not meet modern design criteria, according to newly released analysis. And about 60 percent of 1,230 miles of non-urban levees have a high potential for failure from under-seepage, through-seepage, structural instability, and/or erosion. In addition, about half of the 1,016 miles of channels are believed to be inadequate to handle projected flooding. And two bridges are in need of repairs.

The plan calls for $14 billion to $17 billion in repairs and other investments – including the $5 billion in bond funds already approved. Investments would be spread over the next 20 to 25 years.

Officials said the money would come from a mixture of federal, state and local sources. Voters will need to approve another bond, Mierzwa said.

Most of the money – up to $6 billion – would be spent in urban areas, where thousands of homeowners and their property could be affected by a flood. Another $6 billion would go toward system-wide improvements.

The plan doesn’t call for specific projects, but offers recommendations. Those include extensive bypass expansion and the construction of a new bypass; major improvements to intake, weir and gate structures; sediment removal projects; urban and rural levee repairs; fish passage improvements and ecosystem restoration.

Focusing on other projects beyond levee repairs is a good step forward, Mount said.

“There’s always the pressure to simply fix the problem, meaning just make the levies taller and stronger. That’s the path of least resistance,” he said.

By constructing and strengthening levees, Mount said, the state may actually induce development and growth behind the levees and hence increase flood risk. Thus the need, he said, to prioritize flood control investments to areas where risk reduction is greatest – and to choose wisely which areas to develop.

“Climate change has expanded our uncertainties,” Mount said. “If trends associated with warming continue, we’ll have to constantly upgrade the levees to match these conditions. So we have to consider this constant economic investment.”

Environmental groups said the plan was a step in the right direction. Still, John Cain, Director of Conservation for California Flood Management at the nonprofit American Rivers, noted that one concern is the plan doesn’t sufficiently tackle the effects of climate change, like sea level rise, and it isn’t based on updated projections of what extreme floods could look like.

Another concern, he said, is that the state should not spend all the bond money on levees while leaving improvements such as bypass construction for a later date when funds may not be available.

But Mierzwa said the plan calls for working on levees and other improvements simultaneously. The state is already putting together a team to start feasibility work for two bypass expansions, he said.

Thus far, state officials say they have spent about half of the $5 billion in bond funds on more than 200 projects. Those include flood emergency exercises, 120 critical levee erosion site repairs, the removal of three million cubic yards of sediment from the bypasses and substantial levee improvement projects, among others.

The Central Valley Flood Protection Board must adopt the plan by July 2012.

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1/2/12

The longtime practice of dumping huge rocks and chunks of concrete along the coastline to stop erosion is coming under fire from those who favor letting the shoreline retreat naturally. San Francisco's efforts to protect Ocean Beach is the latest battleground.

For years, San Francisco's Ocean Beach has been under assault by such powerful surf that a fierce winter storm can scour away 25 feet of bluff in just days.

The startling pace of the erosion near the San Francisco Zoo has compelled the city to spend $5 million to shore up the crumbling bluffs. The strategy has been simple: drop huge rocks and mounds of sand to protect the nearby Great Highway and the sewer pipes underneath from being destroyed by the crashing waves.

But as the enormous rocks have piled up, adding to a jumble of concrete — chunks of curb and bits and pieces of gutters — from parking lots that have tumbled onto the shore, so too have the demands that the city get rid of it all and let the coastline retreat naturally.

Now, San Francisco finds itself under fire from environmentalists, who call the rock and rubble unsightly and harmful to the beach, and the California Coastal Commission, which regulates development along the state's 1,100-mile coastline but has refused to sign off on the fortifications, some of which have sat on the shore for 15 years without its permission.

The standoff at Ocean Beach is the face of the fight in California over the proliferation of sea walls and tossed-together barriers, steps that environmentalists and others say are obliterating the state's beaches and will never stand up against the advancing ocean.

The dispute over how to respond to the receding shoreline south of the Golden Gate Bridge is similar to others playing out at wave-battered bluffs and beaches up and down the coast, where temporary sea walls have a way of becoming permanent fixtures.

On crumbling bluff tops from Pacifica in Northern California to Encinitas in San Diego County, homes are protected by large rock sea walls and sandbags that were allowed under emergency permits but have never been formally approved. In Cayucos, a beach town in San Luis Obispo County, some oceanfront homes are protected by nearly 30-year-old sea walls that received nothing more than verbal authorization. Other coastal highways in the state are protected by sea walls that were supposed to be temporary.

The 1,000 feet of rock sea walls at the center of the dispute in San Francisco were not supposed to be permanent either. Some were built with emergency permits and some without any permission from the Coastal Commission.

In July, the panel rejected San Francisco's bid for after-the-fact approval for the barriers and get permission to build several hundred feet of new, buried sea wall. The commission said the city needed to come up with a better plan, such as moving back from the shore or building a vertical structure mimicking a natural bluff.

San Francisco shot back, suing the Coastal Commission in September in an effort to void its decision.

Twice, the waves have been brutal enough to pose a threat to underground infrastructure, city officials said. The El Niño-stoked storms of December 2009 and January 2010, for instance, devoured more than 40 feet of bluff, undermined the Great Highway and sent its southbound lanes sliding into the surf.

San Francisco's reliance on crude sea walls isn't out of the ordinary in California, where property owners for decades have erected fortifications when waves threaten homes, roads and underground sewer lines.

The result: More than 10% of the state's coastline — and about one-third of Southern California — is protected with man-made barriers.

Although sea walls effectively protect property in the short term, they can intensify the effect of waves and alter surf patterns, leaving beaches stripped of sand until they narrow or even vanish altogether.

Environmental and surfing groups strongly oppose the barriers, and coastal regulators have increasingly asked property owners to find other ways to cope with the ocean.

There are some signs San Francisco is moving in that direction.

Last month the Coastal Commission granted the city an emergency permit to drop large sandbags on a length of the beach in preparation for this winter's storms, a softer approach on the city's part that even drew praise from a member of the local chapter of the Surfrider Foundation, an opponent of sea walls.

A master plan being drafted for the beach calls for moving the most pinched stretch of the Great Highway several hundred feet inland and narrowing the road in other places. 

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12/30/11

The body of a young Minke whale washed ashore in the Point Reyes National Seashore this week, officials with the Marine Mammal Center said.

The dead whale turned up near Alamere Falls, north of Bolinas. Researchers from the mammal center and Academy of Sciences in San Francisco had hoped to spend Thursday taking samples from the whale, but high tides prevented access. The cause of death was not known.

The whale was believed to be a female and while an exact length was not known, it was described by onlookers as a juvenile.
"It wasn't in the best shape," said Jim Oswald, spokesman for the mammal center. "There is some question if this was an entanglement issue," he said, referring to a possible tangle with old fishing line.

Point Reyes National Seashore officials said Minke whales are seen off the coast from time to time.
"It's not like they are super rare, but then you don't see them too often either," said John Dell'Osso, chief of interpretation and resource education at the seashore.

Minke whales are considered to have a stable population throughout the world. They can grow up to 35 feet in length, weigh 10 tons and live up to 50 years old. They are often seen at the surface breaching and creating sounds including "clicks" and "boings," according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service. 

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To learn more about Minke whales, go to the American Cetacean Society's Minke whale factsheet. 

11/4/11

In recent months, some in Congress have been waging a whole-scale war against the Environmental Protection Agency. By now it has reached comical dimensions, with three separate bills aimed at preventing a so-called EPA “dust rule” that has never even existed. 

The spectacle would indeed be funny, if it wasn’t deadly serious. Republicans in Congress and in the GOP presidential debates are seeking to defund an already cash-strapped EPA under the pretense of caring about the federal deficit and are trying to hamper the agency by arguing that its rules hurt the economy.

Quite to the contrary. We have 40 years of data to show that a cleaner environment goes hand in hand with solid economic growth.

In a 2010 analysis of rules passed in the prior decade, the non-partisan Office of Management and Budget calculated benefits-to-cost ratios across various government agencies. The EPA came out on top with the highest ratios by far, with benefits from its regulations exceeding costs by an average of more than 10 to 1. If you care about well-functioning, free markets, the EPA would be the last federal agency you’d want to cut.

As any economist worth his or her professional crest will tell you, regulation solves problems that markets ignore. For example, they ensure that the costs of those who pollute show up on their own books, rather than increase the costs for others — either those left with cleanup costs or the healthcare expenses of those who live downwind or downstream.

Those who create costs pay for them — that simple idea is the logic behind the Clean Air Act and most other environmental regulations. It forces markets to reckon with the true costs of doing business, to be more efficient, and to innovate. And it does so at a great benefit to society, even boosting GDP in the long run by making us all healthier and more productive.

But is now the right time to strengthen environmental rules? No major piece of U.S. environmental legislation has been passed when the unemployment rate was above 7.5 percent. (U.S. unemployment currently stands at 9.0 percent.) Environmental protection, after all, costs money that we don’t currently have, or so the story goes. Wrong again: smart environmental regulation creates long-term policy certainty and mobilizes capital in the short term.

Leave it to the CEO of one of the largest U.S. utilities to set the record straight. Michael Morris, the CEO of American Electric Power, said during an investors’ conference call last month that EPA’s proposed tighter mercury and toxics standards would be anything but a job killer: “Once you put capital money to work, jobs are created.” Someone needs to install the scrubbers and modernize the existing energy fleet.

As Josh Bivens from the Economic Policy Institute put it in a recent congressional hearing on the same EPA toxics rules: “In short, calls to delay implementation of the rule based on vague appeals to wider economic weakness have the case entirely backward — there is no better time than now, from a job-creation perspective, to move forward with these rules.”

“Green growth” isn’t just a catch phrase. It’s the only way to reconcile our relentless pursuit for material wealth on a finite planet with an atmosphere at the boiling point. The fact is that sound environmental regulations — whether they address dirty air or an overheating planet — can create jobs and be a boost, rather than a burden, for the economy. 

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