Posted on 09/26/2005 10:44:37 AM PDT by SmithL
The river is rising, rain is pounding down and a powerful wind howls out of the Delta.
A storm lashes across East Contra Costa County as an unusually high tide surges through the Golden Gate and up the Carquinez Strait, roiling the normally quiet waters at places like Dutch Slough, Old River and Sand Mound Slough.
The region's 100-year-old levee systems give way in several places, flooding the below-sea-level islands and tracts.
Thousands flee to higher ground, picking their way along the region's evacuation routes, mostly traffic-clogged, debris-strewn country roads. The power is out, telephone and cell phone networks are down.
It hasn't happened yet, but a storm of that magnitude, or an equally powerful earthquake that brings the aging levees down, has been rumbling through the nightmares of emergency planners for decades.
Those nightmares were pushed into everyone's waking world after seeing the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina. And they are made more relevant when considering far East County's recent population boom and a study done last year putting the chances of a catastrophic Delta levee failure within the next 45 years at 2-in-3.
"We have to keep providing better and better flood protection, not just as we've done for the past 20 years, because there are more people and higher property values," said Barbara Burns, a civic engineer with Reclamation District 799.
District 799 maintains the nine miles of levee on unincorporated Oakley's Hotchkiss Tract and, like the county's other reclamation districts, also is responsible for approving and monitoring levee construction.
The county's Office of Emergency Services and the most populated reclamation districts -- the ones responsible for Bethel Island, Hotchkiss and Discovery Bay -- are all either updating their emergency response plans or have done so already to assist the nearly 20,000 who live in the region.
To date, however, none of the districts has conducted disaster response exercises and Contra Costa's drills have focused primarily on the more urban parts of the county. Also, none of the agencies responsible for emergency planing has conducted large-scale public awareness campaigns informing residents about how to react to a catastrophe.
The Bethel Island Municipal Improvement District is updating and expanding its plan, and Discovery Bay's town council is getting ready to put its first emergency plan together. District 800 maintains the levees for Discovery Bay and shares emergency planning responsibilities with the town council.
"The plan is required for funding from (the Federal Emergency Planning Agency) if there's a disaster," said BIMID board member Sheila Goodson. "We are working with the county Office of Emergency Services in construction of this plan."
"Our plan rolls up into the county plan and the county plan rolls into the state and the state into the federal plan," she said.
The districts form the first line of defense during a major disaster in their areas. The plans from districts 799 and 800 call for increased levee patrols as river levels rise, winds increase, rain pours down or after an earthquake strikes.
The plans include contact numbers for district and emergency response officials, lists of supplies and equipment, flood fighting techniques and evacuation routes.
"The No. 1 thing we do is keep the levees from breaking, and No. 2, when water gets into our district, we pump it back out. We're basically just a bowl," said Jeff Conway, District 800's manager.
"We've got 5,000 homes here we're protecting."
All levels of government in the United States are required to abide by Standardized Emergency Management System guidelines when planning for and responding to disasters that require response from multiple agencies over several jurisdictions.
According to the guidelines, "Special districts are primarily responsible in emergencies for restoration of services that they normally provide ... and for warning of hazards from their facilities or operations."
Perhaps the reclamation districts' most important role is as an early warning system. When the weather worsens, water rises or earth shakes, their plans call for running levee patrols every hour for 24 hours straight.
The districts coordinate sandbagging and minor levee repair efforts until it becomes more than they can handle.
"We do everything we can to flood fight. Once the levee is broken, all we do is dial 911 and call the sheriff's department. We don't do evacuation," District 799's Burns said.
Bethel Island, by contrast, is planning to train several volunteers in emergency response. Some of their duties would be to help move people from specific neighborhoods to marinas designated as evacuation points.
All the islands 2,300 residents will be informed in advance about which marina they've been assigned to and volunteers will check names off a list as people show up to be rescued.
"The evacuation will be by water primarily and the details on how it will be managed and if people will leave from their own boats or boats provided by the county hasn't been determined yet," Goodson said.
By that point, the county's Office of Emergency Services will be involved, and it's likely somebody from the state Department of Water Resources would head out to the area to assess the damage and begin organizing state help.
At this point, phone calls -- if possible --paperwork and e-mail would be flying back and forth among local, county and state officials. But none of that should hold up the response, said Chris Boyer, the chief emergency planner for the Contra Costa Office of Emergency Services.
"We respond at the speed of the disaster," Boyer said. "There's a number of things we could do. We could be prepared with a community warning system to send out an evacuation order, send out extra deputies, activate the search and rescue team."
"The sheriff's role is strictly limited to coordination of response. ... We're the glue that sticks the whole thing together," he said.
As the evacuation effort intensifies, the county's plan, published in 1996 and currently being updated, calls for somebody at OES to request the Red Cross set up temporary shelters at school gyms and other public places.
If the flooding worsens despite the best efforts from the reclamation district and the county, the Department of Water Resources gets involved.
"The Office of Emergency Services can ask DWR to provide technical assistance or they can get manual labor from the California Conservation Corps or the California Department of Forestry," said Sonny Fong, DWR's emergency preparedness manager. "If it's a major flood fight and we don't have readily available resources, then we go to the Army Corps of Engineers to ask their assistance."
"These things can move quickly, within hours, from the local to the state to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers," Fong said.
To make that process move as smoothly as possible, the districts and the county need plans, need to share those plans with each other and need to practice implementing them.
While those plans are either done or in the process of being revised or created, the reclamation districts have never conducted disaster exercises.
The county annually simulates a major disaster response but has never done one for a catastrophic levee failure, Boyer said.
But with the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina fresh in everyone's minds, officials all over the county are becoming more interested in just such a scenario.
"There's heightened awareness right now, and we need to take advantage of that as leaders," said Contra Costa County Supervisor Mary Piepho, whose district includes Discovery Bay. "People want to know what to do at home should something happen, and I think that as much hands-on preparedness we can do is extremely valuable." Kiley Russell covers growth and development. Contact him at 925-952-5027 or krussell@cctimes.com.
If the federal taxpayers were not subsidizing their property values by building/maintaining levees, and subsidizing them again when they break, wouldn't these people live in a more rational area?
Who ever thought this was a good idea ?
Exactly right. And when someone is injured or killed in a flood in such places, consider that they wouldn't even have been been there in harms way to begin with had it not been for our fed $ lulling them into a false sense of security.
Jeffers has compiled a lot of info in the "New Orleans Levee Failure Assessment": http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1489838/posts
The French?
Actually, we only started filling in the swamp and building levees in the early 1900s, long after we purchased it from the french. :) Until then people built on the higher ground, such as the NO Algiers area, which has been the first to return to "normal" after Katrina.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.