Posted on 02/16/2006 9:44:14 PM PST by NormsRevenge
SACRAMENTO - Three Central Valley lawmakers unveiled flood-control bills Wednesday as part of a larger rollout of public works legislation sponsored by Assembly Republicans.
Stockton's Greg Aghazarian, Fresno's Mike Villines and Richvale's Doug LaMalfa are carrying the legislation, all of which would suspend the California Environmental Quality Act for levee repairs.
Assembly Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield said the proposals, along with others to streamline road-building projects and protect highway money, represent their stance in the larger debate over public works that is dominating discussion at the Capitol.
Suspending CEQA, as the act is known, strips layers of bureaucratic red tape away from routine levee repair projects, Aghazarian and others say. Do this, and the dollars Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Legislature are asking voters to spend will go farther.
"We are looking to do something in California other than buy new studies," McCarthy said.
But levee engineers who actually do the fixing say the real hindrance to their efforts isn't CEQA, it's the federal Endangered Species Act.
"The biggest, No. 1 problem is clearly ESA," said Joe Countryman of MBK Engineers, a firm that performs levee work in the Delta. "CEQA is much less onerous."
Bill Darsie of Stockton-based Kjeldsen, Sinnock & Neudeck agreed. "CEQA really isn't the problem. The problem is ESA."
To be sure, while Darsie says he's never seen it happen with levee work, the potential for problems does exist with CEQA. Should a group take umbrage with a maintenance project, it could use the law as a weapon to stop the project.
"There are times when provisions of CEQA can be untenable," he said.
Aghazarian, who's sponsoring the bill to suspend CEQA for routine levee maintenance, said his proposal would eliminate that potential.
"If CEQA's not the problem, let's put this in the code so it doesn't become a problem," Aghazarian said. "Why not do this if it has the potential to save someone's property or life?"
Villines' proposal would allow the governor to declare a state of emergency to repair levees determined by either the Army Corps of Engineers or the state Department of Water Resources to be an imminent flood threat.
Several such sites already have been identified in the Delta along the Sacramento River.
LaMalfa's bill would eliminate an existing requirement for levee repair crews to maintain the same amount of natural habitat they found before they did the repairs.
Countryman said his work in the Delta faces this problem, but it's easily dealt with because new habitat springs up in unused corners of the Delta islands all the time.
Steve Maviglio, a spokesman for Assembly Speaker Fabian Nûñez, panned the ideas.
"In a nutshell, these Assembly Republican bills roll back state environmental laws in the guise of flood protection," Maviglio said.
Aghazarian countered by noting that existing law exempted CEQA provisions for Pac Bell Park in San Francisco, the BART route in the East Bay and even for potential Olympic construction in California.
"A lot of these make perfect sense, but we should at least have these same protections for our levees," he said.
McCarthy said their public works package is a starting point; he knows it will not survive the greater public works debate intact.
"What we're trying to do is bring solutions," he said. "We want to bring something to the table."
Aghazarian's bill is AB2026; Villines' bill is AB2029; LaMalfa's bill is AB2027.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
I've invented a buoyant flood road solution to the problem, if anyone is interested.
I am as long as I don't have to inflate it with my own breath.
This whole arguement is just backwards. CEQA was originally passed to provide public input to government projects. After the Mono Lake decision, the law was then applied to private projects. Over the years, public projects have gradually been excluded. CEQA as law is outdated, meant for another era. It should be scrapped or modernized.
Technically, the rats are right, levee repairs should not be exempted, because that is what CEQA was passed for. The GOP has boxed itself in to a corner with this approach. Rather then push for an exemption to bad law, they should demand reform/modernization of bad law. Point out how it does nothing for the environment, say they can't support bonds that result in endless studies and no action.
Exemptions are just kicking the can down the road for another generation to deal with.
The only "breath-inflating" required is talking to your CA legislatiors. They don't have to build dumb levees or desperation-sand bag for a flood, the buoyant road panels, piano hinged to a buried concrete wall on the land side, dead man anchored on the river or seaside, naturally float up into a vertical sea wall only when needed,then float back down into a roadway again when the flood waters abate. No electrical or hydraulic systems are required, natural buoyancy and gravity operates it all. Sure, it'll cost money to build it/them, but how much damage do floods do?
How are the hinges sealed?
Welcome to the real world, whoever is trying to repair the levees.
The environazis have prevented the farmers from killing the ground squirrels who are destroying the levees with holes. Then they had to totally evacuate Yuba City and Marysville, along the Sacramento River..about 1996/97.
The enviros won't let farmers clean fallen brush or weeds out of the edges of runoff ditches or irrigation ditches for a myriad of critters.
When the floods put the strawberry growers out of business and the growers could show this to Pete Wilson, Wilson immediately stepped in and ordered the debris cleared from the water courses because it was washing out roads, fields, etc. That lasted as long as that storm emergency. Then the environazis took over again, with the help of the judiciary and injunctions.
When the food eating public that lives in the cities and only sees food on a restaurant plate or in a grocery store finally looks at empty shelves, they will cry WHY? Where is our food?
It will be too late, because the people who know how to grow food and take care of the land on which they do so will be off their land and no longer willing to feed a large group of total ingrates.
Oh, not very well, more like your standard piano hinges only bigger. Maybe you teflon coat them but leaking piano hinges is not a real problem, it's the wall of 20' to 50' high flood water that you want to stop in its tracks. I've made a small table top model, tested and photographed it in a local swimming pool, works exactly like it's supposed to(lazy B configuration of (28)5"x5" plywood panels). Sent it off, sketches and photos, to 22 coastal state governors for christmas, only one response, Bob Riley of AL; who in turn referred it to his FEMA guy, where it died(as I knew it would). You know what's happening to FEMA right now, yes?
At this stage of design can you estimate:
In 100 running feet of hinge, how much lateral offset, in inches, will the hinges tolerate without binding?
I'm assuming a continuous, slightly flexible, roadbed platform overlain with a flexible, macadam like, substance.
A kindred soul! Yes, exactly the questions this architect has been pondering for 5 years since I first thought of the flood road after the Des Moines flood. I just used canvas-fabric super-glued to the plywood edges in my model(triangular wedge shaped)but in a real roadway you have heavy semitrucks pounding on it. You have both concave and convex curves. On convex(outward facing)curves you could have 3 cross piano hinges, 2 at edges of square panels and 1 down the middle. As the road panel lifts the middle hinge bulges up, finally pointing outward(landward)at full vertical extension. On concave(inward facing)curves the 3 piano hinge set would be tucked down/under and when the adjacent square road panels lift they pop to straight across a full extension...anyway, that's one way of doing it. You could also have a tough, tough thick fabric that does the same thing, but you have to consider rutting, washboarding of a heavily used road lane, plus possible resonant drumming if you don't have perfect bearing under the road panels...as to offset forces on hinges, not to worry, the dead man anchors hold the lateral forces, the piano hinges just hold the panels down(bolted to a buried concrete wall/footing)...then there's the cost : probably comparable to a freeway in million$/mile...surfacing something like aircraft carrier flight decks...so, if you tell me your snail mail address and promise to get it to these CA legislators, I'll send you a copy...
If you got a foundation that can hold this, then you got a foundation that could hold a levee against the same height of water.
You don't quite get the picture yet. A dirt levee is just that : a long pile of dirt, useful only .001% of the time to hold back flood waters, otherwise its just a useless waste of money and ground area. A roadway of buoyant panels that only swing up into a vertical seawall when needed to hold back flood waters, naturally, then float back down by gravity into a roadway again...is a USEFUL road 99.99% of the time. Roads/highways often run along rivers, beaches, yes? Thus modifying them to a flood road configuration is a "twofer", get it? Why build a levee when you can build a useful flood road instead? Think of lightning rods...
Well, me? I am from Louisiana and I would like to say that our beloved friends from the enviromental screwball community had a bit of blame in the levee collapse in N.O. Don't take my word just do a search for the lawsuits from the environmentalist over levee construction. Go a few years back. It didn't happen yesterday but my friends the enviro Nazis are there. Yes they are. :) God I love America and the internet; don't you?
Well, me? I am from Louisiana and I would like to say that our beloved friends from the enviromental screwball community had a bit of blame in the levee collapse in N.O. Don't take my word just do a search for the lawsuits from the environmentalist over levee construction. Go a few years back. It didn't happen yesterday but my friends the enviro Nazis are there. Yes they are. :) God I love America and the internet; don't you?
Yes, there's a lot of blame to go around but consider this : did I hear right? 700 BILLION to rebuild N.O.!!! There are some 300 miles in the perimeter around N.O. yes? If a buoyant flood road would cost $1M/mile that's $300M. Now divide $700B by $300M = 2333 or .0004286 or .04% of what the rebuilding costs will be. Yes, it could be more than $1M/mile, $2M/mile would be .08%, but since laziness prevailed in the levee system for too many years, now the rest of the country gets stuck with the bill. I thought of this flood road idea 5 years ago, nobody listened then(letter to nat'l FEMA director), nor are they listening now(AL FEMA director). So later this year nature will pick another hurricane victim...and still another katrina-tab...as we say in MT : you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink...
levees are great to drive your chevy to
Yeah, I remember the song, but really, they're nothing more than useless piles of dirt that you the taxpayer pays for. 99.99% of the time they just sit there, growing weeds...and chevys. Think of a flood road like a lightning rod, a skinny little wire up on the roof, doesn't do anything until a ZAP comes along. But floods are the greatest killers in nature, vs lightning, hurricane force winds, avalanches, snake bites, forest fires, etc. And yet you pay through the NOSE for flood insurance, yes? It's a RACKET, yes? So why not OFF that flood insurance policy/cost with a flood road?
Yes, the eco-freaks have been part of the problem, but the levee failures speak to a deeper cultural problem. As Rush pointed out : 2 basic lessons from katrina : geological siltation over 300+ years and self reliance. Basically you've had a "yowsuh boss" mentality in New Orleans : born lazy, taught lazy and expecting to be spoon-fed throughout life. Thus it was that lazy cultural approach to life that didn't do the vital work of levee repair despite YEARS and YEARS of warnings. And now they want bailed out AGAIN! The only reason I see for new orleans' exstence is the PORT which is the transit point for the FOOD that the hard working bread basket of america produces, otherwise it's just a sin-loving pack of wharf rats...a tree is known by its fruit....If I heard right : $700 BILLION to rebuild N.O....the whole TAX PAYING country asks : is it worth it? Don't we have better uses for $700 BILLION dollars?
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