It was the defining moment of the January 1997 floods.
A KCRA-TV news crew was standing in the backyard of a Weston Ranch home that was on a street where every family was busy loading up rental vans with whatever possessions they could jam inside.
The camera was focused on a young couple with anxiety on their faces.
The husband started to speak as the camera panned from the back side of his home to his back fence.
“If we had known it could flood here we never would have bought the home.”
Just as he finished his sentence the camera stopped on the nearly 20-foot high backside of the French Camp Slough levee that was right behind his house.
One had to wonder what he thought the 20-foot-high mound of dirt behind his house was for anyway. But in the homeowner’s defense, he is like other Californians living in a dreamland with no reality of where their water comes from or how it is kept from destroying half the state.
If anyone did, who would buy in Weston Ranch - the lowest point in the county outside of the Delta proper - without at least making it a top priority to make sure the levees protecting their home were well maintained instead of just assuming they are.
There is almost a universal denial that California is what it is today because we have managed to harness, store, and direct the run-off from the Sierra, Trinity Alps, and Siskyous.
And while it may not flood this year, the next water bursting through levees will one day again flood parts of the South County just as it has 11 times since 1929.
The politicians will do their usual sound bites and look concerned when it happens. But they know all too well the short memory of California voters who tend to live in the moment.
A year after the 1997 floods that hit Manteca and elsewhere in California, politicians got a bond measure on the ballot to address both flooding and water storage needs.
Part of that money was supposed to have addressed flooding on the San Joaquin River between the Stanislaus River and Lathrop. Not a penny went toward actual improvements until some money was awarded last year to Reclamation District 17 which is north of the biggest problem area.
Politicians in Sacramento hijacked $1 billion from the Proposition 13 water bond approved by voters in 1998 so they could keep the state afloat during the era of the Gray Davis budget fiasco.
The scary part is most of the people familiar with the river know simply dredging what is believed to have been a 7-foot silt build-up since the 1950s between Vernalis and Mossdale will go a long way to help the situation.
But you can’t do that without massive studies. Why? The silt is part of the “environment” even though the channel the river runs in now has been within boundaries dictated by man. Well, at least most of the time when Mother Nature isn’t demonstrating that she’s still calling the shots.
There’s a debate whether Lathrop levees are as strong as possible. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re not. But at least the reclamation district is taking steps to strengthen them to a degree.
Manteca, for its part, is requiring a developer to widen the cross-levee south of Woodward Avenue as the Trails of Manteca development proceeds. That levee needs to be widened and possibly extended further east toward Union Road as historic flood water lines mean less and less as more development takes place up and down the valley covering land that once was used to percolate run-off into the ground.
Development all along the San Joaquin Valley watershed has shot holes in the myth of “100-year flood events” as such catastrophes are looking more and more like every 10-year affairs.
It goes without saying that the state’s flood protection and water storage system needs to be expanded to help gain some degree of certainty in California’s never ending cycle of droughts and floods.
A KCRA-TV news crew was standing in the backyard of a Weston Ranch home that was on a street where every family was busy loading up rental vans with whatever possessions they could jam inside.
The camera was focused on a young couple with anxiety on their faces.
The husband started to speak as the camera panned from the back side of his home to his back fence.
“If we had known it could flood here we never would have bought the home.”
Just as he finished his sentence the camera stopped on the nearly 20-foot high backside of the French Camp Slough levee that was right behind his house.
One had to wonder what he thought the 20-foot-high mound of dirt behind his house was for anyway. But in the homeowner’s defense, he is like other Californians living in a dreamland with no reality of where their water comes from or how it is kept from destroying half the state.
If anyone did, who would buy in Weston Ranch - the lowest point in the county outside of the Delta proper - without at least making it a top priority to make sure the levees protecting their home were well maintained instead of just assuming they are.
There is almost a universal denial that California is what it is today because we have managed to harness, store, and direct the run-off from the Sierra, Trinity Alps, and Siskyous.
And while it may not flood this year, the next water bursting through levees will one day again flood parts of the South County just as it has 11 times since 1929.
The politicians will do their usual sound bites and look concerned when it happens. But they know all too well the short memory of California voters who tend to live in the moment.
A year after the 1997 floods that hit Manteca and elsewhere in California, politicians got a bond measure on the ballot to address both flooding and water storage needs.
Part of that money was supposed to have addressed flooding on the San Joaquin River between the Stanislaus River and Lathrop. Not a penny went toward actual improvements until some money was awarded last year to Reclamation District 17 which is north of the biggest problem area.
Politicians in Sacramento hijacked $1 billion from the Proposition 13 water bond approved by voters in 1998 so they could keep the state afloat during the era of the Gray Davis budget fiasco.
The scary part is most of the people familiar with the river know simply dredging what is believed to have been a 7-foot silt build-up since the 1950s between Vernalis and Mossdale will go a long way to help the situation.
But you can’t do that without massive studies. Why? The silt is part of the “environment” even though the channel the river runs in now has been within boundaries dictated by man. Well, at least most of the time when Mother Nature isn’t demonstrating that she’s still calling the shots.
There’s a debate whether Lathrop levees are as strong as possible. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re not. But at least the reclamation district is taking steps to strengthen them to a degree.
Manteca, for its part, is requiring a developer to widen the cross-levee south of Woodward Avenue as the Trails of Manteca development proceeds. That levee needs to be widened and possibly extended further east toward Union Road as historic flood water lines mean less and less as more development takes place up and down the valley covering land that once was used to percolate run-off into the ground.
Development all along the San Joaquin Valley watershed has shot holes in the myth of “100-year flood events” as such catastrophes are looking more and more like every 10-year affairs.
It goes without saying that the state’s flood protection and water storage system needs to be expanded to help gain some degree of certainty in California’s never ending cycle of droughts and floods.
