Water projects protect us from drought, floods

Floods are nothing new in California, but that doesn’t make them any less painful.

A state better known for cyclical and serious drought actually suffers equal or greater pain when there’s too much water, not too little. Ask your neighbors in Waterford, along Dry Creek or in South Modesto or living along the San Joaquin River. The drought might have ruined their lawns, but when the water spilling from Don Pedro Reservoir reaches these areas, the costs could be far greater.

Should we simply beseech the heavens for drier skies? Or should we hold elected officials accountable and ask them to get off their dam hands?

In 2014, amid a cruel five-year drought, voters approved Proposition 1 to create additional water storage for the future. Those who abhor dams for the ecological damage they do made certain that most of the $7.5 billion bond would go to conservation projects and other types of storage. But even those projects are stalled.

Dams are old fashioned, but they have always served two purposes: creating reserves for drought and a check on previously uncontrolled rain and runoff. Precisely the situation we’re in now.

Anyone living in our region in the late 1800s knew this from experience. California’s worst floods came in 1861-62 as virtually the entire valley – 300 miles long, 20 miles wide – was inundated. Sacramento was abandoned. If there had been a Modesto, it would have been 9 feet under water.

There were severe floods in 1937, again in 1986 (when we first heard the term “Pineapple Express”), and then the infamous floods of 1997.

That’s when Don Pedro’s spillgates first opened. Low-lying areas in Waterford, Modesto and along the San Joaquin River near Manteca all flooded; more than 1,100 homes were flooded.

The U.S. Geological Survey called that storm “unprecedented” – there were 20 levee failures; water caused $2 billion in damage to roads, bridges, homes and crops; nine people were killed and 120,000 evacuated; Yosemite flooded for the first time since 1862; the Tuolumne River crested in Modesto at 71.1 feet.

No one expects a repeat this year. But clearly our water model isn’t working. We need more dams.

“New storage also helps flood control,” said Jake Wenger, a Modesto Irrigation District board member. “The people of California passed a bond in 2014 thinking that this would do it. … We have to hold our state leaders accountable; we need new storage.”

But it’s too easy to toss all of that responsibility on state leaders.

The Turlock and Modesto area has always led the way in water policy. The Wright Act of 1887 was written by a Modesto schoolteacher. Turlock and Modesto irrigation districts were the first in the United States. They built Don Pedro Dam (with help from San Francisco), creating the largest reservoir in California not owned by the state or federal governments.

Perhaps farmers here have gotten so used to reaping the benefits of others’ foresight they can’t see that it is past time to pay those benefits forward.

“It’s up to us,” said Wenger, a 34-year-old west Modesto farmer. Before the districts built “New Don Pedro Dam” in the late ’60s, early ’70s, the old reservoir held only slightly less than 300,000 acre-feet. “Things flooded over here all the time,” he said. “In most ‘average’ water years things were flooding. … We’re far better off with 2 million acre-feet of storage.”

The climate has changed. Instead of a blanket of gradually melting Sierra snow, we get torrents of rain. Even our largest reservoirs can’t hold back all of it.

It’s time to reconsider our antipathy toward dams, not just as water-storage projects but as safety measures to keep thousands of homes dry and people safe.

This story was originally published February 20, 2017 at 2:24 PM with the headline "Water projects protect us from drought, floods."