Last year, all eyes were on the Don Pedro spillway as a nervous Modesto waited
A year ago Tuesday, the spillway opened at Don Pedro Reservoir for only the second time in its 47-year history. The operators warned that the Tuolumne River could rise as much as 10 feet in Modesto as the water rushed down.
That would be 6 feet short of the disaster of 1997, when about 1,400 homes in Stanislaus County were flooded. But it still threatened to soak trailer parks and other sites along the river.
Emergency workers urged people to evacuate riverside homes. Dairy farmers made plans to move cattle to higher ground if needed. At the spillway near La Grange, TV crews stood ready, The Bee set up a livestream video, and officials watched from helicopter and drone.
They all wondered what would happen as the spillway opened at about 3 p.m. on Presidents Day and the water started its 23-hour journey to Modesto.
Not much, it turned out, compared with other parts of California in one of the wettest years on record.
The Tuolumne rose about 4 feet above its flood stage of 55 feet above sea level, inundating nearby farmland and parks, then settled back over the next week. The river would continue to run far higher than normal into summer, but it no longer threatened property.
It was not 1997, not even close. Nor was it anything like last February's' crisis at Lake Oroville, where eroding spillways forced the evacuation of about 180,000 people downstream.
One year later, Wes Monier talked about the Don Pedro experience. He is chief hydrologist at the Turlock Irrigation District, which shares Don Pedro with the Modesto Irrigation District.
Monier cited a few factors that worked in the dam operators' favor: Up-to-date storm forecasting and modeling of how rain and snowmelt work their way through the watershed. Coordination with San Francisco, which diverts part of the Tuolumne upstream of Don Pedro, and with state and federal agencies dealing with flood threats downstream on the San Joaquin River.
"We were able to get the reservoir in a situation, after each of the storms, to get ready for the next event, and that worked out pretty well," Monier said.
February was the peak of a water year that would bring a record 4.86 million acre-feet of runoff in the Tuolumne watershed.
TID and MID could handle it in part because Don Pedro is one of the state's largest reservoirs. And after about 130 years in business, they are skilled at decanting the lake carefully when runoff is charging in from high in the Sierra Nevada.
ONE MAN'S ROUGH TIME
The spillway opening did mean trouble for some folks. On Feb. 21, 2017, Raymond Lee was scrambling to pull belongings from his trailer at the Driftwood Mobile Home Park along the Tuolumne off South Ninth Street.
The rising water was about a foot away from entering the fifth-wheel, which sat in the same spot where it flooded in the winter of 1997, when owned by someone else.
Pulling out wasn’t an option. "The wheels haven't turned in 20 years,” Lee said at the time. “The bearings would probably fall out and everything else disintegrate."
As it turned out, the trailer did flood, Lee said recently, thinking back to last winter. He had to redo his carpet and tile flooring, and he lost “a few” possessions.
“It didn’t get all the way up inside my trailer, but it went all through the compartments below it,” Lee said, “so I had to air the mold and all that kind of stuff.”
If the situation had been handled better by officials, Lee said, he and neighbors might not have been flooded at all.
“They didn’t open the gates soon enough, for one,” Lee said, referring to TID and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which coordinate reservoir releases around the Central Valley . “I figure they could have opened them a little more earlier and maybe the floods wouldn’t have gotten so high.
Brandon McMillan, a spokesman for TID, said once Don Pedro encroaches into the flood control space (801.9 feet above sea level), the district begins to operate the reservoir within the Army corps’ Flood Control Operations Manual.
“Specifically to 2017, TID coordinated with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to open the controlled spillway gate prior to exceeding Don Pedro Reservoir’s maximum capacity of 830 feet. The use of the controlled spillway gate prior to reaching 830 feet was to minimize downstream impacts along the Tuolumne River.”
Lee, who’s lived at Driftwood about five years, said he couldn’t have afforded to move out of the park on two weeks’ notice. He’s in the same spot now because trailer sites at higher elevations have longtime residents.
“But we’re looking for a house now,” he said earlier this month, “so I’m probably not going to be here” if and when flooding hits in years ahead.
OUT AT CATFISH CAMP
The Tuolumne surge happened several days after the San Joaquin River flooded the Catfish Camp RV Park near Crows Landing.
Kathy Runge and other residents chose to live there because it's quiet, remote, affordable and they don't get too much hassle from landlords.
A year ago, residents walked in a few feet of cold water as they rushed to get their mobile homes out of the park to higher ground, a task not easy for many of them.
They struggled to find trucks to haul out their trailers. A few had RVs that were habitable but with vehicle engines that were not operational. Some residents didn’t move in time and left their homes and other vehicles stuck in the flooded park. Others found it impossible to pull out large appliances.
Runge and her husband got their mobile home out, but left behind a washing machine and a freezer floating in the flooded RV park. "It all just washed down in the water," she said.
Abraham Hernandez, another Catfish Camp resident, said the first signs of flooding were from underneath their driveway near their mobile home. It happened before the river spilled over its banks.
"The water comes up through holes in the concrete," Hernandez said. "It started gurgling, like a swamp."
He borrowed a truck from his brother-in-law to haul out his mobile home. Then, the river spilled over.
The flooding displaced residents living in about 18 mobile homes at the RV park along Crows Landing Road just southwest of the river. Stanislaus County and Red Cross officials provided the residents a temporary shelter in the few weeks after the flooding began in mid-February.
The entire park was underwater, about 3 feet in most of it. The sewage system and water well were likely contaminated, so it was unclear when the residents would be allowed to return to Catfish Camp.
"It was nasty, dirty," Hernandez said about the flooded RV park.
'A LEARNING EXPERIENCE'
Several of the of the residents remained with their mobile homes parked just outside the RV park, because they weren't allowed to park them outside the temporary shelter. Some had just paid rent and had no money to find another RV park to stay.
They had no source for electricity and fresh water, which made daily tasks like washing dishes and showering difficult. They had big water containers brought to them to fill their RV holding tanks. Kind residents in the area brought them pizza and other food.
Runge said only she and Lori Taylor, a manager and resident at Catfish Camp, remained living in their mobile homes parked outside the RV park for two months.
"It wasn't that bad, because we had an (electric) generator and a propane heater to keep it warm at night," Runge said.
In April, they were allowed to return to their mobile home spots in the park. A few, like Runge and Taylor, returned. It didn't take long for the RV park to get new tenants.
"It filled up fast," Runge said about Catfish Camp. "Within a month, every spot was taken."
The affordable $500 monthly rent, including electricity, waste disposal and water, is worth the risk of being washed out by the river every several years, some of the tenants said.
Hernandez and his girlfriend returned to Catfish Camp in May. So did Greer. The residents there weren't worried about flooding this winter, since there wasn't much valley rain and mountain snow. They hope they can be ready to move out on short notice if the river does spill over its banks again.
"It was a learning experience," Hernandez said. "Some people didn't come back here."
This story was originally published February 17, 2018 at 4:16 PM with the headline "Last year, all eyes were on the Don Pedro spillway as a nervous Modesto waited."