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By Sharan Street
Published Jan 16, 2023

Creeks in the Pajaro Valley swelled to flood stage during the January storms. Creeks in the Pajaro Valley swelled to flood stage during the January storms. Image credit: Rosangela Perry   Shutterstock

01-16-23: River Stories

As the atmospheric rivers flowed this past weekend, a flood of reporting came from local, statewide and even national news media. Santa Cruz County’s local news outlets stepped up, from daily Sentinel headlines to the magazine-style reporting pulled together by the team at Good Times. But one interesting story was published on Twitter.

A professor of environmental studies at San Jose State University, Dustin Mulvaney illustrated the history of the San Lorenzo River in series of posts. He begins the saga in 1791, when multiple floods finally drove Spanish occupiers to relocate to Mission Hill—on land where the ancestors of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band had lived for thousands of years.

But subsequent settlers kept building in the San Lorenzo flood plain, and Mulvaney details the torrents that swept away bridges, houses and streets every decade until 1958, when the Army Corps began building levees and dams.

Those levees have more or less held in Santa Cruz, but that’s not always the case throughout the state. In an article headlined “Deadly results as dramatic climate whiplash causes California’s aging levees to fail,” three Los Angeles Times reporters look at California’s levee system. Pointing out that storm water “has a nasty way of finding errors in infrastructure planning and design,” geomorphologist Jeffrey Mount opines, “There are two kinds of levees: Those that have failed, and those that will fail.”

Though our levee systems and dams are aging, some technology is getting better. Mercury News reporter Lisa Krieger writes about stream gauges, linked to telecommunication lines and computers, that can guide public safety officials to where they will be needed. “We can tell first responders, with some certainty, that our gauges are saying it’s going to be a flood-prone area in one hour and 45 minutes,” Kevin Murray of the Palo Alto-based San Francisquito Creek Joint Powers Authority tells Krieger. “That gives them some time to get ahead of the disaster.”

Sacramento Bee reporter Ari Plachta took to the skies with the “hurricane hunters,” as the crew of the U.S. Air Force Reserve 53rd Weather Reconnaissance Squadron are known. Plachta writes, “Scientists have shown these flights can improve storm forecasts by 20%, a boon to both emergency preparations and reservoir managers aiming to keep water stores full but not flooded.”


Be Prepared

As Santa Cruz County’s rivers rose and fell, California Local cofounder Chris Neklason has been focused on aggregating reliable sources of information about current weather, traffic and road conditions, creek levels and more. He has found that federal agencies and state agencies provide information that can be easily shared, but county and local municipal agencies have yet to do so. In a new blog post, he explains why the lack of machine-readable information leaves citizens less informed when disaster strikes.


Communicating During Disaster and Crisis

View of the flooded San Lorenzo River Park Benchlands in Santa Cruz, California on New Year's Eve 2022.
How to effectively communicate actionable information for preparation before extreme events, and to disseminate vital information during and after disasters.

No End in Sight

“Determining when a drought begins and ends is tricky,” writes CalMatters reporter Alastair Bland. Even trickier will be reversing the years of desiccation: the thousands of dry wells in the San Joaquin Valley, the damage to aquatic ecosystems and the decimation of fish species.


Is California’s Drought Over?

Sean de Guzman of the California Department of Water Resources conducts the first snow survey of the 2023 season at Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada Mountains on Jan. 3.
A dozen days of wet and wild weather haven’t ended the drought, and won't cure the driest period in the West in the past 1,200 years.


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