I expect to see this in my lifetime.

I don’t understand how our flood system is going to work. I mean, I don’t understand how the whole system is plumbed, or the details at any site, or how to design a levee or anything like that. I don’t understand that for sure. But, I do have an overview, gleaned from listening around and asking people who’ll answer questions, and I know what some of the problems are. What I can’t understand is what we, as Californians, are going to do when there are more and bigger floods.

Imagine it. Imagine that a big flood, a city-eating flood, came through the Sacramento Valley. Yuba-Marysville, which sits at the confluence of the Feather and the Yuba, gets knocked out; Natomas in north Sacramento is under twenty feet of water; and the Pocket in south Sacramento meets its inevitable fate. The flood collapses several Delta levees, making it impossible to send water south; Southern California has a six month supply of water south of the Delta before it needs to find some other source.

A flood like that isn’t even very unlikely. The 1997 floods strained Sacramento’s levees to absolute capacity; Sacramento was spared because levees broke upstream and flooded parts of Yuba. 1997 was about the same size as 1986; the internal guesses around here say that was about a seventy-year flood (based on the hydrologic record, a flood that has a 1 in 70 chance of happening every year). That is certainly not the largest flood on record. The 1891-1892 flood, after four weeks of rain, flooded more than a tenth of the state. The outflow from the flood caused a weeklong 18-20 foot waterfall from the Bay into the Pacific. Boats reported drinking sweetwater at the Farallon Islands.

A massive flood comes along and takes a chunk out of several cities in the Sacramento Valley and disrupts drinking water to Southern California. What would happen? Well, the Flood Center would do their best to minimize the damage. I don’t think we would get the loss of life here that we saw in New Orleans, simply because there is higher ground closer and floods are easier to forecast. Reporters would cover dramatic rescues and show poignant images of horses and dogs going under. There would be lots of pan and zoom shots of rooflines under water and levees eroding. The waters would subside, hopefully without causing an epidemic. The country would declare a national disaster and vow to rebuild and keep living our Sacramento way of life. Neighborhoods would be uninhabitable wreckage. It would cost billions.

Now imagine that floods like that happened every, say, fifteen to twenty years. What if we knew New Orleans would be flooded again within a generation? Would we vow to rebuild after the second time? The third time? Would we adjust? How? Build stilt houses? Stay off the floodplains? Abandon our too-narrow levees to give the river room for winter flows? Abandon cities? Walk away from that infrastructure?

What if floods were just one part of it? I mean, the guys at the Flood Center don’t sleep at night, but if you want to know who is freaking the fuck out, they’re over at the California Department of Forestry, wondering how they are going to keep a third of the state from going up in flames as artificially dense forests die from less moisture from early snowpack melt. What if Los Angeles burns during the months that the California Aquaduct is down? What if they have to choose between fighting fires in Malibu and reserving a month of drinking water? What if the nation would like to help, but it was a particularly nasty hurricane/tornado/blizzard season and has been for ten years?

Here’s the thing. I think these problems are real and imminent. I wish we would solve them in advance, but I can’t see how that will happen. Smart people are trying and the system is too heavily weighted in favor of shortsighted self-interest. So I wonder what it will really be like. Will there be debates in the Legislature where they decide they can’t afford another disaster declaration? Will they warn would-be returnees that they purely will not get help the next time? Will cities in stupid places ebb by default, ‘til the only people left there live in 19th century self-reliance? What will we do when three big disasters in ten years leave us too poor to respond to the earthquake? What will the big picture look like? What will seem normal to us?