Our Paul Tullis has a deeply reported piece in the recent Miller-McCune magazine about a subject near anddear to all Californians: Water. From his article:
[S]tate Sen. Joe Simitian, the Palo Alto Democrat who pushed through the state Legislature a historic package of bills that will determine a host of water issues in California over the next generation, including what to do with the Delta, told me the Delta is “California’s Katrina waiting to happen.” If, in a flood or an earthquake, a large number of levees fail at once — and there are 1,300 miles of them, a stretch longer than California’s Pacific coastline — up to 515,000 residents and 520,000 acres of farmland will be at immediate risk. Millions more acres and large urban areas will lose access to a major source of their water for months, or even years, as saltwater from the adjacent San Francisco Bay flows in.
[Civil engineer Gilbert) Cosio believes this is largely hype. He’s been working on these levees his entire 26-year career. Visual inspection, physical monitoring, magnetic anomaly studies, ground-penetrating radar and geomorphic studies are a few of the tools he and his colleagues at MBK Engineers use to assess levee condition. He wants to impress upon me the idea that these levees are, in fact, relatively safe.
“In our mind, the glass is half full,” he says with a chuckle, compared to “25 to 30 years ago, when the glass was totally empty. We think there’s room for improvement, but they’re a lot better than they used to be.”
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