Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
July 27, 2009
5. Agencies, Programs, People –
Senate Begins Debate on $34.3B Energy and Water Appropriations Bill
The New York Times
Scientists plot and prepare for Noah's Ark-like floods;
California
but crisis experts are now planning for a 200-to-500-year flood.
Dry levee is southwest Manteca’s last defense
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Senate Begins Debate on $34.3B Energy and Water Appropriations Bill
The New York Times – 7/27/09
By Taryn Luntz and Ben Geman
The Senate this afternoon will begin debate on a $34.3 billion fiscal 2010 energy and water spending bill as environmental groups press lawmakers to strip provisions they say will damage wetlands and fish habitat in
Overall, the Senate bill, S. 1436 (pdf), would provide $27.4 billion to the Energy Department, $5.4 billion to the Army Corps of Engineers and $1.1 billion to the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation.
The amendment picture was not clear at press time, however a coalition of environmental groups was pressing for changes they say are necessary to protect fish and wetlands near the Mississippi River in
In a July 23 letter (pdf), the groups urged Senate leaders to remove two bill riders that would shift $3.9 million from a fish restoration project in southern
"These provisions would obstruct compliance with a federal court order by rescinding FY 2009 funds the corps intends to use to deconstruct structures to restore the habitat and the channel of the St. Johns River," said the letter, which was sent last week to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Appropriations Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) and signed by officials from the Environmental Defense Fund, National Audubon Society and eight other groups.
The corps should use the money to undo environmental damage caused by the initial construction of a floodplain project that a federal judge later ruled illegal, the letter said.
Energy spending
The DOE spending plan steers $2.23 billion into renewable energy and efficiency programs, compared to $1.93 billion in fiscal 2009. However, that amount is less than the $2.32 billion in the White House spending request.
The bill bucks an administration request to end funding for hydrogen-powered vehicles research and development, instead including $190 million for hydrogen programs overall.
The bill also substantially scales back a DOE plan to create eight multidisciplinary "energy innovation hubs" funded through various program areas. It blocks five outright, while blessing one focusing on modeling and simulation, noting in report language that "advanced computing and simulation can play a critical role in developing advanced fuels and modeling reactor performance."
Two other programs -- on Fuels From Sunlight and Energy Efficient Building Systems -- would receive $22 million each if the administration uses $44 million from the recent stimulus law for the South Table Mountain Ingress/Egress and Traffic Capacity Upgrades project at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This would free up the $22 million for each proposed hub, the report states.
Other funding levels include $4.9 billion for the Office of Science, $761 million for nuclear energy programs, about $700 million for fossil energy programs, and $5.76 billion for cleanup of DOE nuclear sites.
The bill's report language (pdf) also includes language that says lawmakers expect DOE to suspend a fee the nuclear industry pays to the federal government to remove and permanently store nuclear waste (E&E Daily, July 21).
Army Corps
The spending bill allots $5.4 billion to the Army Corps of Engineers' civil works program but funds no new projects starts, a move likely to spark amendments from lawmakers eager to win money for new parochial projects.
The Appropriations Committee received 256 funding requests from senators for new civil works projects or studies but elected to award none because of a $60 billion existing backlog of authorized Army Corps programs.
"The committee believes that recommending new starts in this budget environment would be imprudent," the committee bill report says. "These new starts would get over the 'new start' hurdle, only to face a budget that cannot accommodate all of these needs. One has to ask, is it more prudent to start a project, or to adequately fund those that have been started?"
The budget proposal is $280 million higher than the president requested for the agency and slightly lower than the $5.5 billion bill cleared by the House.
The Senate bill provides about $2.5 billion for maintaining and operating existing Army Corps programs, $61 million less than the House measure and $54 million less than the president's request.
It allots $340 million for flood-damage reduction projects in the
Bureau of Reclamation
The appropriations bill would give the Bureau of Reclamation about $1.1 billion, a $93 million boost from the House version and $110 million more than the president requested.
Reclamation's water account would see a $73 million jump to $993 million. The account finances water development, management and restoration in the 17 Western states.
The California Bay-Delta Restoration account, which is aimed at improving water quality and reliability in the San Joaquin River Delta, would garner $41 million, and the Central Valley Project Restoration Fund would win $35 million under the measure. #
Scientists plot and prepare for Noah's Ark-like floods;
California
but crisis experts are now planning for a 200-to-500-year flood.
Long Beach
By Dana Bartholomew
Oh, my friends, do you remember?
On that fatal New Year's night
The lights of old
Were a flick'ring, Oh, so bright.
A cloud burst hit our city
And it swept away our homes;
It swept away our loved ones
In that fatal New Years flood.
— From "
First come the wildfires. Then the extended cloudbursts. Then the furies of mud, rock and debris that roar out of the
And in the floods' wake, every few decades, rage death and destruction across
"The debris flows, reported as mud slides, pick up speed like a waterborne avalanche coming down off the mountains — moving at 40 miles per hour picking up boulders like minivans and sweeping into the city," said Lucy Jones, chief scientist for the Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project at the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena.
"In (1934 and) 1978 it happened in La Crescenta...and it'll happen again."
Worried about the long-term effects of climate change, the USGS and the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration are co-creating a scenario for a cataclysmic flood across the
Last year, a USGS-led team of 300 scientists created a detailed scenario for a 7.8-magnitude earthquake in
Many of the same scientists are now fashioning a hypothetical scenario similar to the mother of all known
That flood, occurring during 45 days of rain, turned
Despite more than a century of flood channels, debris dams and levees built since, such a flood could wreak $25 billion in damage to the state capitol alone, according to the Geological Survey.
And because of global warming, scientists forecast such a colossal gully-washer born by the "pineapple express" jet stream to happen sooner, rather than later.
"With climate change, the West Coast is expected to experience even more extreme winter rainfall than we've seen so far, along with extreme episodes of dry, hot weather in summer," said Marty Ralph of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., a member of the team creating the scenario, in a statement.
"Highly accurate rainfall forecasts with longer lead times will be essential."
Bill Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, agreed. Most
"In terms of property damage and long-range liability to the state," said Patzert, "a great flood will make Katrina look minor league.
"January and February are the months we're at really high risk, the months that should really scare residents with the Godzilla of El Niños."
Scientists forecast the hypothetical storm to originate near the equator, resulting in an "atmospheric river" (AR) of moisture that will expand, gather speed and with the ferocity of a hurricane slam into the West Coast, hurling driving winds and rain for weeks. The six-week storm could dump as much as 8 feet of rain in the mountains, sowing massive destruction on the flats.
To help prepare for such a 200-to-500-year flood, 10 teams of experts are studying everything from weather, forecasting, flooding, debris flows, coastal erosion, engineering, cost and the impact to the environment and public health.
The $3million scenario is expected to be completed by the summer 2010, includes 100 scientists measuring the flood disaster preparedness of the nation's most populous state.
"This has never been done," said Jones, from an office inside a clapboard colonial across from Caltech. "If you're going to prepare for something, you most know what you're going to prepare for."
Most residents who suffered debris flows never saw them coming.
It was a few minutes after New Year's in 1934 when, during a flood memorialized by Woody Guthrie, the
A fire that fall had burned the
Then a 20-foot wall of mud and rock thundered out of the canyons, blowing through flimsy check dams of chicken wire and rock.
The 1934 flood killed 45 people, destroyed up to 400 homes and buried up to 800 Model As throughout La Crescenta and Montrose. Boulders up to 70 tons lay strewn about like ping pong balls.
"These boulders floated like fish eggs," said Art Cobery, 80, a La Crescenta historian who lectures on flooding. "It was scary. I would say it was Noah in '34, and Noah in '78.
"Given enough time, another fire, another cloudburst, we're not safe by any means."
Forty-four years later, in February 1978, disaster would strike again. Again, there had been brush fires. And again, heavy rain, with 9 inches that month alone.
In a debris flow memorialized by the writer John McPhee, Jackie Genofile and her two teenagers looked up toward
"There was this big black thing rolling at us. And it picked up 13 cars and was coming down the street," recalled Genofile, 85, of La Crescenta, who still lives in the same house.
"And I said, `Run to my bedroom. Boy oh boy!"
Bob Genofile, a contractor who'd built the house like a concrete fort, joined the family in the master bedroom.
When the slurry of mud rushed in, both parents kneeled on the bed, which floated to the ceiling, while the children, Scott and Kimberly were pinned between its railing and the wall.
"These walls saved us," Jackie Genofile said. "The four of us lived through it. I think it's a miracle." #
http://www.presstelegram.com/news/ci_12920589
Dry levee is southwest Manteca
By Dennis Wyatt
It was a surreal scene.
The sun was shining and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky during the first week of January 1997 as over four dozen California Conservation Corps workers were feverishly laying down plastic weighted by sand bags on the dry cross-levee paralleling Woodward Avenue as water inched up ever so higher on the south side.
A half mile away, Caltrans crews were “plugging” the
In the middle of it all, California State Sen. Dianne Feinstein wearing business attire and heels gingerly walked the levee on an inspection tour with state leaders to see firsthand the impact warm rains and temperatures that hastened a rapid late December snow melt in the Sierra was having on valley levees.
Twelve years have passed since the 11th major levee break since 1927 on the San Joaquin and Stanislaus rivers threatened rural
Save for emergency repairs made by the Army Corps of Engineers immediately after the flood and a potential breach two springs ago that simply restored the levees to their pre-flood conditions, nothing has been put in place to enhance levee durability on the Manteca side of the San Joaquin River. Work has started, though, on upgrades being paid for by special property tax assessments along the San Joaquin designed to protect southwest
Nothing, though, is being done on the
The Trails of
Strengthening by widening and possibly raising the dry levee is expected to be a condition of any approval needed to move the large residnetial project forward. Such work is not subject to the same intense state and federal scrutiny as river levees and can be accomplished in a relatively short period of time.
The developer is already meeting with Reclamation District 17 officials that have jurisdiction over the levee and the city to determine what needs to be done.
Improving the levees will improve the safety of homes that have been built along
Three separate projects that rely on the dry levee for added protection that are being advanced that will add 2,439 housing units between McKinley Avenue south of the Highway 120 Bypass and a slough that drains into the San Joaquin River.
•The Trails of
•Machado Estates with 575 lots is located on the southwest corner of
•Terra Ranch near
http://www.mantecabulletin.com/news/article/5659/
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