Levee Patrols: First line of defense against floodwaters
THE DELTA — Roberts Island hasn’t flooded severely since 1884. Yet here they are, fourth-generation farmer Mike Robinson and his son, Michael, spending their Friday night inspecting every inch of the 15-mile levee from a truck crawling along at 5 mph.
“It does get kind of monotonous after a while,” Michael Robinson says, keeping his spotlight trained on the river to his left to check for erosion.
“Stop yawning. It’s contagious,” says his father, who is looking in the opposite direction at the land side of the levee, watching for signs of water trickling up through the ground.
Levee patrolman is a tedious job, one that might seem unnecessary on an island that hasn’t flooded in the lifetime of either man.
But this is no exercise in futility. Not with hundreds of people living on the island, in farmhouses that date back to the 19th century, with an extensive network of farm pipes and pumps, and only a long, thin, elevated band of dirt keeping it all dry.
“Once it goes, it goes fast,” Michael Robinson says.
So the folks on Roberts Island will keep patrolling, working three-hour shifts in pairs 24 hours a day, until the crisis passes. And whether you live on a rural Delta island or in many of San Joaquin County’s urban neighborhoods, chances are good that while you sleep tonight, someone else will be doing the same thing on the levee that protects your home.
Some are paid workers, some are farmers and some are simply community members. And they are the first line of defense against this flood.
The Robinsons’ shift starts at 6 p.m., just as the last bit of the sun dips below the hills near double-humped Mt. Diablo. It will be a long evening: Michael Robinson worked the same shift the previous day and picked up the midnight to 3 a.m. shift.
They access the levee on the northeast corner of Upper Roberts, passing the elder Robinson’s house and the wooden post in the river that he uses to gauge how serious each flood is. (We’re still 3 feet below 1997, he says, which is reassuring but still too high to even consider stopping the patrols.)
Onward they drive, passing the River Mill on the far side of the San Joaquin River, and eventually the flooded Haven Acres Marina. On the “dry” side of the levee, the fading sunlight reflects off vast pools of water that have seeped through the levee onto farmland because the river is running so high and strong.
This is not necessarily a worry, Mike Robinson explains, as long as the water bubbling through the levee is clear. If it’s brown and dirty, it may be eroding the levee, which eventually could cause it to collapse. In the growing darkness, he uses a spotlight to tell the difference.
They pass “Holly’s Boil,” the spot where Mike Robinson’s daughter found a seepage problem while patrolling the levee during the 1997 floods, when she was home from college on winter break. Yes, just about everyone has served time as a patrolman.
Later they pass the “hot tub,” another 1997 boil so named because you could see the water bubbling to the surface of the pool encircled by sandbags. The “hot tub” problem happened on a bend where the river exerts even more pressure on the levee.
“This was serious, serious, serious stuff,” Mike Robinson says as they pass. With most of his 70 years spent on this very island, he knows this levee and he knows what he’s talking about.
While not terribly exciting, there are fringe benefits to the levee patrolman’s job. Barn owls take flight in the span of the truck’s headlights. A raccoon, a muskrat, a beaver and more rabbits than the Robinsons can count will be spotted before the night is over.
And this is about as pleasant an evening as a levee inspector can hope for: There is no rain, no wind and is a relatively mild 46 degrees, though with the windows down for better viewing, it feels colder.
It is almost silent, the only noise is the croaking of the frogs and the grinding of the gravel beneath the tires. And not long after sunset comes the Delta’s utter darkness.
“When there’s no moon, sometimes you can’t see your hand in front of your face,” Michael Robinson says.