State braces for threat of flooding
“It’s not like nobody wants to fix it; it’s just a hard fix,” he said. “It’s a lot of money and a lot of resources to do it.”
Preparing for a worst-case scenario
Dustin Fuller, manager of the Cross Creek Flood Control District, can attest to that.
“I can tell you farm ground will go under this year — I don’t know to what extent,” Fuller said.
“My job is to look at the worst-case scenario, and the worst-case scenario is water encompasses this whole area.”
Though he’s taken state lawmakers on tours and explained what subsidence is and that new federal standards in the wake of Hurricane Katrina require wider levees, it hasn’t resulted in money for levee improvements here, he said.
According to federal standards, rural areas with sparse populations “might not be calculated to generate sufficient economic benefit to offset the costs of levee rehabilitation,” a state Legislative Analyst’s Office report in March stated. There is an estimated $2 billion worth of crops in Fresno, Tulare and San Joaquin counties, it said.
Fuller said if Corcoran flooded, it would cause $600 million in damage.
Taking matters into his own hands
Many of the state’s dams and weirs are at least 60 years old, and in the Central Valley, many were built more than a century ago, the report stated. It noted that flood-management responsibilities in California are spread among more than 1,300 local agencies managing an infrastructure of more than 20,000 miles of levees and channels and more than 1,500 dams and reservoirs.
In February, Fuller decided he no longer could wait for the politicians. He called a local contractor who has lived in the community for decades to supply the labor, hammered out a contract in a week with the Corcoran prison to excavate one of its wheat fields and launched a $14-million effort to raise 14 miles of levee wall by 4 feet.
Fuller said his agency will be able to pay off the contract by 2020. In the meantime, crews have piled on more than 700,000 cubic yards of dirt, enough to cover 120 football fields, on top of and alongside the levees.
They are 4 feet taller and 10 feet wider than they were before the drought, he said.
“We had to take the bull by the horns and get to work,” Fuller said. “I don’t have time to wait for the bureaucrats to square this mess out.”