Grant to support studies for road flooding project
Effort targets low-lying route through China Camp
Researchers are launching the next phase of a multiyear project that could elevate or reroute a flood-prone stretch of North San Pedro Road in San Rafael.
The project that began in 2017 focuses on the low-lying segment between the Santa Venetia neighborhood and Peacock Gap, cutting through China Camp State Park. The road provides an alternative north-south route to Highway 101 that emergency responders use to avoid highway traffic.
However, the road’s proximity to tidal marshes to the northeast and the Gallinas Creek watershed to the west has resulted in frequent flooding during king tides and heavy storms. The flooding is only expected to worsen with climate change through sea-level rise and more intense storms.
“It’s been kind of a lingering issue for a long time,” said Stuart Siegel, interim director of the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, led by San Francisco State University.
The road is the only way to access the 2-squaremile China Camp State Park along San Pablo Bay. The park is visited by about 400,000 people annually and is known for its camping, trails, wildlife, marshlands, beaches and rich cultural history.
The park boundaries are part of the historic territory of the Coast Mi
"That road is very important to the community. We all know it’s the only road in the park."
— Superintendent Maria Mowrey, California State Parks
wok people who resided there thousands of years prior to the arrival of European settlers. The park is named after the Chinese immigrants who settled and established a shrimp fishing village at the location in the late 19th century.
The village was a refuge for the immigrants during a time of growing anti-Chinese sentiment. The village eventually was dissolved following the passage of several discriminatory laws in the following decades, such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and prohibitions on shrimp exports and certain fishing equipment in the early 1900s.
Maria Mowrey, the Bay Area superintendent for California State Parks, said addressing the road flooding is important for continued access to the park, but has its own complications such as impacts to the environment and cultural resources.
“It’s not an easy problem to solve,” Mowrey said. “That road is very important to the community. We all know it’s the only road in the park.”
After holding a workshop in 2017 to discuss the flooding issues in the larger Gallinas Creek watershed, the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve heard strong support from the community to come up with a solution.
The reserve received a nearly $160,000 grant in 2018 from the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative — a partnership between the University of Michigan Water Center and federal government on coastal research — to draft new road configurations using the input of neighbors, community leaders, tribal leaders, state agencies and researchers.
After a year of work, Siegel and his team had a list of potential projects that included raising about a mile-and-a-half of San Pedro Road, rerouting the road away from the marsh and into the nearby hills or leaving the road intact and addressing the marsh’s hydrology instead. Raising the road either through pilings or through sediment fill is estimated to cost $5 million to $20 million, while the less popular rerouting option is estimated to cost $25 million to $100 million, according to early estimates provided by Siegel.
Rerouting the road over the ridge behind Back Ranch or Miwok Meadows was deemed the least popular given its cost, environmental impacts and impacts to existing park amenities such as trails and camping areas, Siegel said.
Before designing any of these projects, researchers will need to get a better lay of the land, Siegel said. Earlier this month, the reserve received a $525,000 grant from the National Estuarine Research Reserve System Science Collaborative to perform a study over two to three years looking into the ecology and hydrology of the surrounding marshland. The marsh is one of the last original marshlands in San Francisco Bay, with nearly all of the historic habitat having been filled to make way for development in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The grant also works to provide greater collaboration between the research reserve and the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, the federally recognized tribe representing the Coast Miwok people.
“We are working closely with the state park on a long-term plan, and ultimately, the implementation of that plan,” said Greg Sarris, the rancheria’s tribal chairman.
After the study, the research reserve will seek funding for engineering and environmental studies. Siegel said the project partners hope to have a plan in place and begin breaking ground in five years.
“It takes all of our agencies to make something like this happen,” Mowrey said. “The San Francisco
State and National Estuarine Research Reserve has been critical to this.”
More information about the project can be found at nerrssciencecollaborative. org/project/Siegel18.