Rising to weather the flood
Russian River towns, battered in past years, say they’re ready
Resort owner Lynn Crescione and most of her neighbors are readier than ever for the whopper El Niño predicted to spread havoc along the Russian River in coming weeks. That preparation was learned the hard way, through years of pain.
The first time the river leaped its banks and drowned Crescione’s spread of rustic cabins in Guerneville, in 1986, she reckoned it was a once-in-a-lifetime bad break. It’ll never hit that hard again, she thought.
Then came the epic El Niño floods of 1997-98. Crescione’s cabins went under the river’s surging waters again.
She’d had enough. So by the time the moderately bad floods of 2005-06 came, Crescione had raised most of her resort up on stilts by 61 feet — more than 10 feet
higher than the river’s most catastrophic flood on record.
“These really bad floods always come mid-decade, right around New Year’s, and I just got tired of the routine,” she said. “Moving furniture upstairs on New Year’s Eve and spending the first part of the new year handling damage stinks.
“Let me tell you this: I have come to love stilts and stairs.”
Turns out a lot of folks along the flood-prone lower Russian River have embraced stilts and stairs since the last big El Niño deluge of 1997-98. And then some.
More than half of the homes or rentals in the flood plain have been elevated out of danger, either privately or with government funding, since 1998. Many of the vacation shacks that used to dominate the little towns along the river from Hacienda to Monte Rio have been snapped up by newly moneyed, permanent residents who fixed them up and installed flood fortifications.
Coupled with an increasingly aggressive flood-control program by Sonoma County and the environmental community group Russian Riverkeeper — not to mention quicker evacuation procedures — it appears the lower river area is readier than ever for flooding.
This comes just in time for what scientists say could be a record-breaking drenching connected with El Niño, the much-hyped and precipitation-heavy weather pattern cruising in from the tropics. It seems, officials say, that watery chaos descending every mid-decade for the past 30 years finally hammered the right lessons home.
“I would definitely say this area is much more prepared than in the past,” said Forestville Fire Chief Max Ming, who has worked on every flood dating back to the mid-1980s. “The flood in 1986 was probably the worst of all. Fewer people were prepared for anything, we had propane tanks floating down the river because they weren’t strapped down like they are required to be now, and so many houses weren’t up on stilts.
“We’ve learned each time it’s flooded since then.”
The 1986 flood set the record along the Russian River, when the waters surged to 49.5 feet. The 1997-98 El Niño pushed the waters to 45 feet. The river starts to crest its banks at its lowest level at 32 feet, in Guerneville.
Since 1998, Sonoma County has tightened regulations requiring every new building or remodel to have its primary floor raised above not just
flood levels, but the more rigorous 100-year-flood levels.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency and disaster agencies in California and Sonoma County helped in that process by doling out $10 million to nearly 300 low-income homeowners to raise their residences above the flood line. FEMA grants continue to be available, with about a three-year waiting list — but gentrification in the area has made them less urgently needed.
Since the turn of the century, median family incomes in the lower river towns have jumped significantly, such as Monte Rio’s 38 percent, according to the U.S. Census. Home prices have leaped along with in normal comes, surging 30 percent in 2013 alone, according to the CoreLogic real estate data and analytics company.
“Everything has been gentrifying, and I’d say that while the ratio was about 50-50 for vacation rentals versus permanent residents in the mid-’90s, it’s now 85 percent permanent,” said K. Keller, a longtime Realtor with Russian River Realty. “It used to be most things sold for about $350,000 or so, but now there are homes around here listed for as high as $5 million.
“The reason the homes have improved so tremendously since the 1990s is the difference between transient residents and people here permanently,” she said. “People here full time are protecting their major investments more.”
One of the big hopes of emergency officials is that they’ll see a big payoff from the constant clearing of the river and its tributaries to help water flow more quickly away from residential areas. The county spends $3.5 million a year maintaining flood channels that feed the river, up from $1.5 million spent in 2005, and the Russian Riverkeeper group also regularly pitches in to clear overgrown vegetation, trash and debris.
‘A very resilient community’
The clogging of a key channel is what led Healdsburg to flood badly during last December’s freak storms, while the lower Russian only got some moderate overflow.
“Clearing those channels for the river has been one of our big focuses,” said Sonoma County Supervisor Efren Carrillo, whose district includes the lower river. “Are we really prepared in all ways? That’s a million-dollar question. The real question is how El Niño hits — exactly where, and how hard.
“But I do know the lower Russian River is a very resilient community, and they know how to take care of themselves.”
Russian Riverkeeper Executive Director Don McEnhill said keeping the tributaries clear is more essential than ever, not only to leach off surging floodwaters but to protect the river’s ecology and its creatures. Since 1942, he said, development has shrunk the key ground the Russian River occupies from 3,200 acres to 807 acres today — meaning there is less room for the waters to spread without doing damage.
Removing trash from river
“We’re trying to add room and width to the river, which would improve things, and we’re also dealing with garbage on the river all the time,” McEnhill said the other day as he roamed along the channels with a cleanup crew. “It’s very important to get all the trash off the river, which also means helping clean up homeless camps, by the time the rains start hitting hardest.
“It’s going to be some heavy lifting, but all of this is important to keep doing for the health of the river, even in non-flood years,” he said. “We can get it done.”