Flooding Fears Now Focused on Delta Area

RIO VISTA, Calif. — While thousands more evacuees returned to their flood-soaked Northern California homes, water managers shifted focus Monday downstream to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where a web of levees was being put to the test by high flows, rising tides and wind-driven waves.

A vast estuary feeding San Francisco Bay, the delta is the source of drinking and irrigation water for two out of three Californians. If levees there continue to fail, salt water could threaten the water supply and risk flooding of 55 islands dotted with homes and some of the state’s most productive pear and asparagus farms.

“These levees are fragile to begin with, and when you get high water and winds that blow waves against them, you’re asking for trouble,” said Jim Taylor, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “It’s not a good situation.”

Throughout the day, work crews fanned out across the 1,200-square-mile delta, searching for weak spots in the levees and shoring them up with rocks and dirt dredged from the rivers.

By evening, collapsed levees had swamped two small islands, and “boils” indicating levee erosion around six other islands were keeping water managers on edge. Many islands are below sea level and only the levees prevent them from vanishing.

In Rio Vista, beside the swollen Sacramento River, residents spent Monday checking their tide tables and eyeing choppy waters that were lapping against cinder-block retaining walls protecting downtown.

“We’re still on alert,” said Larry Profitt, city manager and police chief of Rio Vista. Surveying the scene from the second floor of a building north of town, Profitt watched a muddy, 200-yard-wide river pour across California 84--which is closed indefinitely--and proclaimed, “Awesome, huh?”

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Elsewhere, Yuba County authorities lifted mandatory evacuation orders affecting more than 20,000 people from the towns of Olivehurst and Linda, where homes were damaged by a lake of water that spewed from a levee break on the Feather River on Thursday.

More than 500 people from the area, however, remained in shelters because their homes were still under water, and hundreds more were believed to be staying with friends or relatives. There was no telling when the flood waters might recede far enough to allow them to resume their normal lives.

“For some of these folks, this could be a pretty long-term situation,” said Bill Harris, a Yuba County spokesman. “We’re doing our best to help them--with housing, transportation, whatever. But it’s never enough.”

In other flood-related news Monday:

* State and federal officials began to put the past week’s flooding into historical perspective. A preliminary tally shows 1,847 residences and 148 businesses have been damaged or destroyed. Gov. Pete Wilson called the floods the worst in recorded state history.

More than 4,300 people remained in emergency shelters Monday, and thousands more were staying with friends and relatives.

Early damage tallies from nine counties stood at $775 million, but that does not include the hardest-hit areas. Some officials predicted that the total losses could exceed the $1.8 billion racked up in the late-winter floods of 1995. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the flooding on the Sacramento River ranked as a 50-year event, meaning the odds of it happening in a given year are one in 50. On the Feather and Yuba rivers, the storm was a 100-year event, and on the Tuolumne, which flooded Modesto and a host of small rural communities, it was a 125-year event.

* In Sacramento, the Legislature opened its 1997 session with new Assembly Speaker Cruz Bustamante (D-Fresno) suggesting a special session be held to deal with the flood emergency, a proposal tentatively endorsed by Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward).

Traditionally, lawmakers use special sessions to enact bills that can take effect sooner than those approved during a regular session. Such bills might grant tax relief to victims, provide low-cost loans or offer temporary housing assistance.

Lockyer suggested that the session could also consider broader issues, such as the strengthening of levee systems and an expansion of dams and reservoirs to collect and store water that now runs into the Pacific.

* The first pointed criticism of water managers’ performance during the floods came from Rep. Wally Herger (R-Marysville), who took a helicopter tour of the devastation Monday.

“We can’t allow this to continue happening,” he said, referring to the evacuation of his hometown when nearby levees appeared to be weakening Thursday.

“We have to learn by this,” Herger said. “We have to bring levees up to par immediately. . . . We need reservoirs.”

* Transportation officials said two key California highways--U.S. 50 through the Sierra to South Lake Tahoe and U.S. 395 north of Mammoth Lakes--would remain closed for weeks because of the need for extensive repairs.

Throughout the state, the highway system has suffered an estimated $50 million in damage--a figure that is likely to rise, a Caltrans official said.

* James Lee Witt, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, concluded a tour of flood-ravaged areas of California and pledged that disaster aid would come swiftly.

“Obviously it’s going to be tough for people to recover from this,” Witt said after flying over the area with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.). “A lot of people have lost everything.”

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The flooding from storms that began the day after Christmas has claimed five lives and, at its peak, forced more than 100,000 people from their homes. The toll includes drowned livestock, ruined wheat crops and boats torn from their moorings on rivers around the north state.

Most of the flooding was caused by failures in levees that normally do a fine job of guiding runoff from upstream dams to the delta. Saturated by rainwater and pressured by persistently high water levels, some older levees have given way.

Although Monday marked the fourth straight day of sunny weather, the hazardous conditions will continue, officials said.

“The next few days are going to be critical,” said Richard Andrews, director of the state Office of Emergency Services. “There are some very serious structure problems requiring immediate attention.”

Many of those problems are in the delta, a historically marshy region at the confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers that was reclaimed in the 19th century by workers--many of them Chinese laborers--who built a system of levees that created islands.

Over time, the islands have sunk to the point where many of them are well below sea level. That’s why a break in a delta levee can be such a quick, disastrous event.

“It’s not the end of the world if water runs over the top of the levee, if it doesn’t break,” said Dante Nomellini, a lawyer for several reclamation districts in the delta. “The end of the world is when the beaver hole opens up and you can’t stop it, and it blows out.”

If that begins to happen on a large scale, salt water from San Francisco Bay can intrude, contaminating water used by millions of customers as far away as Southern California. The State Water Project built dams to control the rivers and the California Aqueduct to move the water south, but first it must flow through the delta’s fragile channels.

“If you lose an island, then you start to reconfigure the way that whole drainage system operates,” said Jeff Cohen, a spokesman for the state Department of Water Resources. “That’s bad news for San Francisco Bay ecology and bad news for consumers of delta water.”

On Monday, the torrents of runoff pouring into the delta had pushed the water level eerily high. Marinas were swamped and ferries that carry people to and from islands were unable to operate. Boats torn from their moorings floated by, slamming into levees from time to time. Sandbags--the last line of defense--were piled everywhere.

Complicating matters, the highest tides of the year were scheduled to roll in Wednesday.

Les Smith, 68, lives in a Rio Vista mobile home park that was evacuated Saturday when the first threat of flooding surfaced. Unlike his neighbors, Smith--a retired mechanic--stayed put, and on Monday, he damned the danger and cast a line in the water, hoping a sturgeon would bite.

“This is the first break we’ve had to do any fishing,” he said. “It’s been kinda scary around here.”

Down the road, Smith’s neighbor, Jim Seniff, was less sanguine. Returning home to check on his trailer after two days as an evacuee, Seniff predicted that the worst lay ahead.

“The rainy season is still coming. This could be a long winter.”

Times staff writers Max Vanzi and Carl Ingram in Sacramento contributed to this story.

* AGRICULTURAL IMPACT

Losses are not tallied, but farmers will be hit hard. A3

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Flood Toll

Damage total: $775 million and growing.

Fatalities: Five reported.

Dam capacity:

Shasta Dam, 95% full

* Oroville Dam, 89%

* Folsom, 73%

* Friant Dam, 100%

* New Don Pedro Dam, 100%

* New Melones Dam, 94%

* Camanche Reservoir, 97%

Major highway closures in California:

* U.S. 50 in the Sierra Nevada closed through January between Riverton and Twin Bridges

* U.S. 395, closed indefinitely between Bridgeport and Walker River Canyon.

* California 70, closed to northbound traffic at California 99 north of Sacramento and south of Yuba City.

* California 41, closed at Yosemite Park entrance in Mariposa County

* Interstate 5, reduced to one lane in each direction south of Shasta-Siskiyou county line

* California 1, portions closed along the Monterey Coast due to landslides

Evacuations:

* 4,300 evacuees in Northern Californians remain in 18 shelters.

SOURCES: Caltrans; state Office of Emergency Services; state-federal Flood Operations Center