After the Flood

MODESTO —  Flotsam was scattered all about Crater Avenue on Tuesday morning. Piled on the front lawns of the new suburban homes were mattresses, refrigerators, cardboard boxes marked “Photos and etc,” Christmas decorations, pots and pans, carpets and sandbags, here a pair of reclining easy chairs, there a little girl’s Cabbage Patch dolls. Everything was soaked and mud-stained.

Blue-and-white banners fluttered bravely at one house, marking the show model for what is a still-incomplete tract: “River Bend Homes.” The alluring name refers to the Tuolumne River, which in normal times runs parallel to the street, a few hundred yards to the east. This, of course, has not been a normal time. When the Tuolumne flooded last weekend, it covered Crater Avenue with four feet of river water.

“No one ever told us it could flood,” Grace Jacobucci said as she mopped her garage floor. The river had seemed a safe distance away. It had seemed, she said, “nice--close, but not threatening.”

Like many of their neighbors, Jacobucci and her husband are new to the valley, freshly arrived from the San Francisco Bay Area. They are part of a larger California phenomenon: The relentless migration into the Central Valley by refugees of Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and other cities. By the hundreds of thousands they have come seeking, as one of Jacobucci’s neighbors put it, “a lower cost of housing, better neighborhoods, lower crime rates, the whole suburbanite dream.”

What they got last week was a flood.

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Californians will build houses just about anywhere--balance them on the slippery slopes of hills, cram them into canyons, hang them over the ocean, straddle them across earthquake faults. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that a good portion of the residential building done to accommodate the valley boom has taken place on historic flood plains. Less predictable will be the fallout, now that a flood in fact has come.

Floods, even more so than droughts, raise questions and raise them quickly about all sorts of water-related issues. Floods can be exploited, spun, say by those who want to capture more water for farmers, or by those who want to release more water to restore fish and waterfowl. In the backwash of the flood will come the debate over what it meant.

From one quarter will come a call for reexamining the patterns of residential growth across the Central Valley. In the past few years, advocates have questioned the wisdom of sprawling all those Meadow Lark Villages and River Bliss Homes across prime farmland, in flood plains, over parched pastures and even, as proposed by one dreamy developer, on the often-tame (but not this week) bottom of the San Joaquin River. Perhaps the flood will encourage more local growth planners to take a stab at planning growth a little, a novel concept.

Conversely, the flood already has floated the Dam People from their caves. This concrete-loving clan had been in hiding since last year when Congress again declined to build the Auburn Dam, an expensive throwback to the West’s dam-building binge of a half-century ago. Interestingly enough, this dam they cherish would have been irrelevant to the flooding here and up near Yuba. No matter, the Dam People are chanting, again, build it, dam it. At least they got the timing right, if not the hydraulics.

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Somewhere between those who would not hammer together another house on the California plains and those who won’t rest until every piece of running water is converted into a replica of the concrete Los Angeles River are the realists. Nobody listens much to them. They do, however, have some valid suggestions to toss into the post-flood mix.

Levees, for example: It’s unfortunate that levees, unlike grand dams, aren’t named after politicians. Maybe that would motivate more public servants to pursue the politically mundane goal of re-buttressing the levee systems, failed levees having been a prime culprit in these floods.

Similarly, better management of dams: Some water resources experts complain that dams designed--and sold to the taxpayers--as flood control tools over time come to be run primarily as reservoirs for farmers and other customers of captured water. Dam operators overly sensitive to the summertime value of stored water may wait too long before opening the floodgates in the face of a coming deluge.

So much to argue, after the waters recede. In large measure, the debate will be directed at the sort of people who live on Crater Avenue, transplants who not only are transforming this region’s landscape but also its politics. Will they side with the developers, the dam boosters, the environmentalists, the farmers who for so long ruled the valley waters? These newcomers hold more power than they can imagine, mucking out their muddy houses at the river’s bend.