Hurricane Katrina was the most costly peacetime disaster to hit an urban area in U.S. history, yet the city’s flood protection system — more than 400 miles of levees and floodwalls — was ostensibly built to withstand this type of Category 3 storm.
It was a disaster that needn’t have happened, according to Berkeley civil and environmental engineers Raymond Seed and Robert Bea. Together they helped lead a team that analyzed the levee breaches just a month after Katrina.
California could face a similar catastrophe. “California has the highest national risk for flooding in terms of the amount of potential flooding and the number of people that could be affected,” says Seed, who has studied the Sacramento and San Joaquin River Delta levees for 27 years. “An earthquake could lead to the loss of so many levees all at once that it could take many years to repair them, creating a massive longtime outage for California’s principal water delivery systems that, in turn, could be devastating for the ecosystem.”
Critical levee engineering work and repair have been stymied by complicated, interlocking issues. “The ecosystem and water delivery are equally important. We need to choose a coherent solution for the entire system and implement it at the same time,” Seed says of recent findings of Governor Schwarzenegger’s Blue Ribbon Panel for the Delta, of which he is a member.
Seed believes that water use may be “the single most contentious issue in history of California,” but the various stakeholder groups involved know that things must change. “Everyone understands that it can’t continue like this. For the first time, an inclusive stakeholders working group has been created to achieve resolution because they recognize this issue can only be resolved collaboratively,” he says.
