Among all the apocalyptic disasters that Californians routinely prepare for — earthquake, drought, wildfire, carmageddon — the most welcome is rain, even though giant El Niño events like the one currently massing in the Pacific can bring their own set of calamities: flooding, mudslides, carmageddon with hydroplaning.
After four years of drought, creeks and rivers flowing through the Bay Area are more trickle than torrent. But weather scientists are recording water temperatures in the Pacific nearing the highest they’ve ever seen, suggesting El Niño will open an atmospheric fire hose in the jet stream this winter. That’s caused a rising tide of anxiety that has left even the highest-and-driest Californians on edge.
Across the Bay Area, roofers and tree-trimmers are so busy preparing for the onslaught that many have stopped accepting new jobs. And public works crews are shoring up creek beds, clearing storm drains and stocking up on sandbags in preparation.
The pre-El Niño buzz is already building along the banks of the San Francisquito Creek in below-sea-level East Palo Alto, and on rooftops from Alamo to Morgan Hill.
As the final nails were being driven into a new roof on Charles Hwuang’s Alamo home this week, he said he would sleep better this winter. “Hearing about El Niño made me more nervous,” Hwuang said, “made me do something about it sooner rather than later. I’ll sleep better tonight.”
The last “very strong” El Niño winter of 1997-98 left 17 Californians dead and property damage of $550 million in its wake. It also brought San Francisquito Creek, quite literally, to the Palo Alto doorstep of Kevin Fisher. His was one of 1,700 Peninsula properties damaged when the creek overtopped its banks after a month of steady rains. “It was like being in an aquarium,” Fisher said, recalling the water’s ominous rise outside a picture window facing his backyard.
If the rains come in quick succession, city storm drains in low-lying places like Pinole and Hercules in the East Bay can be counted on to back up and turn the streets into rivers.
“A few days of heavy rain, you’ll have flooding throughout the Bay Area,” said Bill Allenbaugh, of El Sobrante, owner of Bill’s Defensive Driving School. “That’s when it’s more likely there are going to be rear-end accidents with multiple vehicles involved. People just don’t pay attention. They drive at a certain speed, then it starts raining and they drive at the same speed. You can’t do that!”
The roar of chain saws is likely to get louder this winter as PG&E crews respond to power outages caused by the drought-weakened timber. “I think we’ve had 5,000 major trees die,” said Gary Kremen, chairman of the board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, which for months has been urging its customers to conserve water, and now must prepare to provide them with sandbags for flood control — in a very real sense the sky is falling.
Everyone wants this to be the deluge that douses the drought, but too much rain coming down too fast could sink low-lying communities like Alviso, East Palo Alto and Fisher’s neighborhood, which is a mile and a half southeast of San Francisquito Creek.
“Lives are at stake when it floods in East Palo Alto,” Kremen said. “In the 1998 flood, people almost died there. And it’s going to come. We will get some floods.”
“What people don’t realize is that San Francisquito Creek drains 40 square miles of the Santa Cruz Mountains,” says Fisher, an engineer, who had a narrow middle-of-the-night escape the last time, carrying his two small children, dog and elderly mother-in-law to a neighbor’s SUV after his family vehicles were flooded.
That night, the city of Palo Alto “got caught totally flat-footed,” Fisher said. “They didn’t have a clue.” Since then, an auto-dialer system to alert residents that the creek could flood has been installed, and a monitoring system allows anyone to watch the creek rise on their computer. “But it’s been nearly 20 years,” Fisher said, “and truthfully, in terms of the flood risk, there’s been zero change. I think another flood would just about do us in.”
To prevent anybody being done in by the next El Niño, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties created the Joint Powers Authority (JPA), which has taken a special interest in the Pope-Chaucer Street Bridge, a chokepoint on San Francisquito Creek that sits at the juncture of Palo Alto, Menlo Park and East Palo Alto. Crews were out last week shoring up the creek’s banks, and if the water gets dangerously high this winter, they will be back with sandbags and inflatable flood walls — berms filled, perversely, with water.
In the heart of tech-savvy Silicon Valley, the preposterously low-tech burlap bag filled with sand remains the most sophisticated weapon to fight flooding. “Short of actually building a big engineered solution,” JPA Executive Director Len Materman said, “sandbags are the tried-and-true solution.”
The East Bay Municipal Utility District, which has no responsibility for flood control, maintains a stockpile of sandbags to prevent its water treatment plant from being flooded by an El Niño monsoon. “There’s a lot of talk about what needs to be done this fall to be ready for it,” Abby Figueroa, the district’s spokeswoman, said. “It’s on everyone’s mind.”
On an average day, the west Oakland water treatment plant gets about 60 million gallons of wastewater. During the sort of unhalting storms El Niño can bring, groundwater leaks into cracks in the sewer pipes and the volume of wastewater can triple, overwhelming the system and sensitive noses near the Bay Bridge. Figueroa said if the plant’s capacity remains maxed out for too long, it releases “partially treated sewage” into the bay.
Four years of dry winters have lulled many homeowners into a false sense of security about the fitness of their roofs to withstand an El Niño pounding, said Jeff Tamayo, co-owner of Town & Country Roofing in Brentwood. His company would hire 25 additional workers if Tamayo could find them, which is why his crews are booked two months out.
“What happens historically is people wait for it to start raining before they call for a roof repair,” he said. “And by then it’s too late. We’ll be a month to six weeks out before we can get to them. With a heavy downpour and strong winds, things that should never, ever leak all of sudden leak very bad.”
Of course, there is no guarantee the coming storms will deliver the marauding moisture marinade that will recharge aquifers, refill reservoirs and leave a sable of snow in the Sierra to melt our troubles away. “All the forecasts we’ve seen so far are about El Niño conditions. They’re not rainfall forecasts,” meteorologist Jan Null, of Golden Gate Weather Services, said. “We don’t know what we’re going to get.”
The faster one storm is followed by another, the less water the ground can absorb, causing the kind of runoff that led to 33 landslides along Portola Valley’s Alpine Road during the ’97-98 El Niño storms. Because Kevin Fisher lives in what the Federal Emergency Management Agency has designated a floodplain, he is part of the tiny fraction of Californians who have flood insurance. About 8.3 million homeowner policies were in effect in 2011, according to the Association of California Insurance Companies, a private trade association, and yet as of this year only 232,651 of those included flood coverage. That’s 3.6 percent, compared to the 10 percent who carry earthquake insurance.
“Flood is not covered in a homeowners insurance policy,” said Nicole Mahrt Ganley, the group’s spokeswoman. “People talk about getting physically prepared for disaster, but they don’t always talk about being financially prepared. Even if you’re not required to have it, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a good idea.” And flood insurance requires a 30-day waiting period to take effect.
Along the bone-dry banks of the San Francisquito, you can almost hear the lyrics of the old Johnny Cash song, If the good Lord’s willing and the creeks don’t rise. Fisher doesn’t know the words, but he’s heard the tune before. “Of course I’m worried,” he said. “We all are.”
Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004. Follow him at Twitter.com/BruceNewmanTwit.