Sacramento is vulnerable to serious and catastrophic flooding. Experts say Sacramento is more at risk than any other city in the country, including New Orleans. We came close to a major disaster here during the high rains of 1986, 1995 and 1997.
Courtesy: http://www.safca.org/floodRisk/floodThreat.html
A recent study by scientists and engineers at the California Department of Water Resources estimated that a major flood would likely cause in excess of $20 billion in damages and flood 102 square miles of urban lands, more than 63,800 homes, schools, hospitals, businesses, and other buildings. More than 230,000 Sacramento residents would find their homes, schools and businesses under floodwaters of one foot or deeper; approximately 150,000 would face six feet or more of flooding; and 120,000 would face 10 feet or more of flooding. “I remember when I came to live in Sacramento in 1980,” said Dennis Mileti, director emeritus of the Natural Hazard Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “I was amazed when someone showed me the rivers, and I had to look up at them.”
Sacramento is the most flood-vulnerable city in the US, even more at-risk than New Orleans. According to the Sacramento Bee, Darryl W. Davis, director of the hydrologic engineering center of the Army Corps of Engineers, “There is no question in my mind that Sacramento is at the highest flood risk in the nation.”
Sacramento has been hit by three storms in the past 20 years, in 1986 1995 and 1997, and forecasts predict worse storms are inevitable. Each of these past storms threatened to overtop levees in urban Sacramento, inundating portions of the community and bringing us perilously close to the devastating community-wide flooding we saw in New Orleans. And just as in New Orleans, the entire Sacramento region would be paralyzed and isolated, as streets and freeways, airports and rail rights of way became flooded. Public safety, business and all normal life will come to a standstill for days, if not weeks. We came close to a major disaster here.
