99% Invisible - Not Built For This #5: The Little Levee That Could

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Most of the stories in this series have been about places that are ill-prepared for the extreme weather that is coming their way. But this story is about a place that managed to get the kind of infrastructure that will actually help it survive climate change. How after more than two decades of tireless work, the residents of Hamilton City, California finally got the levee they deserved. Not Built For This is a 6-part mini-series from 99% Invisible, with new episodes on Tuesdays and Fridays in the 99% Invisible feed. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to ad-free new episodes and get exclusive access to bonus content.

This is episode five of Not Built For This, The Little Levy That Could. The year I moved to California, it barely rained at all. It was 2015, and the local news was doing lots of stories about taking shorter showers and how much water it takes to grow a single almond. For most of my time in the state, California has been hovering somewhere between extreme and exceptional drought conditions. But then came the winter of 2023. The rain started on New Year's Eve. At first it was relieving, exciting even, to see the dry creek beds spring to life, and the sun-baked hills behind my house

get a good soak. But then the water just kept coming. The storms went on for weeks on end, until we had too much of a good thing. Many rivers in Northern California flooded that winter, inundating communities that only a few months earlier had been praying for rain. The new scientific consensus is that California needs to prepare for both drought and deluge as the climate changes. Meteorologists have settled on the phrase weather whiplash to describe the bewildering snap

from one extreme to the other. Many of the towns that felt the sting of the weather whip were low-income agricultural communities, towns like Planada and Allensworth and Pajaro, where a river broke through an old levee and displaced over 3,000 people. Following those floods, there were a lot of questions about the capacity of the state's aging water infrastructure

to handle supercharged storms, and about who pays the price when that infrastructure fails. But our story today is about another flood-prone farmworker town in California, one that actually managed to stay safe and dry during the big storms of 2023. It's called Hamilton City, and it's a small, unincorporated community built along the Sacramento River in California's Central Valley. For decades, the only thing protecting Hamilton City from the river was one of the worst levees in the entire state.

This crumbling mound of dirt was built right up against the bank, and it was full of holes. You know, it was literally like somebody put a big block of Swiss cheese along the river because it was so full of, you know, squirrels and other ground animals that just were always burrowing, and that's why it was always problematic. This is Ryan Lustor, an ecologist with the Nature Conservancy, who has worked along the Sacramento River for decades. He says that the Hamilton City levee

was slapped together on the fly by a sugar beet company in the early 20th century. You'll look at it made out of? The worst soil that they could find. This is like sandy, loamy soil. They didn't know that they needed to put clay and all that kind of stuff to make it more solid. You just had guys out there with steam shovels and horse

drawn whatever piling up dirt just doing what they could with what they had. With only this crappy Swiss cheese levy to protect them, Hamilton City was constantly at risk of getting wiped out in a flood. And that might well have been the town's fate, were it not for the Herculean efforts of two of its residents, a fire chief and a farmer's daughter. When they set out to get a new levy for Hamilton City, they had no idea what they were getting into.

No idea how much of their lives would be spent trying to build a better, less whole-ridden pile of dirt. But as it turned out, they were up against powerful economic formulas that have long determined which communities are worth spending federal dollars on. Formulas that make it very hard for a small working-class town like Hamilton City to get the protective infrastructure it needs. But over the course of decades our heroes navigated a game of bureaucratic mousetrap, overcame the economic rules that were stacked

against their little town, and forced Hamilton City to the front of the levy line. Most of the stories in this series have been about places that are ill prepared for the extreme weather that is coming their way. But this week we have a story about a place that actually managed to get the kind of infrastructure that will help it survive climate change. Because against all odds, Hamilton City, after a lot of work, actually was built for this. I'm Emmett Fitzgerald. Wow, look at that river. Oh man, it's moving.

I'm standing along the bank of the Sacramento with Jose Puente. He is the former Fire Chief of Hamilton City, and he's also one half of our dynamic duo. The muddy brown water is stampeding past us, and it's incredibly high. Or at least I thought it was. I've seen it higher. I've seen it higher. It's not in the biggie. He pulls out his phone and checks a website that tells him just how much water is pumping

through the channel. So it's almost about 90,000 cubic feet per second. Is that a lot? It's a lot of water. Yeah. Sounds like a lot. Yeah. But I have seen it where you have 150,000 cubic feet per second.

Jose scrolls through a chart that lists the strongest flows from the past. It goes back decades. Today is when Jose was a young man, and the river was running so high that it threatened to break through the old levee and flood the town. And it seems like he was here for pretty much all of those high water days, down by the river, fighting to prevent a flood. I was in that flood fight, and I was in that flood fight. Wow. And I remember that one too.

1970? 1970. — In the days of the old levee, flood fighting, as Jose calls it, was a local tradition in Hamilton City. And Jose was a legendary fighter. Ever since he was in high school, whenever there was a big storm, he'd be out here,

desperately trying to plug up gopher holes and reinforce the levee. Jose points down the river to the site of one of his more memorable battles. It was kind of scary, and that particular night, we were told just to get away from here, that the river's going so high. In the middle of the night,

Jose and a couple of friends headed down to the levee to see the angry river for themselves. So we started walking from the bridge all the way out here, okay, midnight. Three idiots walking the levee. So by the time we got over here, it was like we met the sheriff at that time. We told him, he says, well, what do you think? He says, we can stop it here. All through the windy night,

they piled sandbag after sandbag on top of the dirt to try and stop the river from breaking through. Somehow, they held the water back and Hamilton City survived the night. But even though they were victorious in that battle, Jose knew they'd never win this war. At least, not with that Swiss cheese levy. In the 70s and 80s, local leaders in Hamilton City

started to get fed up. They shouldn't have to evacuate the town every time there was a big storm, and rely on volunteers with sandbags to keep everybody safe. So they started asking the government for help. For a long time people kept asking our local congressmen, hey we need to address this issue of the levee. And eventually the army corps of engineers, the group that builds much of the water infrastructure in the U.S. conducted a series of reconnaissance studies on the old levy. And those reconnaissance studies always came back and said,

yes, there is a problem, but you do not need the one-to-one benefit ratio. The one-to-one benefit-cost ratio. José is referring to the all-important formula that for many years has determined how the federal government spends money on stuff like levees and seawalls. Well, in order to spend federal money, the Corps of Engineers has to do an economic analysis that shows that there are going to be more benefits and damage averted from the flooding or from storms than the cost of the project. This is Rob Young.

He's a professor of geology at Western Carolina University and an expert on the way the federal government thinks about flood infrastructure. Rob says that basically before the Army Corps can go build an expensive levy with taxpayer money, they have to show that the value of the property it would protect is at least as much as the cost of the project. Which, you know, on the surface sort of makes sense, right? I mean, you don't want to spend $5 billion of federal money for $10 of benefits.

But there's a pretty massive problem with making decisions about who gets a levy based on property value. The richer you are, the more likely you are to get federal flood protection. It biases our flood protection projects to expensive infrastructure and away from those who probably need the help the most. Rob is particularly critical of the Corps for funding projects that protect the beachfront second homes of wealthy people. Wealthy people who could probably afford to pay for their own flood protection.

And the reason for that is not that the Corps is evil or they're just mean, but it's this ingrained system of the economic analysis. Ultimately, that ingrained economic analysis means that if you're a small working class town along, say, the Sacramento River in California, for example, and you really need a new levy, you're pretty much screwed. The way the system works right now, if you don't have high value property, then you're much less likely to get federal protection. Just as simple as that.

For decades in Hamilton City, it really was just as simple as that. The town kept asking the government for help, but every time the Army Corps ran the numbers, help was not cost effective. Here's José Puente again. I think that the federal government kind of figured that it's a lot cheaper if we pay for the damage versus doing an investment on the construction of the levy. But even though the math was stacked against them, Jose was determined. By the 90s, he'd become the head

of the Hamilton City Fire Department, and he'd been fighting floods for literally half his life. He was tired of it. And so, Jose decided he was going to make it his mission to get Hamilton City the new levy it deserved. He didn't know anything about federal infrastructure policy, but how hard could it really be? mission to get Hamilton City the new levy it deserved. He didn't know anything about federal infrastructure policy, but how hard could it really be? We had no idea.

We didn't understand what we were getting into. I mean, for us, when we started, it was a shot to the moon, okay? It was a dream. Jose started rallying people in town together in pursuit of that moonshot. They formed an official organization and they wanted an official sounding name, something that people would have to take seriously. They went with Hamilton City Citizens in Action, which they shortened to the CIA. We put CIA.

When we, our first event that we did, people really thought it was CIA. In order to recruit people to the CIA, Jose would go around town giving a little spiel about the need for a new levy to anyone who would listen. I would see him at all of our nonprofit meetings, the Lions Club, the Women's Club, that type of thing. Him coming everywhere, church. I would see him all the time coming, giving his speech. I need help. We need help. We have an issue. And you know, the more people that get involved, the better off we are. This is Leanne Grigsby-Puente.

And I was like, what? What is he talking about? Leanne didn't know that much about the levy or the Army Corps of Engineers and its benefit-cost ratio. She also didn't really know that much about Jose, but she understood his sense of urgency. I was raised in agriculture. We know what it's like to have to protect the land and the power of water. And that's what a lot of people don't understand. And she thought she might have something to offer. I mean, I can take notes.

I can make an agenda. You know, I can answer a phone. I can make phone calls, you know, those types of things. I can do that. So I asked him, I said, I want to help. What can I do? And next thing I knew, I was coming to big meetings And I was like, oh, what did I get into? Pretty soon, Leanne was a fixture at these meetings.

And she and Jose became partners in crime. Leanne was the talker, the mouthpiece for the organization. While Jose was quietly getting stuff done behind the scenes. They started spending so much time together working on the Levee project that they became really close. A few years after founding the CIA, they got married. Your whole relationship is based on the levy. And a rodent levy, so you can even imagine.

But Hamilton City's new power couple was facing an uphill battle. Because even if they could somehow get the Army Corps of Engineers to agree that it was worth it to build them a new levee, it turns out Hamilton City would actually need to pay for part of it. With big infrastructure projects like this, the local people have to make a significant contribution to the cost, usually 25 to 35% or so, which for a big city can be fine, but for a tiny unincorporated community like Hamilton City was pretty much impossible.

Well, there was no way that the locals could meet the 25%. It wasn't exactly clear how much that would be, but it was certainly in the millions and potentially in the tens of millions of dollars. They weren't going to raise that money all at once, but they needed to start somewhere. And Leanne and Jose came up with an idea. They would throw a levy festival in downtown Hamilton City and ask all the best cooks in town to volunteer.

And to our surprise, everybody said yes. So if your family was good at making tamales, then that family did tamales. If your family was good at making carnitas, then that's who made the carnitas, carne asada, tacos, corn on the cob. Citizens in Action started hosting one or two lee festivals a year.

They were fundraisers, but also acts of political theater to show the powers that be just how badly this little community wanted a new Levee. They would invite local politicians and nonprofits and people from the Army Corps, and they knew that they wouldn't have any problem getting the people of Hamilton City to show up. We're lucky Jose is probably related to half the town.

Not so lucky for our children and our grandchildren. Is that true Jose? You related to half the town? About a quarter of it. These Levee festivals were always well attended, although Leanne admits that a lot of people were probably just coming for the tamales. It was our biggest moneymaker and by the end of the levies, when we stopped doing the festivals, we were up to 60 dozen an event.

We sold out in two hours. If you wanted tamales, you had to get there first, okay? Because within two hours, they were sold. Politicians that came in said, we're just in here for tamales. And it was like, hey, you're late. They're gone. The Levee festivals were really successful fundraisers. They made it possible for the town to hire a lawyer who knew

his way around federal infrastructure policy. But Leanne and Jose were nowhere near the millions of dollars they needed for the local contribution to the cost. They needed help. And in the year 2000, help arrived in the unlikely form of an ecologist. So how does a community of 2,000 people that's severely economically disadvantaged come up with millions of dollars? They're not going to do that selling tamales. This is Ryan Lustor from The Nature Conservancy. And he would end up being a key part of the solution

to the two seemingly insurmountable obstacles facing Hamilton City. How to raise millions of dollars, and how to get around the all-important benefit-cost ratio. Ryan was working along the river doing habitat restoration when the federal government made a key tweak in how they calculated the ratio. Basically, they said if you could design a levee that also restored habitat, they would take that into account when they were calculating whether the project was worth spending money

on. They said you can now include ecosystem benefits in your calculations. And when the folks in Hamilton City heard about this, they thought that could be the solution to our benefit cost problem. So that's why the community came to us and said, hey, will you guys partner with us and help us, you know, with the restoration side of this? And we said, absolutely. And when you say the community, how much was that Jose and Leanne?

It was pretty much them. Yeah. And so, Ryan and Jose and Leanne and a bunch of local farmers started working together. And I really can't stress enough what a surprising collaboration this was. In this part of California, farmers and conservationists are often on the opposite sides of disputes about how to use land and water. Leanne grew up in an old farming family, where environmentalist was a dirty word. I was an adult in my 30s when I came and worked on this project.

And all I could think of is if my grandfather knew what I was doing right now, he'd be so upset. And for his part, Ryan certainly never thought he was ever going to be a part of an effort to build a levee. In fact, Ryan had spent much of his career trying to undo all the damage that levees had caused. Because you look at a levee, it's like, oh, that's bad for the ecosystem, right? In order to better understand why levees have traditionally been so bad for the rivers of the Central Valley,

I took a trip to the newest state park in California. It's called Dos Rios, and it's the site of one of the largest floodplain restoration projects in the state. Welcome to the next California State Park. Yeah. Let's check it out. Yep. My guide for the day is Austin Stevenot, a field manager with the organization River Partners and a member of the Northern Sierra Miwok Tribe.

We're walking through a shady grove of oak trees along the San Joaquin River. These trees are probably 100 years old and for whatever reason weren't cleared. But this is right in front of you is kind of a glimpse of what it might have actually looked like. And that's why I brought you here. Austin says that hundreds of years ago, the Central Valley looked completely different than it does today.

It was covered with a vast mosaic of riparian forests and wetlands that were tended by different indigenous groups. There were tuli elk roaming through the marshlands and grizzly bears feeding on the massive salmon runs. They talk about the salmon run was so immense that at night you could hardly sleep sometimes because there's so many salmon coming up the river, you could just hear them.

This region doesn't get a lot of rain, but the wetlands were irrigated naturally by the rivers that meandered across the valley floor. During winter storms and the spring snowmelt, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin would fan out across the landscape. Occasionally, during really big floods, the entire central valley was transformed into a vast inland sea. It turned the valley into a giant lake, essentially. But in the 19th and 20th century, farmers took over the valley and settled in little towns like Hamilton City. And for them, these erratic seasonal floods

were deeply inconvenient. The idea became that we needed to control the rivers, right? Because you didn't want the river jumping up and flooding out your field that you had just planted in the springtime. So they started building levees. They dammed the rivers and built levees right up against the banks to prevent the floods,

effectively cutting off the wetlands from their water source. Today, the valley is mostly dry, dusty farmland. The marshes and the forests are almost entirely gone. We've lost 95% of this ecosystem up and down the state in the last hundred years, so it's – a lot of people don't know about it or understand it. Levees enabled much of the 20th century development in the Central Valley. But that came at an enormous ecological cost. And it also hasn't guaranteed safety

because when levees are built right up against the banks of the river, the water has nowhere to go. It can't spread out like it once did. And if there's a big storm, like the ones we should expect with climate change, the river just gushes through the channel with increasing ferocity.

And if it gets high enough and angry enough, it can overtop or bust through a levee and flood the towns and fields that were supposed to be protected. But our unlikely team of farmers and conservationists had an idea for a different kind of levy at Hamilton City, a levy that would be good for both the town and for the river.

And we all came together. We all had a common purpose, okay? For the community and the farmers, the interest was flood protection. For the environmental community, they had the interest on restoring land back to its natural habitat. The idea was that instead of building a new levee

right along the bank of the river, they would set it back a mile or so inland, closer to the edge of town. And then, and here's the part that Ryan was particularly into, they would tear down the old one. We need to remove the levee that's along the river so that the river now has room to spread out. Room for the river. The technique of making room for the river comes from the Dutch, and the logic is pretty simple.

Instead of trying to tightly control the river in this narrow channel, you want to give it more room to spread out across the floodplain. This is not only good for the ecology of the river, but it's safer for people, because it slows the water down and makes it less dangerous. And when the river floods, it's not really a problem, because the water just flows onto a floodplain that was designed to get wet. So instead of fighting nature, let's use nature to our own advantage.

I mean, you're using nature and in this sense, the floodplain, the floodplain is what we're using. It's a storage facility, plain and simple. They drew up a plan for this new setback levee. And as part of the proposal, the Nature Conservancy agreed to buy the 1,400 acres of farmland between the river and the new levy and donate it to the project. That land value would count as Hamilton City's local contribution to the cost of the project.

Then, Ryan and his colleagues would do all of the landscape design work to transform that floodplain into the kind of rich ecosystem that might have been there hundreds of years ago. In 2004, the team got the Army Corps of Engineers to do a feasibility study of their new Setback Levy Plan, and they said, hey, this time it's different. This time you have to consider all of these habitat benefits when you calculate the benefit-cost ratio. The Army Corps ran the numbers. And when you added that dollar value of the habitat

plus the dollar value of the flood risk reduction, that's where we get the total benefits. And this time, the benefits were greater than the costs. Hamilton City passed the test, and the Corps gave the project their seal of approval. The new levy was deemed worth it, all because of the habitat restoration. And you might be thinking, great, problem solved.

Story over, Hamilton City gets the protection it deserves. But not so fast. Because it turns out that even if the Army Corps of Engineers approves a plan, that doesn't mean it has the money to actually go through with it. And to get the federal government to pay for its portion of a levy, you have to go convince them. And I don't mean send a really compelling email.

I mean, you have to go convince Congress in person. What they will tell you is, you got to get the funding from Congress. You have to go to Washington seeking those funds. Coming up after the break, Jose and Leanne go to Washington. When we left off off it was 2004. Jose and Leanne and Ryan had just managed to get approval for a feasibility study for their setback levy. But Congress

controls the purse strings for federal infrastructure projects. And getting them to actually pay for things is a whole other process that itself can take years. And it's a process that is also biased against small working-class communities like Hamilton City. Before working on this story, a thing that I didn't really appreciate about big infrastructure projects like this is that you're competing against every other project across the country for funding. And it's not like there's some super fair and reasonable process to decide who needs that money the most.

Here's Rob Young again, our flood infrastructure expert. So much of the resilient spending that's available today relies on that community having the capacity to go after that money. He says that if you want that money, you have to put together a proposal and go lobby against every other city in town over who gets included in the federal budget. And you're up against other communities that have lobbyists and attorneys and full-time planners and GIS staff that can put together a hell of a nice looking shiny proposal.

So that tends to be where most of the funding goes. Small communities or communities that are not incorporated, they tend to fall by the wayside because they just don't have the ability to even step up to the table to get some of that funding. And they tend to be the ones who need to help the most. Hamilton City didn't have a planning department or a GIS specialist or a team full of lobbyists, but they did have the Nature Conservancy and the CIA. And so Jose and Leanne and Ryan and

their lawyers went all the way to Washington, D.C. to try and convince a bunch of suits on Capitol Hill that little old Hamilton City deserved a levy more than all of the other cities and towns in the country. When the team first arrived in Washington, they got a little boost when they learned that legend of the Hamilton City Levee festivals preceded them. When we went back to Washington, DC, we were at the Pentagon. The first thing that came I was getting a tamales. We did not bring your tamales to the Pentagon. Sorry. We didn't think that they would allow them to come in here. They go like, hey, trust me, they got in.

You know, that was the Tamale diplomacy. On these visits, our Tamale diplomats would meet with the Army Corps and members of Congress and their staffs. Jose and Leanne would try to do the trip in just two or three days to save money. So sometimes we were taking red eyes landing and going directly to work. I've done that. It's terrible. Yeah, it's horrible. And on the last day, you work all the way up until six o'clock and then you get to the airport as fast as you can and try to get out of there so you don't have to

pay for another hotel room. It was not cheap. It was not easy. And it was intimidating, even for Ryan Luster. He had more experience lobbying than Leanne and Jose, but even he felt a little out of his depth. You know, sitting in the Pentagon, talking about habitat restoration, it's like, am I in the right place?

This seems kind of odd. Who were you pitching in those moments in the Pentagon? The Army. You're sitting there with people in uniform telling them about elderberry beetles and these Bells of Vario birds and why we should plant more oak trees. And they're looking at you like,

what are you talking about? Jose, for his part, never thought that he would be in Washington, DC, meeting with senators and generals. But he also figured out pretty quickly that it was all a game and that he could play it as well as anyone. When you get there, it's like you're actually in charge. You know, you know what you're going to talk about. They don't. So you have to sell yourself within the first five minutes. Jose and Leanne went to DC more times than they could count in the 2000s. Year after year, they made the trip.

And year after year, they got turned down. I'm not sure why they kept at it. Maybe at a certain point, it just felt like they'd invested too much to give up now. Or maybe they just really understood that the existence of their town was at stake. But whatever it was, their persistence caught the attention of some high-powered people in Washington. Leanne's in particular. She was relentless.

And what was really different with Leanne was that she took the time to understand the process, which is not common. This is Congressman John Garamendi, who represented the Sacramento Valley at the time. He says that it felt like Leanne knew every inch of what seemed to him like a very complicated project. Talking to her was like talking to a hydrologist, a farmer, and a floodplain ecologist all rolled into one bundle of energy. And on top of that, she knew her way around a labyrinth of government agencies. She knew what the Army Corps of Engineers needed. Fish and wildlife, the federal agencies. Congressman Garamendi got to know Leanne and Jose very well over the years.

He says they became fixtures around the Capitol. They were back here at least every three to four months. Did you ever get tired of them? Oh, God, no. No, no, they were just the energy that they brought to the discussion was such that you never get tired of that kind of energy. You would simply feed on that energy and you'd want to work whatever was necessary to complete their dream.

But the dream just wasn't coming to fruition, and the years just kept piling up. The 2000s bled into the 2010s, and back in Hamilton City, people were starting to get impatient. It had been over a decade since the Levee festivals first got going. Years of supporting this project with basically nothing to show for it. So we'd have to go back to the community every three years and say, okay, we know the last time we were here and we told you it was just going to be one more year.

I mean, one more year, one more year, one more year, one more year, one more year. I mean, it just kept going on and on and people were starting to be like, uh. And if the community was getting tired of this saga, imagine how Leanne and Jose were feeling. They were devoting hours and hours of their time, week after week, year after year. The Levee Project had become one of the central tent holes of their life. Originally we were told, oh, you know, this project is going to take about four or five years.

And so we said, oh, four or five years, that's not bad. So then the next thing is, you know, those five years, six years, eight years, ten years, 15 years, and you're going like, what the hell's going on? Did you ever almost give up? Were there moments in this process where you were like, I don't know if we can keep doing this? There were frustrating moments when we were just like, done, I'm cooked. And then something, it happened almost every single time, something big and exciting would

happen. Just that little bit of movement that got us back into where we were, okay, we can do this. We can do this. I think part of the reason they were able to keep the faith was that the project just felt like it made too much sense not to happen. Farmers liked it. Environmentalists liked it.

The Army Corps liked it. And so Leanne and Jose and Ryan just kept making the case that this was a win-win no-brainer of a project. And eventually, in 2014, close to 20 years since they threw that first levy festival, the government finally agreed. The Hamilton City Setback Levy was included in that year's federal budget. We were chosen. There were hundreds of projects that we were competing with, and this was one of them. That was a really big deal. For Leanne and Jose, they couldn't admit that it was really happening

until they saw the clouds of dust from all the construction equipment arriving in town. I literally stood out in my front yard and watched the first dump truck leave the project. I seen him go in, and I seen him come out. I think when we saw the equipment, that's when it was like, okay, we're done. Did you go celebrate? People think, oh, did you have a big party? No, we did not. We literally went out on the levy,

had a cocktail and said, thank you, Lord Jesus. Thank you, Lord, because it just took so long. You may have noticed that there hasn't been a whole lot of talk about climate change in the story up until this point. That's mostly because when Jose and Leanne were getting started with all this, climate change was a distant threat in people's imaginations. But it's not a distant threat anymore. And as people in California struggle to cope with drought and deluge, the Hamilton City Setback Levy is starting to look like money very well spent. Because it turns out one of the best tools to prepare for extreme rainstorms and big flooding events

is a setback levee just like the one in Hamilton City. This was not designed to be a climate-based adaptation project, but it turns out it is. This is exactly what you need to deal with future climate scenarios. And we, I don't know if I want to say we were lucky that the project can fit that new need, but it does. Ryan thinks that Hamilton City should be a model for the Army Corps of Engineers, or really anyone trying to keep people safe

in an era of supercharged rainstorms. Not just in California, but the entire country. And what's frustrating about that is that you would think because it checks all the boxes, well, why isn't it being replicated? Some aspects of the project are being replicated. The Army Corps of Engineers recently built a brand new setback levy downriver from Hamilton City in West Sacramento. And all throughout the country, from Northern California

to my hometown in Vermont, people are coming around to the idea that making room for the river is one of the best ways to prepare for extreme rainstorms. But whether Hamilton City can provide a workable blueprint for other small, working-class towns that desperately need protective infrastructure? I'm not so sure.

I mean, it's wonderful that you can point to an example where with a tremendous amount of perseverance and maybe a little bit of luck and outside assistance, we have a community that proved it could be done. Again, here's Rob Young. But, you know, I loved playing baseball and no matter how hard I work, I'm not going to be Shohei Otani. And so we, you know, we can't expect all of these communities to be able to pull it off in the same way.

For one thing, not every little town has a Jose and Leanne, the Shohei Otanis of Levy Building. What happened in Hamilton City is a cool story, but it doesn't change Rob Young's assessment of the overall problem. Any way you cut it, the deck is stacked against these small poor communities. And Rob's not naive.

He knows as well as anyone that we just won't be able to protect every community in the years ahead. That's just not possible. I mean, we have thousands of miles of coast. We have probably tens of thousands of miles of floodplain along rivers in the U.S. along rivers in the U.S. You know, the idea that we can guarantee protection to everybody, it's just not feasible. But if we can't build everyone a levy, we have to think long and hard about who is going to get the levies that we do build. Rob says that we need to have a national triage conversation

about how we want to use our resources, about which communities should get priority and why. And again, it all comes down to what we value as a nation. These are our funds. These are public tax dollars. Certainly one would hope that the only calculus isn't going to be property value when we're talking about providing flood protection. In recent years, the Army Corps actually has started to rethink the benefit cost ratio.

There is rulemaking in the works right now that could transform how the Corps makes decisions about who gets protection. You know, there are a wide variety of reasons why you might choose to invest those federal dollars beyond simply protecting high value real estate. But even if we do change the values that drive how these decisions are made, I think the Hamilton City story points to another massive problem as we try to adapt our infrastructure to climate change, which is speed. As disasters pile up all around the country, people need protection and they need it fast. And this whole process just takes so much time.

Here's Leanne Grigsby-Puente again. We've had people from out of the area ask us, how do you do this? And we always tell them, are you willing to put 25 years of your life in this to make sure it gets done? Because that's what we did. And that's what we tell them. I kind of couldn't believe it when I heard Leanne say that. Like, if I was one of those people trying to build a levy and I got that advice,

I would give up right there on the spot. And as proud as Jose is of what they've accomplished, even he's not sure it was worth two decades of his life. I mean, if somebody was to ask me, hey, would you commit to this again? I don't know. On the one hand, I think this is a hopeful story of a small town overcoming the odds

to get the kind of forward-thinking infrastructure it deserves. But on the other hand, it feels like they never should have had to work this hard. And the thing is, they're still not done. Ryan Luster says they need a couple more years to finish the habitat restoration. My goal is December of 2026. Probably is going to bleed into 2027. 27 years. Who's going to spend 27 years on a project?

I mean, I guess it's kind of a rhetorical question because I almost did. I guess just like when we're thinking about all the work that needs to be done to like adapt our infrastructure and adapt the way we're living to the challenges that are coming our way, it's you know, it's a hopeful story. And it's also a it's a sobering story. Exactly. It's a very sobering. Yeah, it's very sobering. But it's it shows that it's not impossible. that it's not impossible. This past winter, 2024, California got hit with more big storms. I wanted to see the new levee in action.

And so on a rainy weekend, I drove up to Hamilton City to meet with Jose. I said, we're on the Mazda today. OK, cool. Oh, yeah, the old truck. The old truck. It looks good. Yeah. It's an old beige pickup, one of those perfect tiny trucks they don't make anymore. Yeah, no, my baby's showing his age.

How many miles? Oh, I got 300,000. 300,000? That's pretty good. Yeah. We take the old truck up onto the new levee. It honestly isn't much to look at, just a big wall of dirt. It's hard to believe how much time and money it took to get this built, but it makes all the difference in the world.

On the other side is the floodplain, a giant space that's designed to fill right up with water, so that the town stays dry. Jose says there was a moment the night before when it was really raining quite hard. But instead of heading down to the levee with a bunch of sandbags, he went to bed. After many years, it's comfort to know that you can sleep better. Towards the end of our tour, we get to a spot where the river has flowed over the bank and onto the floodplain. It's not a lot of water, but it's enough that you can appreciate the way this landscape might have looked before, when this whole valley was a wetland.

Oh wow, look at all the birds. Yeah. Ducks. Yeah. They go where the water goes. See, this gives you a different perspective, doesn't it? Yeah. Totally.

It's a beautiful scene. It almost makes you want to tear down all the levees and bring back the inland sea. Of course, that is a terrible idea. There are millions of people living in this valley, and the food grown here supports millions more. You can't let the rivers run wild. But you also can't just keep patching holes and crumbling old levees built right up against the riverbank and hope for the best. The Setback Levee at Hamilton City may not be a perfect model for every vulnerable river town, but I think it offers a hopeful vision of compromise.

Proof that we can design for people and for nature at the same time. That we can choose to loosen our grip, relinquish some control, and give the river a little more room to breathe. When we got back to the lot where my car was parked, the winds had died down. The storm was just about over. Where are you headed now? Going home. Nice.

Going home. Maybe take a nap now? Going home. Nice. Maybe take a nap. I don't know. You've you've earned it. All right. Next time on Not Built For This. So far this series has been all about the way climate change is impacting how and where we live. It's been about things like housing and infrastructure and insurance. But coming up on our final episode, we have a story about the impact of climate change

on our bodies. We're going to Phoenix, Arizona to see how extreme heat is revealing the biological limits of adaptation. Our thermometers top out at 109, and personally I've had multiple patients that have come in that have maxed out our thermometers. All we can do is try to find a shady spot to sit. Most times we're stuck out in the sun. It really sucks.

It's hot, nasty, muggy, dirty, filthy, just all around bad news. This episode of Not Built For This was reported and produced by me, Emmett Fitzgerald, along with producers Jason DeLeon and Sophie Kodner, and managing editor Delaney Hall. Further invaluable editing from Christopher Johnson, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, and our standard bearer, Roman Mars. Mix and sound design by Martin Gonzalez.

Theme and original music by George Langford from Actual Magic, with additional music by Swan Rayal. Fact-checking by Sona Avakian. Series art by Aaron Nestor. Special thanks this week to everyone we spoke with in Hamilton City, as well as Alicia Kircher from the Army Corps of Engineers, and Bill Paris, who was a lawyer for the community.

I also wanted to shout out the organization River Partners, which is doing a lot of the remaining restoration work at the Hamilton City site. Not Built for This is a six-part series from 99% Invisible. Our final episode will be out on Friday, wherever you get your podcasts. Kathy Tu is our executive producer, Kurt Kolstedt is our digital director. The rest of the 99PI team includes Chris Barube, Vivian Ley, Lasha Madon, Gabriella Gladney, Jacob Maldonado Medina, and Nina Potuck.

The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are a part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM podcast family. You can find 99% invisible on all of the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. There's a link to that and every episode of 99PI and Not Built For This at 99PI.org.