The Daily - The California Floods

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

For weeks, a string of major storms have hit California, causing extreme flooding. While it might seem as if rain should have a silver lining for a state stuck in a historic drought, the reality is far more complicated.Today, how California’s water management in the past has made today’s flooding worse and why it represents a missed opportunity for the future of the state’s water crisis.Guest: Christopher Flavelle, a climate reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: In the wake of recent storms, California is facing questions about whether its approach to handling crippling storms is suited to 21st-century climate threats.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

Well, greetings, everybody. Unsettled weather today. It was a rather gloomy Friday here in Southern California. We saw anywhere between some drizzle to light showers, no heavy rainfall. But the heavy rainfall is coming our way as we make our way through tomorrow night. So it's going to be a pretty stormy New Year's Eve and a stormy entrance to the year 2023 coming to Southern California. From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi, and this is The Daily. You're telling us the snow, well, there's going to be a lot of snow early on and maybe a little bit of rain. There's going to be a lot of rain.

Okay. It's weird. This is once again the atmospheric river bringing rain to Northern California. Yeah, the rain has been nonstop all day. First responders saying, if you don't have to leave your home, stay home, stay dry and stay warm. For the past couple of weeks, a string of major storms has hit California and caused extreme flooding up and down the state. In Sacramento, it was the wettest New Year's Eve on record. At least two levees have been overwhelmed. Highway 101 in South San Francisco looked more like a river today. We

saw mudslides, downed trees, flooded streets. We've seen it all today in San Francisco and San Mateo counties. Forecasters call this weather system, quote, brutal and life-threatening. And while the rain should be a silver lining for a state stuck in a historic drought, the reality is far more complicated. Breaking news out of California tonight, where more than 34 million people are under a flood watch. You're not going to believe this. Look at this water. Look at this guy.

He's almost waist deep. I'm pretty sure we're looking at the roofs of vehicles there, Liz. With that home. Right there. In Santa Barbara County, the entire community of Montecito evacuated. The death toll from this relentless string of storms has now climbed to 14 today after two people were killed by falling trees. Serious problems in Chatsworth where a 15-foot sinkhole suddenly appeared

and swallowed two cars, trapping a mother and daughter inside. Today, my colleague Christopher Flavel says that the way California chose to deal with its water in the past has made today's flooding worse and amounts to a missed opportunity for the future of California's water crisis. It serves to really kind of illustrate how much of that valley really is a floodplain. Yeah. It's Thursday, January 12th. So, Chris, I keep catching glimpses in headlines about the terrible weather in California. You know, catastrophic flooding, storms, evacuations, and even deaths.

So tell me what's happening in California right now. There's no single stat that captures what's happening. So here's a list of stats. As of now, you've got almost 5 million people under flood watches. You've got 60,000 households without power, evacuation orders in seven counties, 28 emergency shelters, two nursing homes had to be evacuated, 53 roads closed, the Santa Barbara airport is closed, rail lines are closed, and there's more rain coming. According to FEMA this morning, total rainfall in the past few weeks in California has been 400% to 600% above average.

Oh my God. This is an epic event. It's hard to find a way to convey just how bad this is. The examples are heartbreaking. There's a story about a five-year-old swept away from his mother's arms, a toddler crushed by trees. The LA Times noted compellingly that the death toll so far is higher from these floods than the past two wildfire seasons combined. Oh, wow. That's incredible.

So the human toll is excruciating. And it's striking that it's just like all over the state, right? It's not just in the south, just in the north. It's really everywhere. the same sort of system of dams and rivers and levees gelling together into one mega catastrophe. And Chris, explain this, because, you know, it seems like this is just, as you say, FEMA's pointing out, far more than normal. What's going on? So the phrase that everyone has become painfully used to now is atmospheric rivers. Hold on, remind me though, what's an atmospheric river?

Sure. An atmospheric river refers to a concentration, some call it a plume of moisture, high in the atmosphere. And what that means is as the wind and a storm system blows that over land, you get intense volumes of rainfall. And in California, there's a pattern. My colleague Raymond Jong pointed this out in a masterful piece last year. California is, you've got a pattern of more intense and more severe rainfall moving in from the Pacific and delivering this kind of sustained, severe rainfall that just overwhelms California. And I assume all of this is made worse by climate change. Yeah. And heavy rainfall and storms, of course, aren't the only manifestation of climate change for California. These storms and floods are happening at the same time that California is grappling with, A, severe and ongoing droughts.

Droughts so bad that it challenges the notion of drought, right? A long-term decline in moisture levels and wildfires, right? A long-term decline in moisture levels and wildfires, right? So you've got a landscape that's really been primed to flood because the drought kills vegetation. So you get less vegetation on the ground to soak in the rain before it runs off. And wildfires leave burn scars across the landscape, which means even more sort of acceleration and velocity as that rain hits the ground and runs off. So it's the combination of these different kinds of crises that together put California where it is.

But those are just the natural factors. That's just the natural climate and the weather patterns that California is wrestling with. There's one thing that you can't leave out of this discussion, which is the physical environment that's been built by people in California for decades and even centuries, which is actually contributing to this. of greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change, but in the sense of how California has built its system for holding, managing, and flowing water through the state. Because that system, as we're now learning, has actually made California even more vulnerable to the kind of flooding that we're seeing now

and made the problem even worse than it would have been otherwise. So Chris, explain that. What kind of system are we talking about here? So the story begins in the second half of the 1800s, where California is beginning to realize that it's got, in the Central Valley, a fantastic source of agricultural wealth. fantastic source of agricultural wealth. But there's one big problem, which is water. The soil is fertile. There's plenty of sunshine. What they don't have is water at the right time, which is in the hottest season in the summer. So the first turning point is in the early 1900s, where farmers get access to better technology to pull water out of the

ground through wells and better pumps. And they use that to irrigate a whole new array of high value crops. And the result is an explosion in farming and in wealth in the Central Valley. But if anything, they leaned into it a little bit too hard, because by the 1930s, they could tell that groundwater was being drained far faster than it could be replenished. And so it became clear by the 30s, something had to change. So California began embarking on what's been called the largest public works project ever at the time, which was the Central Valley Project, building a series of enormous dams that would capture runoff from the Sierra Nevada,

hold it behind dams, and route it as irrigation water through this empire of farms that had sprung up in the Central Valley. At the same time, the federal government built the Hoover Dam, which allowed it to harness the water of the Colorado River, which was another source of irrigation and drinking water for California and the states around it. So you got these two mega projects that together just transform the landscape and the potential of California. So a major feat of engineering. An unbelievable feat of engineering. And it worked. It turned the Central Valley into arguably the most important patch of farmland in the U.S.

and maybe in the world. It produces about a quarter of the food that the U.S. consumes, almost half of some fruits and nuts. And it's really a core pillar of California's economy, which is the fifth largest economy in the world. Okay, but so how are those decisions from decades ago, which drove California's success, making the situation now in California worse? Well, there's two problems that arise

from the way the system has been built. The first one is when you get severe, intense rain events, there's just not enough room for that water. You get more flooding because the channels that have been created for those waters by building those levees just become too narrow for the volume of water that you get. You can imagine a world before levees or with no levees where when you get intense rainfall, the water just goes everywhere and fills the land. People will sometimes refer to the Central Valley as the Inland Sea because it had a propensity to flood during parts of the year and even have standing water. That no longer makes sense because we've had almost 200 years of farming and large-scale developments. You can't just let water go everywhere at this point in the valley without causing massive destruction to fields and orchards

and towns and cities. And so the challenge is finding a way to control the water without being too aggressive so it's got nowhere to go. Right. You know, if there were no farms or towns there, a flood wouldn't be a big deal, right? But because there are levees that allowed for all that development, it is a massively big deal, as we're seeing right now. That's right. At some level, you can't reset the clock, right? You can't just erase the developments

and the agriculture that now defines the Central Valley. The best you can do is try and find a way to really tinker with the system because those farms and people aren't going away. Right. that the system that the state uses now doesn't try to take advantage of all this excess water to recharge the state's all-important aquifers. Okay, so help me understand what an aquifer is. Wherever you are in the world, the ground beneath you isn't solid. In many cases, there are porous structures, there's space between the rocks, there's even

caverns. That space often holds water, and that water is accumulated over centuries and millennia from rainfall and from glaciers. It's a gigantic reserve of water that can be pulled up out of the ground through wells and used to irrigate crops or provide drinking water for people. And that aquifer, that groundwater, is really arguably California's most important resource. And it's been heavily drained down, depleted by more than a century of farming and population growth. And flooding could be a way to help recharge that groundwater so there's more of it for the future.

Okay, so then what do you mean when you say that the system the state has now doesn't take advantage of this floodwater to replenish the groundwater, the aquifer? Right now, the system is you've got these giant reservoirs behind dams, and they're meant to capture this excess flood water, which is great. You can use it later, but it only does so much. And you've got, as we've seen, water going where it's not meant to go, right? So every time a community or a home gets flooded, in addition to the tragedy that is for people who live there, it's a waste because that is, you just get like horrible, disgusting runoff that makes its way to the ocean, right? That no one can use. Yeah. Like I'm not somebody who thinks the world

must always be how it's always been, but there is something to the idea that like, this is the system nature built, right? These rivers take the course they do, and that's what made this farmland so fertile in the first place, right? They flood regularly. The sediment spreads across fields, and the aquifer is where you need it, right? The aquifer that you want in the Central Valley is in the Central Valley, right? So if the water leaves the valley and heads to the coast, you've lost it. Even if it sort of drips into marginal aquifers underneath the side of Barbara, that doesn't help the almond grower in Bakersfield.

Right. The way advocates put it to me was that if you deliberately and intentionally widen the rivers, you get better groundwater recharge where it's supposed to happen, reaching the aquifers that you want to use for farming, rather than that water rushing into towns and cities, and sure, reaching into the soil, but a lot of it just runs off, causes mudslides and landslides, destroys homes, and causes all kinds of havoc in the meantime.

Okay, so what you're saying is that because of the way the system was set up, those floodwaters aren't going back into the ground in the most efficient way. That's right. And the cost of not grabbing that water to recharge aquifers in the most efficient way, the cost of that decision keeps on going up, right? Because the surface water is drying up, it's going away, both reduced snowpack off the mountains and reduced flow from the Colorado River. So if anything, this is an especially difficult time just to let that huge surplus of rainwater flow by because that groundwater is becoming more and more important as sources of surface water dry up. Got it. And as that surface water dries up, farmers are already turning more heavily toward groundwater. In fact, the number of dry wells reported to the state

jumped in 2021. So this isn't some future problem. Farmers are already trying to cope with reduced groundwater, even as groundwater becomes more important because surface water is slowly going away too. I mean, if the surface water goes away and the groundwater goes away, you've got nothing, right? That's it. You've got nothing. And I've met vineyard growers in California who will truck in water because they lose surface water and groundwater, but that's not sustainable. That's so high cost. You can't keep it going for long. So yeah, you, you started talking about the end of farming areas when your groundwater and your surface water aren't available. It's,

it's really terrible. and your groundwater and your surface water aren't available. It's really terrible. So what are they going to do? I mean, is it fixable? It is fixable. And not only that, everyone seems to agree what the fix is. The catch is the obstacles to actually doing that are almost insurmountable. We'll be right back. Okay, so California is having this severe flooding problem,

and it's being made a lot worse by systems designed over decades to essentially tame nature. So what would it take today to solve this problem? You know, the short answer is pretty straightforward. You could make more room for the river by pulling back the levies and setting aside more land on either side of these rivers so that when there is really intense rainfall, there's more room for the water and more chance for that water to sink down and recharge the aquifers. The problem is doing that is really, really, really hard. Why is it so hard, Chris?

Start with the economics, right? If you want to pull a significant chunk of land out of agricultural use, out of residential use, and you're the state, you've got to buy that land. So you've got to find the money to buy that land. And many homeowners and farmers won't want to sell that land. So at some point, you don't just buy it. You've got to seize it through eminent domain. So that gets into the politics. Politically, there's nothing quite as painful as when state or local officials try to force people off their lands. But maybe even more overwhelming

than the economic challenge of buying the land or the political challenge of taking the land is just the cultural barrier to this because culturally California, like the rest of the West, was built on the philosophy that, as you said, we can tame nature. We can bend nature and make it work for our goals. And the underpinnings of this idea of more room for the rivers is that at some point, you can't keep taming nature. You've got to bend to nature and accept that human plans have limitations. And those limitations are getting more pronounced with climate change. And I don't know how you get a community or a state or a country to that point where people are willing to accept that we can't always tame nature.

Okay, so very hard politically, but wouldn't another downside be California as breadbasket? I mean, wouldn't we lose a significant amount of agricultural land? Doing this, making more room for the rivers would definitely involve taking some farmland out of production. But from the conversations I had for reporting this story, it didn't seem like as a total share of Central Valley farmland, this would mean taking a huge amount out of production. And it could arguably make the whole system more sustainable because the farmland that remains would have more groundwater to draw on in the future. And in general, I couldn't find anybody who said that this would have serious negative consequences. Everyone seemed to agree this was going to be beneficial in the long run if we could do it. Okay, so it sounds like the

hardest thing here is that it's a political loser, right? Like, it would cost a ton of money, which would probably mean more taxes, which people hate, and it would make some people have to give up their way of life, all in service of some long-term benefit, which you know, Chris, especially as a climate reporter, people really don't want. They don't want to do that. Absolutely. And to California's credit, they're starting to do some projects along these lines, some pilot projects. But to make it work at scale, as you said, will just be so hard politically, economically, and culturally that it's a great example of the kind of big change that you need as these weather patterns and weather extremes get worse. And the question is always, will lawmakers and officials want to take the chance? lawmakers and officials want to take the chance. To be clear, this isn't a panacea. Even if California can pull this off and give its rivers more room, that wouldn't solve the problem of

flood damage and it wouldn't solve the problem of access to water for irrigation, for drinking water for cities. Those things would remain challenges. But having said all that, there is some good news here, which is that despite all the practical impediments and obstacles actually making these changes, if California could do it, it would be that rare case in climate adaptation where you've got a single change that can check a bunch of different boxes all at the same time. Right. You can reduce the severity of flooding. You can increase groundwater recharge. You can provide new habitat for wildlife in these reclaimed river areas. From my reporting on adapting to climate change, it's rare to find a solution or a policy change where you get all those different wins at once.

Right. And you talk about rare. I mean, it's also presumably pretty rare to solve an effect of climate change, you know, the drought in California, by harnessing another effect of climate change, the rains. That's right. There's almost a beautiful symmetry to it, taking two challenges from climate change and almost directing them against each other to help with both. So California, in a sense, is lucky, right? If you compare it to other states in the Southwest, like Nevada and Arizona, they don't have the good luck of having to fight through too much rain and too much flooding. The outlook in those places is a lot less sunny. But California at least has a chance to turn this around.

And bear in mind, the storm that California is suffering through right now is not the worst it's going to see. As my colleague Raymond Jong has written, California has to worry about much worse megastorms, the kind of storms that last for 30 days without a pause. Those storms are what could make this decision about more room for the river look like it's not just a luxury, but something that California has to fix. Because as these floods get worse, the damage will grow and just becomes catastrophic. Chris, thank you. Thank you.

Another series of atmospheric rivers is expected to arrive this weekend, bringing another round of heavy rain across northern and coastal California. We'll be right back. Here's what else you should know today. George Santos' campaign last year was a campaign of deceit, lies, and fabrication. On Wednesday, Republican officials on Long Island called for U.S. Representative George Santos to resign as he faced multiple inquiries into his finances, campaign spending, and fabrications on the campaign trail. The calls for Santos to step down marked the sharpest denunciation yet from members of his own party. Joseph Cairo, the Republican Party chairman in Nassau County,

where part of Santos' district is located, said Santos had, quote, disgraced the House of Representatives and we do not consider him one of our congresspeople. Santos refused to resign, writing on Twitter that he was elected to serve constituents, not, quote, the party and politicians. And the Times reports that aides to President Joe Biden are said to have found other classified

documents dating back to the Obama administration at a second location. It is not clear where or when the documents were recovered, but Biden's aides have been scouring various places since November when Biden's lawyers discovered a handful of classified documents in his former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington. The revelation is likely to intensify Republican attacks on Biden, who has called former President Donald Trump irresponsible for hoarding sensitive documents

at his private club and residence in Florida. Today's episode was produced by Michael Simon Johnson and Luke Vander Ploeg, with help from Sydney Harper. It was edited by Paige Cowett, with help from Lexi Diao. Contains original music by Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. We'll see you tomorrow.