Today, Explained - Too much water for California

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

Rain is good for California, but the state was not prepared for what might be a megastorm. KQED’s Dan Brekke assesses the damage from the San Francisco Bay Area and the Pacific Institute’s Peter Gleick explains how we can be better prepared for future storms. This episode was produced by Siona Peterous and Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Efim Shapiro, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

California. Perfect place to live, except for the earthquakes, the mega drought, the wildfires, and now the atmospheric rivers? The list of things to worry about just got a little longer. That's incoming on Today Explained. until they explained. I've been thinking about you. You know, no, no. I've been thinking about you. Do you think about me still? Do you, do you? Or do you not think so far ahead? Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points.

Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Today Explained, Sean Ramos from Dan Brekke from KQED in San Francisco isn't a weatherman, but he, like many of his colleagues, has been reporting on the rain, the atmospheric rivers, and all the fallout in California. California is in the grips of a really historic surge of Pacific storms. And what makes it doubly newsworthy, I think, is that maybe three to four weeks ago, nobody saw this coming. Pretty much the whole state right now is seeing unceasing rain. Really, if you looked at the midline of California on a map and north, it's where most of the rain has fallen. But really, this series of storms, which started the day after Christmas, has touched every part of the state in some way or another.

President Biden has approved California's emergency declaration as the state braces for more severe weather. A new storm is hitting northern California as southern parts of the state begin cleaning up and hopefully moving on from days of rough weather, which have also been deadly. Iconic coastal destinations across Santa Cruz County devastated in this week's storm. In Aptos, Seacliff State Beach Friday still littered with prelogs and debris, with plenty of work and worry ahead. What we're seeing here in the Bay Area where I am, I'm actually located in Berkeley and talking from home, you know, the rain is falling again today. My little backyard rain gauge is slowly filling up. And water is just running out of everywhere. You know, more rain, more flood, more mud, more cleanup. I'm just, it's frustrating.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. You see it seeping out of people's yards. You see the creeks coming out of the hills here are just roaring with water. And then in other parts of the state, rivers are filling up. Our reservoirs are slowly rising. Luckily, really, that they're slowly rising at this point. And then there have been numerous places where, you know, the flooding has really impacted people's lives, forced them from their homes, and in some cases people have

died. At least 17 people have died across California as a result of the storms. Tens of thousands remain under evacuation orders. Now, the past 15 days or so, we've gotten so much rain that the soil is probably super saturated. That creates all this runoff, but it also makes it much easier for trees to fall if there's a lot of wind. And these storms have often been accompanied by very high winds that have been pushing trees over. So in some cases, people have been killed by falling trees. There was a case here in the Bay Area where a young child was killed when a tree fell onto his home, and that's happened in other parts of the state too. Also, we have rivers in California that most of the time look

very tame. Their tributaries, their tributary creeks look very tame. All of a sudden, they've become very wild and dangerous in some cases. And there is an incident down in central California, just outside a town called Paso Robles, where a car was swept away with a mother and child inside of it. Rescuers were able to get the mother to safety, but the child was lost. In addition to around 20 people dying in these storms, which gives us a sense of how grave this is, how much damage has been caused? Do we have any idea

what the dollar amount is? I don't think we're even close to being able to assess that yet. I think it's too early to say what the cost is going to be, but the state has declared a state of emergency here. And that means the state government cuts all the red tape and makes it possible for all the cash the state has dedicated to a disaster like this makes it flow faster and gets any kind of physical help out there, like flood-fighting supplies, as the state likes to call them, out to communities. Angelo Martino and his nearly two-year-old son Miles are here at the Higgins Fire Protection District Station 21, one of the sites where Nevada County is offering free sandbags to residents. But I think it's going to take weeks or months really before we have a dollar amount on what this means for the state. And even when the rain stops, which it hasn't yet, there's still going to be an emergency. There's going to be landslides and mudslides and trees falling down. What's

happening to all the people who need to be evacuated, who are on the ground still experiencing this? Unfortunately, you know, California is used to the kind of disaster where people are hurried out of their homes because of an imminent threat. People in these areas that have been under mandatory evacuation orders are simply doing what people have learned to do in these situations. There are evacuation centers that are set up that will continue to be open while the emergency continues. Most people find some kind of workaround, which may mean crashing with family or friends or sometimes even leaving for some other part of the state or country while this is going on until they can go back home. In some areas, evacuation orders have actually already

been lifted, even though the threat of a flood is still very real up there. When the rain stops, the impact does not. We're being warned that because of the supersaturation we're seeing in the soils around here that trees will be falling for some days or even weeks. Mudslides are going to be possible for days or weeks. And so the storm has really turned the state's highway network upside down. There is almost no way of getting between northern and southern California by road yesterday without encountering some major storm-caused delay or complete road closure. All right, take a look at this. This is a flooding on 101 in Gilroy.

It is closed right now southbound at Mesa Road. Whoa. That is something you do not want to drive through. You just don't know. Do you think the state has learned something for the next time something like this happens? I think it has. But, you know, just stepping back a little, I mean, I know that there's a lot of interest in this phenomenon of atmospheric rivers, and there's been a lot of serious research into what the potential worst-case scenario is for a series of atmospheric rivers, similar to what we're seeing now. But what's happening now is far from the worst case that's projected. And part of what the researchers are trying to do there is get the state's attention

about what could happen if serious measures, and measures that will cost tens of billions of dollars, to take on this threat. I do have to say that while there is some serious flood planning going on in parts of the Central Valley, there has yet to be anybody at the state level who has said, you know what, we have to make this a major or primary state priority because of the economic threat and also because the communities that are most vulnerable to this are also largely disadvantaged communities, right? So there's a big equity question surrounding this as well. Because if you don't spend those, say, $30 billion for flood fixes and developing new

ways of managing floodwater, right? You don't have to dam it all up or put up levees. You can create areas where the floodwater can spread out. If you don't do that, then you may be facing a trillion-dollar disaster. It could be the most costly disaster in human history. Dan Brekke, KQED. Momentarily, we'll hear from a researcher on how to avoid the most costly disaster in human history. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Thank you. to make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an AuraFrame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the Aura Frame.

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Today Explained is back. Dan's gone, but we got his neighbor, Peter. I'm Peter Glick. I'm the co-founder and senior fellow at the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California. And I'm a hydrologist and climatologist by training. And are you in Oakland, Peter? The Institute's in Oakland. I'm actually in my home in Berkeley at the moment. And how are things at your home in Berkeley at the moment?

They're pretty good. My backyard is flooded and my basement's a little bit wet, but I'm much better off than many people around the state at the moment. You know, we started the show with a guy named Dan Brekke, who works for KQED in California. I believe he also lives in Berkeley. And the first thing he said was, a lot of people in California didn't see this coming. Did you see it coming, Peter? I saw it coming, but I'm paying attention to these things. Climate and water is my thing. The good news is that our weather forecasting systems today are remarkably good. There was warning that these storms were forming in the Pacific and on their way really weeks ago. And the forecasts have been very accurate.

So it was possible to see these things coming. But of course, extreme events are sometimes a surprise to people and we're not always prepared. I don't want to blame the people, but if you saw this coming weeks ago and there was forecasting and all the like, did 18 people need to die? Did billions of dollars in damage need to occur in the state of California? You know, California, like most of the world, is vulnerable to extreme events. We have wet years. We have dry years. we have dry years,

we've had very long periods of drought, we've had extreme rainfall and flooding events. It's impossible to prevent all floods, all extreme events. It's impossible to prevent all death and destruction. California, like again many parts of the world, has spent a lot of time and money trying to prepare for these kinds of extreme events. But some of these things are unpreventable. You can't prevent the worst things from happening all the time. And the hope is that we learn lessons from what we experience and we figure out how to prevent damages and deaths from occurring in the future. Tell me more about that. Is this a once-in-a-lifetime storm or is this going to be happening with more regularity in the future. Tell me more about that. Is this a once-in-a-lifetime storm, or is this going to be happening with more regularity in the future?

Well, we're in the middle of it, so we don't yet know whether it's a once-in-a-lifetime event. If it keeps raining, you know, the forecast again is for several more weeks of wet. The rainy season in California runs from October until April, and then we have a dry season. So in theory, we could get storms in the rest of January and February and March. If that continues to happen, this could be a once in a lifetime event. Conversely, it could dry up and the storms could disappear.

We just don't know yet. But we do know that extreme events happen. And we also know, unfortunately, that extreme events are more likely now because of human-caused climate change. We're already seeing the influence of climate change on these kinds of extreme events, and that's going to continue to happen. And how will the state of California be more prepared in the future, or how could it be more prepared? For floods in general, we have already built a lot of infrastructure. We've built big reservoirs to store water during

wet periods, to control floods. We built levees alongside rivers to try and protect developments very close to big rivers that have the risk of flooding. Those kinds of infrastructure bring great benefits to us. They capture storm floods. They prevent certain kinds of flooding events in floodplains, but they can't prevent all damages. And so in the future, we have to both understand what's going to be delivered by nature. We have to understand the nature of how climate change is influencing these extreme events. We have to look at infrastructure that we have. We have to think about maybe managing that infrastructure differently or building different kinds of infrastructure. And we have to think about how to move people

out of areas that are at risk. It seems like there are a lot of areas at risk, though. Yeah, well, that's true. Again, it depends on the kind of extreme events we're talking about. In terms of droughts, which we've had for the last many years, the whole state is at risk of water shortages. In terms of floods, the areas most at risk are floodplains, the areas that would flood when rivers overtop their banks, when they spread out. Lots of areas are at risk, and we have to understand what's at risk, what's going to be at greater risk in the future, and how to protect the populations that are in those

vulnerable areas. Does California have some experience with this, with massive relocation and huge infrastructure spending to prepare for this kind of weather event? Well, there are extreme events in the past that give us some hints of what we're vulnerable to. And maybe the best example is in 1861, in December of 1861, more than 160 years ago, it started to rain. And then it continued to rain in January with massive storms coming off the Pacific. And in what some describe as really a mega storm. The entire Central Valley of California flooded. Rivers rose to 20 or 30 feet over their banks.

Millions of acres were flooded. Thousands of people were killed. Hundreds of thousands of cattle and sheep were killed. Telegraph lines that had just been installed that connected the West Coast with the East Coast were destroyed, a quarter of the state's economy was wiped out. Huh. That is sort of the classic megastorm that we know can occur and that we think may occur

again and that we're really not prepared for. The estimate is that if a similar storm occurred today, it would be the worst disaster in California's history. It would cause a trillion dollars worth of damages, not billions of dollars of damages, but a trillion dollars worth of damages. Thousands of people would probably die. You know, in 1860s, the population of California was about 500,000. It's 80 times larger now. It's 40 million people. And the population at risk, the developed infrastructure that's at risk is much greater today than it was then. So what do you do?

I mean, how do you avoid that kind of cataclysmic damage? How do you move thousands of people and avoid trillions of dollars in damage? The bad news is we don't. The bad news is if that kind of event were to happen, a lot of the damages that we see would be unavoidable. The reservoirs that we've built for flood control wouldn't be enough. The levees that we have built for flood protection in floodplains wouldn't be enough. And there would be extensive damage today. The question really might be, what do we need to do to at least reduce the damages that would occur?

And there are things that we could do, but we're not doing them at the moment. So the first thing we need to do is we need to reoperate the reservoirs that we've already built. The backbones of California's water supply are the six mega reservoirs, Shasta, Oroville, Trinity, New Malones, Don Pedro, and San Luis. You know, we have these reservoirs. We want to keep them empty in the winter so that for flood storage, we want them as full as possible at the end of the wet season for water supply for the dry parts of the year, and for droughts. Back on November the 8th, the state's six biggest mega reservoirs were 33% full. In normal years, they would have been 54% full, but the drought kept them low. We have to learn to operate those reservoirs a little bit differently.

We have to pay more attention to the models that tell us that we're going to get these storms off the Pacific. It's going to take more than this to get us out of the hole we've dug ourselves. Probably the most important thing we could do is move development and populations, to the extent possible, out of floodplains. And across this area, hundreds of people requiring rescue. Houses engulfed. They had to be plucked out of their cars as well. One person dying in his vehicle. They're called floodplains for a reason. They're called floodplains because they flood when we get incredibly severe events.

But we built levees that channel these rivers, and then we built developments right up against the edge of these levees without accepting that leve these rivers. And then we built developments right up against the edge of these levees without accepting that levees fail. Over time, we need to move populations out of these floodplains to the extent possible and let the rivers flood to some degree. The good news there is that if rivers flood more, we can actually recharge groundwater. We can store more floodwaters in groundwater that's already overtapped.

That's good for water supply. It's good for preventing some of these floods from occurring. But it's a difficult policy decision. It's a difficult economic decision. It's going to require changes in the way we manage development in California. And people certainly don't like giving up their real estate in other parts of the country. California real estate, even more expensive,

even more precious, some of the most expensive real estate in the country. We can assume people aren't going to want to relocate, right? Absolutely. That's a political challenge and it's an economic challenge. But think about it this way. If you live in a floodplain and you have flood insurance and a big flood occurs, you get a payment for the damages that have occurred and you often rebuild in the exact same spot. Let's change our flood insurance

policies, first of all, to prevent new development in flood plains. But second of all, if you're damaged during a flood, let's pay for those damages, but let's prohibit people from rebuilding in the same place. Let them rebuild, but somewhere else. If flood insurance policies permitted that, then over time, we would see what's called managed retreat from those vulnerable areas. Instead of rebuilding and reflooding over and over and over again, we could rebuild in other places and over time

restore those floodplains to more natural conditions. But this is kind of a wish list you're furnishing right now. This isn't what's happening. This is what ought to happen to be better prepared so fewer people die, so we have less damage. I would say it's smart flood planning rather than dumb flood planning. It's time to change from a philosophy that we can manage and prevent these floods to one where we have to learn how to live with them. We have to learn how to accept the kinds of extreme events we're getting and reduce the consequences of them. And it sounds like you're not just talking about California anymore.

No, what's true in California is true everywhere. You know, we get extreme events in California. We have floods, we have droughts, we have to deal with them. But look at the horrible flooding that occurred this year in Pakistan. 30 million people were dislocated from their homes. And even today, months afterwards, many of those places are still flooded. Look at the heat, extreme heat events that have swept over Europe over the last few years. The floods and droughts that are sweeping over Australia one after another.

These kinds of extreme events were seen globally. California may be a place where we can explore some smart policies and maybe we can learn lessons from other parts of the world as well. My preference would be that we don't wait for the mega flood. We don't wait for the mega disasters to take the lessons of these lesser disasters that we learn from existing droughts and existing floods. And we implement these policies now. If we wait for the mega flood like 1861 and 1862, thousands of people are going to be

killed. The economy is going to be crushed. But if we learn from the kinds of events we're experiencing now and start to implement these policies to move people out of risky areas, to manage the reservoirs differently, to deal with droughts differently, then the consequences of the really, really bad events will be less than they otherwise would be. That's Peter Glick.

He lives in Berkeley, but he works in Oakland, the Pacific Institute in Oakland, to be specific. This installment of Today Explained was produced by Siona Petros and Hadi Mawagdi, Afim Shapiro, mixed and mastered, Laura Bullard, fact-checked, Matthew Collette, edited from Oakland. He's really sad the rain isn't over yet.

Take care, California. Thank you.