How the Great Flood of 1862 Inspired Measure AA
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1 SAN FRANCISCO ESTUARY How the Great Flood of 1862 Inspired Measure AA A 1901 Ferry Crash The Legacy of Sediment from the Gold Rush and Water Wealth Concentrated in Old Irrigation Districts Girl Ranger Saves Watershed from Fire A Duck Rare in the 1920s Now Common Reporters Ask What Happened Next? Following Up on 11 Past Stories WATER ENVIRONMENT CLIMATE EQUITY DECEMBER 2020 NEWS MAGAZINE VOL. 29, NO. 4 ONLINE FEATURES WWW.SFESTUARY.ORG/ ESTUARY-NEWS 2 ESTUARY DECEMBER 2020 EDITOR’S DESK You will also notice how short this issue is. As men- tioned above, we don’t want to load you up with weighty This year has been so uncertain and reading material. But we are also sorely short of pub- so unpleasant in so many ways, Estuary lication funding as partners come and go or juggle News decided to lighten up a bit for the shrinking budgets. As such, this issue will only appear December 2020 issue. We looked into online (though we are printing paper copies on demand, some long-ago disasters and missteps email me your address if you’d like one). for historical touchstones, and delved a little into how this colorful history Hang tight, we are looking forward to a fresh start and relates to present times. It is from yes- reset next year. In the meantime, thank you to all of our terday’s floods, fires, crashes, and even partners and supporters, especially those who’ve been human prejudice, now seen at a dis- able to increase their support this year to cover the gap. tance, that we gain perspective beyond Perhaps you’d like to join them? the Zoom meets and 275-character tweets of today. Stay well and visit the water often! Then instead of cute kittens we find solace in the local Ariel Rubissow Okamoto birds—bringing you good news as cormorants and terns expand nesting, and as waterfowl continue to stop over on [email protected] their migrations, with some rarities now more common Thank You than in centuries past, and vice versa. Finally, because we www.sfestuary.org/estuary-news/magazine-funders/ are reporters with long attention spans, and because news in an estuary ecosystem is often an ever-changing story, we offer you updates on some of our past stories. Virtual RMP Annual Meet The format was not the only departure from business Shows Real-Life Success as usual; event organizers mixed things up by featuring expert speakers from beyond the Bay Area, who shared Instead of a fancy room with plush seats, a catered lessons from monitoring in Puget Sound and Chesapeake lunch, and speakers at a podium sharing their PowerPoints Bay. Attendees also heard about monitoring coronavirus on a big screen, attendees at the 27th Annual Meeting of and disinfectant chemicals in wastewater, managing sedi- the Regional Monitoring Program experienced the report- ment quality and supply, and monitoring CECs in stormwa- out entirely virtually on their own computer screens, ter and PFAS in the Bay, among other topics. The biennial thanks to the Covid pandemic. Nevertheless, and despite RMP Update report, which provides a summary of RMP Zoom burnout, the October event was a success, with many activities over the past two years, was released on the day attendees voicing a preference for the virtual format. of the meeting. The presentations and resources are avail- “I think they did a great job of pulling the whole program able on the Annual Meeting web page. together,” says RMP science advisor Maggie Dutch of the Washington State Department of Ecology. “The only thing DEEPER DIVE I missed out on is the face-to-face conversations that you have afterwards, which are always really valuable.” For a more detailed version of this story... www.sfestuary.org/estuary-news-virtual-RMP-meet/ NEW PODCAST the placement of wave-absorbing “coarse beaches.” She also addresses the problem of scale. While individual local Putting Nature, Not People, governments like cities are typically too small to grapple in the Path of Sea Level Rise with shared flooding problems, a unified regional vision is an elusive dream. Beagle urges cooperation at a middle Science-in-Short Series Interview with Julie Beagle level, organized around logical reaches of shoreline called In this podcast, Estuary News reporter John Hart draws Operational Landscape Units. The concept is gaining ac- out Julie Beagle, ceptance. The Institute maintains an online Adaptation a lead scientist at Atlas, suggesting a menu of treatments suited to each the San Francisco specific stretch of shore. Along the way, Beagle describes Estuary Institute, on how her own focus widened from natural systems alone to ways of defending the people likely to be displaced by rising tides and other Bay shores in the effects of climate change. “These are wicked scary prob- era of sea level rise. lems when it’s people’s lives on the line,” she says. After Beagle describes 10 years with SFEI, Beagle moves to a new position with several kinds of the Army Corps of Engineers early in 2020. “nature-based” treatments that can delay and soften Podcast: the onslaught; her www.sfestuary.org/science-in-short-podcast-julie-beagle- special interest is in sea-level-rise/ 3 FLOOD How the Great Flood of 1862 Inspired Measure AA ROBIN MEADOWS, REPORTER Bay, and a mind-boggling volume collapsed freeways. “This made the When Hurricane Sandy hit New shot through the Golden Gate Strait. economic case for Measure AA,” Co- York City in 2012, it was a wake-up call The city of San Francisco was already vert says. “You can do a lot to decrease for Bay Area Council members, who drowning under the 34 inches of rain the risk for $500 million.” Measure AA, were glued to coverage of the devasta- that fell there during the Great Flood. which Bay Area voters passed in 2016, tion from their tenth floor offices near Much of the land ringing the Bay was will raise half a billion dollars over 20 San Francisco’s Ferry Building. “We under water, and roads and bridges years to restore the tidal marshes that were watching the subways fill up with were swept away. Flooding was even protect against flooding. water,” recalls Adrian Covert, vice worse in president of public policy for the busi- Sacramento, ness-backed nonprofit, which helped so the state lead the 2016 Measure AA campaign capitol tem- that will fund flood protection projects porarily relo- associated with habitat restoration. cated to San “We all looked out the window and saw Francisco’s all that water in the Bay.” They asked Merchants themselves if the disaster unfolding Exchange 3,000 miles away could strike here too. Building at the corner of Covert and his colleagues real- Battery and ized the answer was yes when they Washington learned about the Great Flood of 1862, streets. the worst in California’s recorded history. Heavy rains fell statewide on A similar Christmas Day 1861, and kept pour- scenario ing through January 1862, “just shy of played out in the proverbial 40 days and 40 nights,” a US Geo- wrote meteorologists Jan Null and logical Survey Joelle Hulbert in California Washed model called Away: the Great Flood of 1862. The rain ARkStorm, was so warm it melted the snowpack which posits in the Sierra Nevada, pushing the a 1,000-year snow line up thousands of feet. atmospheric river event. Flood of 1861-62 in Sacramento. Between the rain of biblical pro- An ARkStorm could inundate the Bay Photo: Eugene Walter Hepting, portions and the unseasonable snow Area, other coastal communities, and Courtesy Calisphere. melt, “every creek and rivulet became the Central Valley, at a cost up to $725 a rushing torrent, sweeping the hopes billion in damages—nearly triple that We’re well on our way. A few de- of men and everything destructible of a major Southern California earth- cades ago, the Bay was down to about before it,” according to eyewitness quake in the USGS ShakeOut scenario. 38,000 acres of tidal wetland, barely accounts reported in a January 1862 In Atmospheric Rivers (Springer 2020), over one-third of the 100,000-acre California Farmer and Journal of Use- former USGS hydroclimatologist Mike goal. Since then another 18,000 acres ful Sciences editorial. The Sacramento Dettinger and colleagues detail the have been restored to tidal action, and River topped its low water mark by 24 intense precipitation and consequent an additional 18,000 acres are current- feet, and the American River rose even flooding from these extreme rain- ly in the planning or acquisition stages, higher, topping its low water mark by storms. according to the latest State Coastal 60 feet. The Central Valley, surrounded Conservancy figures. Altogether, that In 2015, the Bay Area Council’s on all sides by mountains, rapidly puts us on track for 74,000 acres—al- Economic Institute modeled the re- filled with water. “The whole country, most exactly three-quarters of the gional impact of a storm that drops 12 as far as the eye could reach, was one total salt marsh we need to weather inches of rain over seven days, which vast surging sea, covered with drifting the next great flood. debris and struggling animals,” the is considerably smaller than either editorial continued. “This desolation the Great Flood or an ARkStorm. The CONTACT: [email protected]; extended over an area of 300 miles resulting report, Surviving the Storm, [email protected] long by 40 or 50 broad.” put the cost at more than $10 billion in damages. This is similar to the cost The only outlet to the ocean for of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, all that water was the San Francisco which fractured the Bay Bridge and 4 ESTUARY DECEMBER 2020 CRASH Slow Bells Could Not Prevent Ferry Disaster ALETA GEORGE, REPORTER had been to the matinees.