California Coast & Ocean

"In Walnut Creek you'd be paying a million dollars. Here you pay half," said Nicholas Ramirez, 32, who was working on his truck on a hot day in June, but put down his tools to chat with a stranger. He bought a two-story home at Summer Lake a year ago for $600,000 and moved in from Antioch, where he had lived most of his life, to get away from the noise and congestion. With a 10-year-old daughter and a young fiancée, he wanted a fresh beginning.

"I like that it's quiet here," he said, gazing down the street of picture-perfect houses backed by giant power lines and blue hills. "There's a lot of family people here, a lot of children for my daughter to play with, and not too many people-notice I say not too many people-speeding through here as though it's The Fast and the Furious."

Ramirez admitted he "could have done better" checking out the flood threat before buying, but added that most home buyers probably don't probe too deeply. "I think it's mainly because everybody has their own problems and their own concerns with themselves. So until it's actually affecting you, you just wipe it off your shoulder," he said, shrugging. Like the Martinez family, the Ramirezes live five feet below sea level.

The Odds Are Scary
"That, in your own backyard there, is the scariest place after New Orleans," said Nicholas Pinter, a geology professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, in a post-Katrina interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. "In California there seems to be large-scale neglect of those levee systems."

The levees are vulnerable to failure from earthquakes, heavy storms, further subsidence, seepage, erosion, and burrowing by beavers and muskrats, not to mention the threat of flooding as global warming raises sea levels and accelerates seasonal melting of the Sierra snowpack. Geologist Jeff Mount, at U.C. Davis, and Bob Twiss, a levee expert at U.C. Berkeley, estimated that there is a 60 percent chance of multiple, simultaneous levee failures due to an earthquake or flood over the next 50 years. The result could be destroyed homes, roads jammed with panic-stricken residents, disrupted water supplies to much of California, and loss of lives.

John Cain, director of restoration programs at the San Francisco-based nonprofit Natural Heritage Institute and co-author of Re-envisioning the Delta, a report produced by U.C. Berkeley's Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, said in a recent interview that residential areas being built on the fringe of the Delta are on average five feet below sea level. In the winter flood season, water can rise more than 10 feet above the base of these homes. Many of the levees the residents rely on for protection are 10- to 30-foot-high unengineered mounds of dirt.

"I think it's incredibly irresponsible and misguided to develop on deep floodplains," Cain said. "We're not talking about people's living room carpets getting wet every few years. We're talking about whole subdivisions, with houses close together, being inundated up to their eaves. And the odds of that happening are really quite high." David Mraz, Delta-Suisun Marsh chief flood manager at the California Department of Water Resources, said in a telephone interview that there is undoubtedly cause for concern. He said only about 40 percent of the Delta's levees meet federal standards, though many of the poorer levees are in agricultural, not residential, areas. He also believes that even the federal standard is inadequate today.

"We have a very extensive levee system and . . . it's a problem just waiting to happen," he said. "The department's pushing for a higher (levee) standard."