Marin IJ: Marin County Allocates $3M for El Niño Preparations

Marin County supervisors will spend more than $3 million to fund El Niño readiness this winter.

The weather pattern, which occurs when the surface water in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean warm more than usual, has increasingly signaled that Marin will experience excessive rain, atmospheric rivers, elevated flood risks and landslides.

Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency last month to prepare the state for the expected El Niño onslaught. A week after he signed the Sept. 21 declaration, Hurricane Polo, one of the fiercest hurricanes to emerge from the eastern Pacific, made landfall in Mexico.

“I’ve likened it to seeing hot lava coming down a hill,” Marin County Executive Derek Johnson told supervisors. “We know it’s coming because we have a superheated ocean off the coast of California. It’s up to us to prepare.”

During the meeting, residents from several Marin neighborhoods requested that attention be paid to special needs in their areas.

Residents in the Santa Venetia neighborhood, where a levee sustained $2.6 million in damages during storms last January, called for emergency action to increase the height of their flood wall.
The biggest chunk of the funding approved on Tuesday, $1.32 million, will be spent on temporary flood barriers, sandbags, sand and reusable flood protection systems, such as larger sand-filled and water-filled barriers.

Another $200,000 will be used to purchase tide gates, manhole seals, inflatable plugs and check valves, which prevent flood water from moving backward through storm drain systems and emerging through inlets and manholes.

The plan is to protect infrastructure before flooding occurs by pre-positioning materials and equipment so they can be deployed quickly.

Another sizable chunk of the funding, $600,000, will cover the cost of labor to deploy and install the sandbags, flood barriers and drainage improvements.

Supervisor Dennis Rodoni noted that the county will experience king tides around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, when county employees often take vacations, and wanted to know what was being done to ensure the county had sufficient staffing available to respond to emergencies.

Christopher Blunk, the public works director, said employees have been notified that they need to inform the county of their holiday plans as soon as possible.

“Supervisors are going to make sure as they review those requests,” Blunk said, “so that we maintain a higher level of baseline staffing than we would typically over the holidays.”

Blunk said some of the $600,000 allocated for labor might need to be spent to hire outside contractors.

“We’re going to need to be able to supplement our workforce,” he said.

The funding plan also will provide $390,000 to Marin County Parks, which intends to use $200,000 for protection of the McInnis Marsh berm and $150,000 for McNears Beach seawall protection, including riprap.

Community outreach is another important part of the preparation plan, receiving $310,000 of the funding. According to a staff report, the majority of that is budgeted for “communications support, including specialist subcontractors.”

The budget also includes $50,000 for a digital marketing campaign, $15,000 for advertising such as bus posters; $10,000 for targeted social media ads; $10,000 for “trusted community voices and partner organizations”; and $8,500 for multicultural and ethnic media.

“We have spent the last month and will continue to work with our neighbors, our cities and towns, schools, hospitals, ranches and farms and special districts to protect life, property, and our vulnerable populations,” said Assistant County Executive Chris Zapata, who has been overseeing the effort.

Nevertheless, some residents in the Santa Venetia neighborhood said more needs to be done, and soon.

A decrepit 2-mile flood wall protects about 700 homes there from flooding. For nearly a decade, the community has sought to repair or replace the rapidly deteriorating barrier, a timber-reinforced berm built atop a pre-existing earthen one.

“This extreme El Niño is going to be much stronger than the one in 1983, which had water in the streets over 3 feet high,” said Jeff Krupnick, a member of the Flood Zone 7 advisory board.

“The flood wall protecting us now is not high enough to protect us from the storm that is coming,” Krupnick said. “It will be extremely dangerous for us if we do not have the height raised to the highest estimation of the tide. Even a few inches less than that, and we could flood severely again.”

During the Jan. 3 king tide, water overtopped the flood wall by about 1 inch at several locations and also seeped through and under it in vulnerable areas.

William Tucker, a civil engineer who lives in Santa Venetia, said, “What we need is crews on the levee now, not after the king tides. It’s an emergency. It needs to be treated as such.”

Tucker advocates raising the levee and timber wall to 10 feet. He said the king tide in January reached about 8.8 feet, while the height of the flood wall ranges from 8 feet to 9 feet.

Public works staff briefed the Zone 7 advisory board on winter preparedness actions underway in Santa Venetia during a Sept. 23 meeting.

The county is using lidar to identify lower-elevation sections of the levee and installing sandbags and temporary flood barriers at strategic locations to raise vulnerable portions of the levee to about 9 feet.

The county is also ensuring that pump stations in the area are in working order, preparing portable emergency pumps for deployment if needed, and staging flood-fighting materials and equipment in advance.

On Friday, a county spokesperson, Anastasia Pallas, said approximately $500,000 of the $3 million approved on Tuesday would fund temporary flood-protection work in Santa Venetia.

“In areas where the existing berm is relatively sound, temporary barriers may allow us to add height,” Pallas said. “In locations where the berm is badly deteriorated, simply placing additional weight on top of it may not be safe or effective.”

Pallas said that in order to conduct visual inspections of the wall, the county must secure permission from about 110 property owners who front the berm.

“The emergency declaration allows us to make emergency repairs in the most critical locations but does not waive property owner rights,” she said. The emergency that the county declared following the flooding last January remains in effect.

Supervisor Mary Sackett, whose district includes Santa Venetia, said, “The existing Santa Venetia flood-protection system keeps me up at night.”