‘Flood fighting is in our DNA’: To live by the Feather River is to know its power and danger
Reporting from Marysville, Calif. — The early settlers snatched up the rich, loamy land along the Feather River to grow grapes and orchards.
Edward Mathews, an Irishman who fled the potato famine, was peddling vegetables and didn’t have the cash for that kind of soil.
During heavy rains, the Yuba River would flow so hard into the Feather at Marysville, it pushed the Feather back north into Jack Slough, named for a freed slave who in 1861 sold Mathews 200 acres of its poor red soil.
On that backwashed clay, the Mathews clan would scratch out a living grazing livestock.
“If you came into the bank with red soil on your boots, they wouldn’t loan you money,” said Edward’s great-grandson Charlie Mathews, 77, who lives on the land today.
But the Mathews family did well for themselves. The arrival of a type of rice from Japan that grew in sunlight this far north transformed the cursed clay into a blessing: Water didn’t drain through it, giving the ricegrass the pooled paddies it thrived in.
Life in the region has long evolved around the ebb, flow and overflow of the Feather River. Its meandering course and merciless moods dictated where soil was good, which crops farmers grew, where they built towns, how deep they dug wells, where families went broke or dynasties were born.
When California dammed the Feather River as part of its monumental project to bring water to Southern California and other parts of the state, the river became more predictable, but not totally so. Levees blew out in 1986 and 1997 and caused widespread flooding, similar to inundations that hit before the Oroville Dam was finished in 1967.
And the crisis at the dam last week, when more than 100,000 people were evacuated due to potential failure of an emergency spillway, showed that nature relentlessly works to rip down humanity’s efforts to control it. Residents remain anxious as another big storm is expected to hit the area Monday.
Farmers here are keenly aware of one point: They live at the pleasure of the river.
Al Montna remembers the eerie moonlight glimmer off the tin roofs of houses floating downstream.
It’s been more than six decades since the floodwaters hit, but he still pictures it perfectly. They were the homes of his classmates.
He was 10 at the time, living south of Yuba City near the river. His dad was busy trying to move equipment at the farm a few miles away, leaving his wife and kids perched on high ground of the family home.
“I heard this roar. I can still hear it,” Montna said. “It was Christmas Eve 1955.”
The flood, caused by a levee break at Shanghai Bend, killed 38 people and destroyed 450 homes. Waters rose to the roofs of low-lying barns.
Seeing the waters surrounding them, Montna’s family evacuated to the nearby Sutter Buttes — dormant lava domes that loom 2,000 feet above the floodplain like a volcanic beacon for the bedraggled refugees of the valley floor.
His father’s crops were lost and most of the family farm was destroyed. His dad feared financial ruin and died of a heart attack three months later.
Montna lived through two more great floods along the river in 1986 and 1997. But the thought of pulling up stakes never crossed his mind.
“We’re very ingrained here. My grandfather came here as a French immigrant. ... He drowned in that river,” Montna said. “This is home. … This is part of our soul.”
Montna Farms not only recovered but is prospering, he said, specializing in premium, short-grain Japanese rice used in sushi.
When county officials ordered the emergency evacuation of Yuba City last week, many residents again fled to the buttes for safety. Montna took different measures.
As a board member of Levee District 1 of Sutter County, he and his entire work crew scrambled to shore up the levees, looking for leaks that could lead to bigger breaches.
“Flood fighting is in our DNA,” he said.
A few miles upstream on Feb. 12, Sarb Johl listened in disbelief to the alert that the emergency spillway on Oroville Dam might fail within 60 minutes. He loaded his wife and 92-year-old mother into a car and told them to drive to stay with family in the hilly Sacramento suburb of Roseville. He stayed an extra hour talking to other farmers and fellow officials on his levee board, determining what to do.
“We didn’t have time to rationally plan: Would the water break to the west or the east? Could the levees hold it? You have to believe it when someone is telling you a 15-foot-high wall of water is coming down. That is a lot of water,” Johl said.
His father, who came from Punjab, India, began farming peaches and prunes on this reclaimed land in the 1960s. The area is known as Yuba County Levee District 10, which was formed in 1909 to make the floodplain available to farmers.
While most orchard growers here don’t directly draw from the river, they still survive on it. Because the state water project continued to direct the Feather River water down its historical course, the river replenishes the aquifer as it always has. Johl pumps water from wells and now conserves it by using drip irrigation for his trees, which favor the porous loam slurried down from the mountains over eons.
On Feb. 13, seeing that the spillway had not collapsed, Johl came back to move his equipment onto the levee. On the other side, the silty river sifted slowly through a wild land of oak and cottonwood. A family of deer picked delicately over the bank and into the orchards’ safety, as one of Johl’s workers tried to fix a valve in the levee that the farm needed for the land to drain.
His family had survived the last two big floods, but the notion that the dam could fail — a nightmare that had never crossed his mind — spooked him. As soon as he was done, he got in his truck and headed to Roseville.
***
The Oroville Dam was sold to residents as a flood control measure, but no one who understood water politics ever doubted its core purpose was to bring more water to Southern California. Population studies in the 1950s predicted millions of people would continue to flow into the region with not enough water, even with canals from the Colorado River and Eastern Sierras, to meet their needs.
Plans to dam the stormy rivers of the North Coast — the Eel, Mad, Klamath and Smith — were scuttled as too costly or controversial. That left the Sacramento River’s main tributary, the Feather, to become the linchpin of the state’s ambitious new water project.
The three forks of the Feather gathered snowmelt tributaries from nearly 6,000 square miles of the Northern Sierra and Southern Cascades, converging in the canyons north of the small town of Oroville. The main stem then flowed another 71 miles to the Sacramento River, and on to San Francisco Bay.
Govs. Earl Warren and Goodwin Knight helped get what was then called the Feather River Project rolling in the 1950s, and the deadly 1955 flood gave it a needed dose of urgency. Gov. Pat Brown lobbied groups up and down the state — notably the powerful Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which feared the project might threaten its legal battles with Arizona for Colorado River water — to bring it to fruition.
By the time the renamed State Water Project was largely completed in the 1970s, the flow was diverted in the Sacramento Delta before it flowed into the San Francisco Bay. From the Clifton Court Forebay, it was pumped up into the 444-mile California Aqueduct that would follow the new Interstate 5. With branch canals and massive pumps and siphons to cross hills and mountains, Feather River water now poured out of taps in the Bay Area, Bakersfield, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles and the Inland Empire.
But during rainy winters, the old levee system just below the Oroville Dam still struggled to contain the flow.
In Olivehurst, Mary Jane Griego said the evacuation order brought flashbacks of the floods in 1986 and 1997.
Griego, owner of Duke’s Diner, was stopped at a red light outside of Yuba City that night in 1986 when a police patrol car screeched into the intersection.
“He said the levee broke. The water is coming,” Griego recalled. Then she heard a rumble and saw a churning wave of water heading toward her. “It was like a scene from ‘The Poseidon Adventure.’”
That flood blasted through the county mall in the nearby town of Linda, which still stands gutted and empty.
After the 1997 flood, Griego decided to run for Yuba County supervisor, with her top campaign issue to fix the levees in the southern portion of the county. She won and, since that time, the levees have been improved and fortified through the more populated areas.
While farmers and officials along the river understand the hydrology around them like cardiologists know arteries and veins, millions of other Californians rely on the same system with varying degrees of awareness. Some know enough to complain about its great flaws — its waste by evaporation or its environmental impact. Others marvel at its grand ambition, allowing great cities to exist where they otherwise could not. Some don’t even know it exists.
North of Lake Oroville in the small wooded town of Magalia, Keith Noble runs a hunting and fishing shop that depends on anglers coming to the lake. With the lake closed due to the spillway crisis, he was irked that several bass tournaments had been scrubbed.
Noble thinks the state could have prevented the damage if officials hadn’t neglected the spillway all these years — in his mind, another example of the northern reaches of California getting short shrift by the big-city liberals controlling Sacramento.
At the southern end of the project, Feather River water pours out of a 28-mile-long pipeline into the Lake Perris reservoir, more than 500 miles from its source and nearly 700 feet higher in elevation.
Saddled between high hills of boulders and white sage, the lake draws campers, boaters and fishermen from across the region. The water teems with rainbow trout, Florida bluegill, black crappie and carp. Anglers there have caught record-size Alabama spotted bass.
But the dam has its own problems. In 2005, the state Department of Water Resources discovered that parts of the foundation might be at risk during an earthquake and ordered the water lowered by 25 feet. Construction to fix the problem is expected to be completed by early next year. But the drought reduced the lake by an additional 17 feet.
Brian Place, manager of the boat rental and fishing shop at Lake Perris, looks out at the low water and wonders when the state will open the spigot to bring it back up.
He says Water Resources told him the lake would come up 10 feet in January, but it’s just starting to fill.
“Within the last week, it’s come up about 3 feet,” he said.
He hopes the state sends the water before the fish lay their eggs in spring, and then maintains it at that level, so a sudden change in depth doesn’t kill off the spawn.
He can only wait and see.
State bureaucracy feeds Lake Perris, and no meteorologist can read that forecast.
Twitter: @joemozingo
Twitter: @philwillon
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