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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cb>Here are the morning’s top stories on Tuesday, December 23, 2025…\u003c/b>\u003c/p>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Christmas is two days away which means Santa Claus is pulling overtime. He’s at the mall taking photos and he’s project managing toy production. This story is all about the work of being Santa. So, if you’re listening with a child who’s expecting a visit from jolly old Saint Nick this year, you may want to turn down the volume. \u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003cli style=\"font-weight: 400\">\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">California is preparing for another storm system that could bring dangerous conditions to large portions of the state.\u003c/span>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003ch2>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kcrw.com/shows/kcrw-reports/stories/its-go-time-for-santa\">\u003cstrong>It’s Go Time For Santa\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Old Saint Nick is a total rock star to little kids, and December is when he goes on tour. On the calendar: photos at the mall, appearances at fundraisers, and official tree lighting ceremonies. But what does it take to maintain the magic of Christmas?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Myk Price is a professional Santa performer. This is his fourth year of performing in public – doing everything from photoshoots to fundraisers. “But I’ve actually been wearing the suit for private parties and friends’ kids for a little over 30 years,” Price said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like a lot of Santas, Price is naturally jolly, but there’s something that makes him a little different. “As of today, I am one of perhaps seven Black Santas in the entirety of California, maybe eight,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He said the Santa community immediately welcomed him into its peppermint-perfumed embrace. And while people of all backgrounds are thrilled to see him, on occasion a kid will say “hey you’re Black, you don’t look like the real Santa.” Price has a careful response. “Many people see Santa in many different ways, and have for centuries, and people have certain pictures in their heads. And just sometimes, depending on who’s here, there is somebody who really needs to see me looking like this. And so today I look like this. Tomorrow I can look like somebody else. It’s all a part of Christmas magic,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12068281/bay-area-braces-for-storm-that-could-become-a-rare-bomb-cyclone-ahead-of-holiday-travel\">\u003cstrong>Storm Expected To Create Dangerous Conditions Across California\u003c/strong>\u003c/a>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>After a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1999695/3-storms-will-bring-much-needed-rain-to-bay-area-and-snow-in-the-sierras\">weekend of rainfall\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/bay-area\">the Bay Area \u003c/a>and the rest of the state are bracing for days of dangerous stormy conditions expected to begin Tuesday night and extend through the rest of the week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two wind-fueled systems will hit the region throughout the Christmas holiday week, bringing a possibility of up to 80-mile-per-hour gusts, flood conditions and widespread power outages. “We really have several waves of potentially strong to moderate showers and thunderstorms, and along with that, we’re going to have very strong winds at the highest peaks,” said Joe Merchant, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Monterey office.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Redding has experienced major flooding after Sunday’s rainfall. City officials issued warnings to avoid multiple major roadways, and urged people to stay home and avoid driving when possible. According to Redding Mayor Mike Littau, a person who was stuck as water entered their vehicle died after calling 911 Sunday night. Littau said the person’s phone died while they were making the emergency call.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Southern California is likely to see the heaviest rainfall, late Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. The National Weather Service is warning of potentially life-threatening floods. \u003ca href=\"https://laist.com/brief/news/climate-environment/atmospheric-river-la-holiday-christmas-storm\">Evacuation orders went into effect Tuesday morning\u003c/a> for nearly 400 properties in “various recent burn scar areas,” according to the L.A. County Office of Emergency Management.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Amber McZeal had just wrapped up her first summer semester back at Southern University of New Orleans in August 2005.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Then the big tropical storm came, which was crazy, massive,” she said. “And then Katrina hit Aug. 29.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana as a \u003ca href=\"https://www.weather.gov/mob/katrina\">Category 3\u003c/a> storm — with 120 mph winds and a surge over 12 feet tall in some areas — decimating New Orleans and other coastal towns along the Mississippi shore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the aftermath, 1,833 people died and survivors were left stranded on rooftops as the federal government was slow to respond. Thousands of people — mostly poor and Black — were displaced in one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twenty years later, some who were evacuated and relocated to other parts of the country, including the Bay Area, reflect on how Katrina changed their lives and how they remain rooted to a place that, for them, is more than geography.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many of her neighbors, McZeal, who now lives in Oakland, initially planned to ride out Katrina, which made landfall two days before her 22nd birthday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m glad I didn’t, because my apartment got 8 feet of water at the bottom and then mold from the roof,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12054224\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1999px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12054224\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250828-KatrinaBayEvacuees-04-BL_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250828-KatrinaBayEvacuees-04-BL_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250828-KatrinaBayEvacuees-04-BL_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250828-KatrinaBayEvacuees-04-BL_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Amber McZeal sits on the porch at DeFremery Park in Oakland on Aug. 28, 2025. She evacuated to the Bay Area from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>McZeal evacuated to Mississippi with friends and later returned to a ravaged New Orleans. She ultimately decided to leave Louisiana — where she said her ancestors have lived since the 1700s — after suffering a respiratory tract infection and growing weary of battling the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, she accepted the government’s offer to pay for a hotel room outside of New Orleans in early 2006.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a forced exile, if you will, or forced displacement,” McZeal said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She landed in Emeryville, where a friend had a spare hotel room. She joined organizers pressing the U.S. government to follow the \u003ca href=\"https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights\">United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights\u003c/a>, which they interpreted to mean that New Orleanians should be able to return to their homes there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But many never did — not by choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>National disaster prompts local relief\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Nell Myhand, then a Bay Area volunteer with the nonprofit \u003ca href=\"https://globalwomenstrike.net/\">Global Women’s Strike\u003c/a>, worked to support Katrina evacuees, many of whom were low-income.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our question was not, what kind of charity can we provide for them, but how can we call attention to the violence that is happening to them at the hands of the government?” Myhand said. “In some countries, in natural disasters, they respond to them by moving people out of the danger as close as possible to where they were.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But in the case of Katrina, the U.S. government decided to disperse people from Louisiana, throughout the country, far away from their homes, from their families, sometimes in places where they had never been before and didn’t have connection.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12054222\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12054222\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/HurricaneKatrinaGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1329\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/HurricaneKatrinaGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/HurricaneKatrinaGetty-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/HurricaneKatrinaGetty-1536x1021.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A historic marker honors volunteers outside Waveland’s Ground Zero Hurricane Museum, in a town that was hard-hit by Hurricane Katrina, on Aug. 4, 2025, in Waveland, Mississippi. Katrina resulted in nearly 1,400 deaths, according to revised statistics from the National Hurricane Center, and remains the costliest storm in U.S. history at around $200 billion in today’s dollars. \u003ccite>(Mario Tama/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Myhand said many people were placed in hotel rooms without kitchens or transportation, leaving volunteers scrambling to meet basic needs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was no central place where we could say, ‘Where are the evacuees who came to the Bay Area?’ There was no coordination that helped us get ready for the folks who were coming here,” Myhand said. “There was really no reason that they had to come here in the first place, except that they were being displaced from that very vital location, that geography.”[aside postID=forum_2010101911063 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/43/2025/08/clint-smith-katrina.png']About 1,700 people relocated to California after Katrina. A 2008 Bureau of Labor Statistics \u003ca href=\"https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art3full.pdf\">report\u003c/a> found that only up to 3% of evacuees came to California and stayed a year later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chet Hewitt, the head of Alameda County’s Social Services Agency at the time, said of the 1,700 people who came to the Bay Area, 1,100 were in Alameda County.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To meet their needs, the county set up a “one-stop center” in Hayward, where retired social workers helped 400 families apply for housing assistance, food stamps, school enrollment, replacement medications and new IDs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The kind of public, private, faith and nonprofit partnerships were essential,” Hewitt said. “The government has a critical role to play — particularly in long-term assistance — but the more rapid response was often of a more communal nature, with the faith community and nonprofits stepping up. We were building a system to respond, not relying on any one segment to do all of the work alone.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Bay Area becomes home\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Over the last 20 years, McZeal built her life in Oakland, earning degrees in psychology and a doctorate in trauma and sound therapy. She said \u003ca href=\"https://decolonizingthepsyche.com/\">her work is deeply shaped\u003c/a> by the traumas she endured after Katrina.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a gem in my heart. New Orleans made me. It ushered me into all of the things that I eventually turned into a job, a vocation, a career path,” McZeal said. “I work in cultural transformation now, and I can, for sure, say it’s directly tied to my experience living through Katrina.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She has thought about moving back to Louisiana, as other evacuees in the Bay Area have, but she said she’s happy where she is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12054188\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12054188\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-07-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-07-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-07-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-07-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dan Smolkin and his wife, Luisa Hernandez, sit in their Half Moon Bay home on Aug. 27, 2025, in a room soon to become a nursery as they prepare for their first child. Smolkin and his family evacuated from New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and later resettled in the Bay Area. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Maybe one day when I’m old, I’ll settle, because I don’t even want to live in the heat,” she said, laughing. “You know the Bay grows on you. That 61-degree weather.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dan Smolkin also found himself resettled in the Bay Area. He arrived with his parents and grandparents to stay with his uncle after floodwaters engulfed their New Orleans home just days after his 17th birthday. Smolkin’s parents decided he should stay with family in Palo Alto to finish high school, while they returned to salvage what they could.[aside postID=arts_13980557 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/08/250811-POOSIE-HURRICANE-KATRINA-MD-01-KQED.jpg']“Never, in my wildest dreams, did I think that I would end up becoming a Californian,” Smolkin said. “One of the things that I’ve struggled with is I wasn’t there in those couple of months where my parents literally were gutting our house down to the studs, and there was part of me that felt like I was missing out on being part of that recovery effort for my family, but also being there in New Orleans.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His parents later rejoined him in the Bay, and he participated in the relief efforts while attending James Madison University in Virginia, where he and his peers \u003ca href=\"https://www.jmu.edu/news/2015/11/20-katrina-mm-oct15.shtml\">routinely traveled into Katrina-ravaged areas\u003c/a> to help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smolkin now lives in Half Moon Bay, where he volunteers with \u003ca href=\"https://coastsidehope.org/\">Coastside Hope\u003c/a>, helping people with food insecurity, immigration and other needs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t want to wait until there is something truly bad that happens to jump in, but rather recognizing there are these ongoing, omnipresent needs in the community. We should all be reaching out and helping in our communities in some way,” he said. “That’s part of what really stuck with me from Katrina, that there’s so much value in having strongly built safety nets and coordinated programs to support people when they’re truly in need.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12054190\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12054190\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-09-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-09-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-09-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-09-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mementos from New Orleans sit on a shelf in Dan Smolkin’s home in Half Moon Bay on Aug. 27, 2025. He and his family evacuated from New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and resettled in the Bay Area. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At home, Smolkin and his wife have a room ready for their first child, a boy due in December.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He hopes Louisiana will remain a part of his son’s life, starting with the family’s annual crawfish boil at his uncle’s home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“To me, New Orleans isn’t just a place, but it’s an identity, and something that I hope to be able to impart on my kid,” Smolkin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Amber McZeal had just wrapped up her first summer semester back at Southern University of New Orleans in August 2005.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Then the big tropical storm came, which was crazy, massive,” she said. “And then Katrina hit Aug. 29.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana as a \u003ca href=\"https://www.weather.gov/mob/katrina\">Category 3\u003c/a> storm — with 120 mph winds and a surge over 12 feet tall in some areas — decimating New Orleans and other coastal towns along the Mississippi shore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the aftermath, 1,833 people died and survivors were left stranded on rooftops as the federal government was slow to respond. Thousands of people — mostly poor and Black — were displaced in one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twenty years later, some who were evacuated and relocated to other parts of the country, including the Bay Area, reflect on how Katrina changed their lives and how they remain rooted to a place that, for them, is more than geography.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like many of her neighbors, McZeal, who now lives in Oakland, initially planned to ride out Katrina, which made landfall two days before her 22nd birthday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’m glad I didn’t, because my apartment got 8 feet of water at the bottom and then mold from the roof,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12054224\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1999px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12054224\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250828-KatrinaBayEvacuees-04-BL_qed.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1999\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250828-KatrinaBayEvacuees-04-BL_qed.jpg 1999w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250828-KatrinaBayEvacuees-04-BL_qed-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250828-KatrinaBayEvacuees-04-BL_qed-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1999px) 100vw, 1999px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Amber McZeal sits on the porch at DeFremery Park in Oakland on Aug. 28, 2025. She evacuated to the Bay Area from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>McZeal evacuated to Mississippi with friends and later returned to a ravaged New Orleans. She ultimately decided to leave Louisiana — where she said her ancestors have lived since the 1700s — after suffering a respiratory tract infection and growing weary of battling the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, she accepted the government’s offer to pay for a hotel room outside of New Orleans in early 2006.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a forced exile, if you will, or forced displacement,” McZeal said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She landed in Emeryville, where a friend had a spare hotel room. She joined organizers pressing the U.S. government to follow the \u003ca href=\"https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights\">United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights\u003c/a>, which they interpreted to mean that New Orleanians should be able to return to their homes there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But many never did — not by choice.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>National disaster prompts local relief\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Nell Myhand, then a Bay Area volunteer with the nonprofit \u003ca href=\"https://globalwomenstrike.net/\">Global Women’s Strike\u003c/a>, worked to support Katrina evacuees, many of whom were low-income.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our question was not, what kind of charity can we provide for them, but how can we call attention to the violence that is happening to them at the hands of the government?” Myhand said. “In some countries, in natural disasters, they respond to them by moving people out of the danger as close as possible to where they were.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But in the case of Katrina, the U.S. government decided to disperse people from Louisiana, throughout the country, far away from their homes, from their families, sometimes in places where they had never been before and didn’t have connection.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12054222\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12054222\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/HurricaneKatrinaGetty.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1329\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/HurricaneKatrinaGetty.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/HurricaneKatrinaGetty-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/HurricaneKatrinaGetty-1536x1021.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A historic marker honors volunteers outside Waveland’s Ground Zero Hurricane Museum, in a town that was hard-hit by Hurricane Katrina, on Aug. 4, 2025, in Waveland, Mississippi. Katrina resulted in nearly 1,400 deaths, according to revised statistics from the National Hurricane Center, and remains the costliest storm in U.S. history at around $200 billion in today’s dollars. \u003ccite>(Mario Tama/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Myhand said many people were placed in hotel rooms without kitchens or transportation, leaving volunteers scrambling to meet basic needs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There was no central place where we could say, ‘Where are the evacuees who came to the Bay Area?’ There was no coordination that helped us get ready for the folks who were coming here,” Myhand said. “There was really no reason that they had to come here in the first place, except that they were being displaced from that very vital location, that geography.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>About 1,700 people relocated to California after Katrina. A 2008 Bureau of Labor Statistics \u003ca href=\"https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art3full.pdf\">report\u003c/a> found that only up to 3% of evacuees came to California and stayed a year later.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chet Hewitt, the head of Alameda County’s Social Services Agency at the time, said of the 1,700 people who came to the Bay Area, 1,100 were in Alameda County.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To meet their needs, the county set up a “one-stop center” in Hayward, where retired social workers helped 400 families apply for housing assistance, food stamps, school enrollment, replacement medications and new IDs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The kind of public, private, faith and nonprofit partnerships were essential,” Hewitt said. “The government has a critical role to play — particularly in long-term assistance — but the more rapid response was often of a more communal nature, with the faith community and nonprofits stepping up. We were building a system to respond, not relying on any one segment to do all of the work alone.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The Bay Area becomes home\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Over the last 20 years, McZeal built her life in Oakland, earning degrees in psychology and a doctorate in trauma and sound therapy. She said \u003ca href=\"https://decolonizingthepsyche.com/\">her work is deeply shaped\u003c/a> by the traumas she endured after Katrina.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a gem in my heart. New Orleans made me. It ushered me into all of the things that I eventually turned into a job, a vocation, a career path,” McZeal said. “I work in cultural transformation now, and I can, for sure, say it’s directly tied to my experience living through Katrina.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She has thought about moving back to Louisiana, as other evacuees in the Bay Area have, but she said she’s happy where she is.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12054188\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12054188\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-07-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-07-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-07-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-07-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Dan Smolkin and his wife, Luisa Hernandez, sit in their Half Moon Bay home on Aug. 27, 2025, in a room soon to become a nursery as they prepare for their first child. Smolkin and his family evacuated from New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and later resettled in the Bay Area. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“Maybe one day when I’m old, I’ll settle, because I don’t even want to live in the heat,” she said, laughing. “You know the Bay grows on you. That 61-degree weather.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Dan Smolkin also found himself resettled in the Bay Area. He arrived with his parents and grandparents to stay with his uncle after floodwaters engulfed their New Orleans home just days after his 17th birthday. Smolkin’s parents decided he should stay with family in Palo Alto to finish high school, while they returned to salvage what they could.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>“Never, in my wildest dreams, did I think that I would end up becoming a Californian,” Smolkin said. “One of the things that I’ve struggled with is I wasn’t there in those couple of months where my parents literally were gutting our house down to the studs, and there was part of me that felt like I was missing out on being part of that recovery effort for my family, but also being there in New Orleans.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His parents later rejoined him in the Bay, and he participated in the relief efforts while attending James Madison University in Virginia, where he and his peers \u003ca href=\"https://www.jmu.edu/news/2015/11/20-katrina-mm-oct15.shtml\">routinely traveled into Katrina-ravaged areas\u003c/a> to help.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Smolkin now lives in Half Moon Bay, where he volunteers with \u003ca href=\"https://coastsidehope.org/\">Coastside Hope\u003c/a>, helping people with food insecurity, immigration and other needs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t want to wait until there is something truly bad that happens to jump in, but rather recognizing there are these ongoing, omnipresent needs in the community. We should all be reaching out and helping in our communities in some way,” he said. “That’s part of what really stuck with me from Katrina, that there’s so much value in having strongly built safety nets and coordinated programs to support people when they’re truly in need.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12054190\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12054190\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-09-BL-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-09-BL-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-09-BL-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250827-KATRINABAYEVACUEES-09-BL-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mementos from New Orleans sit on a shelf in Dan Smolkin’s home in Half Moon Bay on Aug. 27, 2025. He and his family evacuated from New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and resettled in the Bay Area. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>At home, Smolkin and his wife have a room ready for their first child, a boy due in December.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He hopes Louisiana will remain a part of his son’s life, starting with the family’s annual crawfish boil at his uncle’s home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“To me, New Orleans isn’t just a place, but it’s an identity, and something that I hope to be able to impart on my kid,” Smolkin said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "This Bill Would Extend Renter Protections to Homes Rebuilt After a Disaster. Some Say It Falls Short",
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"headTitle": "This Bill Would Extend Renter Protections to Homes Rebuilt After a Disaster. Some Say It Falls Short | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>More than six months after the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12026682/how-we-rebuild-la-recovers-from-wildfire\">Eaton and Palisades wildfires\u003c/a> razed nearly 13,000 homes and apartments near Los Angeles, property owners are beginning the arduous process of rebuilding. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12047275/6-months-after-januarys-fires-recovery-is-just-beginning-for-many\">As they do\u003c/a>, state Senator Aisha Wahab wants to make sure renters aren’t left out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before the January fires swept in, tenants in many of the apartment buildings had certain protections, including rent control and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12005034/this-bay-area-county-approved-sweeping-protections-for-disaster-affected-tenants\">limitations\u003c/a> on when a landlord could evict them. But, under existing law, the apartments will lose those protections once rebuilt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The state legislature is not doing enough to focus on the issues that renters face,” the Fremont Democrat said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wahab’s bill, SB 522, aims to close a loophole in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12034212/california-lawmakers-push-lower-rent-cap-expand-protections-property-owners-worried\">Tenant Protection Act\u003c/a> of 2019, which expires in 2030. The law limits annual rent increases and restricts evictions to only “just-cause” cases, including not paying the rent, violating the lease or withdrawing the unit from the rental market. The law applies on a rolling basis to most multifamily properties built more than 15 years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SB 522 would extend those protections to homes destroyed in a wildfire, flood or other natural disaster, rather than waiting another 15 years for the clock to restart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the proposed legislation has been contentious since it was introduced — condemned by rental property owners for going too far and criticized by tenants for not going far enough. The bill is expected to head to the Assembly floor in the coming weeks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12021263\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12021263\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Buildings are destroyed along Fair Oaks Avenue in Altadena, California, after the Eaton Fire swept through the area northeast of Los Angeles on Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Property owner interest groups say it sends “the wrong message to a landlord.” Debra Carlton, executive vice president for state government affairs at the California Apartment Association, said any regulation on new development could deter a property owner from entering or returning to the rental market.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“State law says that, even in a new construction, you have a 15-year exemption before you fall under regulations such as just cause,” Carlton said. “So this is treating [the rebuilt units] differently, as if they’re not new.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wahab argued there is no concrete evidence that protections in her bill deter developers from rebuilding homes. Researchers from the University of Minnesota \u003ca href=\"https://www.cura.umn.edu/sites/cura.umn.edu/files/2025-03/final_the-good-case-for-_good-cause-v2.pdf\">published a study in March\u003c/a> that examined permitting activity before and after California’s Tenant Protection Act passed into law, among similar state policies in Oregon and New Hampshire. It found that permits for new construction in counties across those states did not decline, controlling for counties in neighboring states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But SB 522 is still shaking off the controversy it brought when it was first introduced.[aside postID=news_12034212 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/024_SanFrancisco_Housing_07292021_qed-1020x680.jpg']Wahab’s bill previously included language that required rent-controlled units to remain that way, even after getting rebuilt. That version received strong criticism from various apartment associations, realtor groups and building trades, which argued the bill, if passed into law, would make rebuilding too expensive for rental property owners already reeling from losing their homes and dealing with insurance claims.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Financing of replacement properties becomes extremely difficult if property owners do not have the ability to recover rebuilding costs through market-rate rents,” Dan Yukelson, executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, wrote in an email to KQED. “Property owners will struggle to secure financing, delaying or preventing reconstruction altogether because rental income and cost recovery will be severely limited.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Wahab’s staff, those terms were removed before the bill’s first hearing in April, despite the language still remaining in legislative digests because of a technical error to be corrected in the coming weeks. But Wahab admitted that by omitting rent control from her bill, it made it more politically palatable, especially for her colleagues in the legislature who are landlords themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was largely a way to thread the needle and to provide stability for evictions — for unnecessary evictions when somebody has already faced a crisis of losing their entire home in a fire,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12022580\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12022580\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/AP25016124878838-scaled-e1737665727227.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Residents embrace in front of a fire-ravaged property after the Palisades Fire swept through the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025. \u003ccite>(Etienne Laurent/AP Photo)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Tenants’ rights groups still largely support the bill — arguing that some protections are better than none — but they’re disappointed it’s now been watered down. Alfred Twu, secretary for the California Democratic Renters Council, said, “SB 522 is weaker without the rent cap.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ideally, said Joey Flegel-Mishlove with East Bay Housing Organizations, just cause eviction protections should be coupled with other policies that support renters, such as rent caps and anti-harassment protections.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The affordable housing advocacy group endorsed SB 522 when it was first introduced. “Rent stabilization is undermined when landlords can evict tenants without cause and set rents for new tenants at an uncontrolled level. Just Cause protections are undermined when landlords can carry out de facto evictions by raising rents to levels tenants cannot afford, forcing them to move out.”[aside postID=news_11934624 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/10/2022/12/GettyImages-1244095544-1020x619.jpg']Still, any renter protections that keep people housed, especially after a natural disaster, can provide relief to tenants, he added, “even if we aim to do more in the future.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lisa Geduldig benefited from similar protections when she lost her apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District to a fire in 2016.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around 8:30 a.m., she said she heard a crackling sound. She went to her window and saw a little fire in the brush next door. Geduldig and 14 neighbors exited the building, figuring the fire would be put out shortly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We thought we were just going to be displaced for a year,” she said. Instead, it took more than three years to complete reconstruction on the severely damaged building. By then, she said, “There were five of us, I believe, who moved back in.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She was able to return because her landlord was required to keep it rent-controlled, even after it was rebuilt. Though Geduldig would not have been covered under SB 522, even if it had been in place then, she said the bill would be more effective if it included rent control. If she had to return to her old apartment at a new, market-rate price, she wouldn’t have been able to afford it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I wouldn’t have been able to move back into the building, and I likely wouldn’t have been able to live in San Francisco,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>More than six months after the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12026682/how-we-rebuild-la-recovers-from-wildfire\">Eaton and Palisades wildfires\u003c/a> razed nearly 13,000 homes and apartments near Los Angeles, property owners are beginning the arduous process of rebuilding. \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12047275/6-months-after-januarys-fires-recovery-is-just-beginning-for-many\">As they do\u003c/a>, state Senator Aisha Wahab wants to make sure renters aren’t left out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before the January fires swept in, tenants in many of the apartment buildings had certain protections, including rent control and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12005034/this-bay-area-county-approved-sweeping-protections-for-disaster-affected-tenants\">limitations\u003c/a> on when a landlord could evict them. But, under existing law, the apartments will lose those protections once rebuilt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The state legislature is not doing enough to focus on the issues that renters face,” the Fremont Democrat said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wahab’s bill, SB 522, aims to close a loophole in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12034212/california-lawmakers-push-lower-rent-cap-expand-protections-property-owners-worried\">Tenant Protection Act\u003c/a> of 2019, which expires in 2030. The law limits annual rent increases and restricts evictions to only “just-cause” cases, including not paying the rent, violating the lease or withdrawing the unit from the rental market. The law applies on a rolling basis to most multifamily properties built more than 15 years ago.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SB 522 would extend those protections to homes destroyed in a wildfire, flood or other natural disaster, rather than waiting another 15 years for the clock to restart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the proposed legislation has been contentious since it was introduced — condemned by rental property owners for going too far and criticized by tenants for not going far enough. The bill is expected to head to the Assembly floor in the coming weeks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12021263\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12021263\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/240109-CAWindStorm-043-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Buildings are destroyed along Fair Oaks Avenue in Altadena, California, after the Eaton Fire swept through the area northeast of Los Angeles on Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Property owner interest groups say it sends “the wrong message to a landlord.” Debra Carlton, executive vice president for state government affairs at the California Apartment Association, said any regulation on new development could deter a property owner from entering or returning to the rental market.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“State law says that, even in a new construction, you have a 15-year exemption before you fall under regulations such as just cause,” Carlton said. “So this is treating [the rebuilt units] differently, as if they’re not new.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wahab argued there is no concrete evidence that protections in her bill deter developers from rebuilding homes. Researchers from the University of Minnesota \u003ca href=\"https://www.cura.umn.edu/sites/cura.umn.edu/files/2025-03/final_the-good-case-for-_good-cause-v2.pdf\">published a study in March\u003c/a> that examined permitting activity before and after California’s Tenant Protection Act passed into law, among similar state policies in Oregon and New Hampshire. It found that permits for new construction in counties across those states did not decline, controlling for counties in neighboring states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But SB 522 is still shaking off the controversy it brought when it was first introduced.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Wahab’s bill previously included language that required rent-controlled units to remain that way, even after getting rebuilt. That version received strong criticism from various apartment associations, realtor groups and building trades, which argued the bill, if passed into law, would make rebuilding too expensive for rental property owners already reeling from losing their homes and dealing with insurance claims.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Financing of replacement properties becomes extremely difficult if property owners do not have the ability to recover rebuilding costs through market-rate rents,” Dan Yukelson, executive director of the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, wrote in an email to KQED. “Property owners will struggle to secure financing, delaying or preventing reconstruction altogether because rental income and cost recovery will be severely limited.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Wahab’s staff, those terms were removed before the bill’s first hearing in April, despite the language still remaining in legislative digests because of a technical error to be corrected in the coming weeks. But Wahab admitted that by omitting rent control from her bill, it made it more politically palatable, especially for her colleagues in the legislature who are landlords themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was largely a way to thread the needle and to provide stability for evictions — for unnecessary evictions when somebody has already faced a crisis of losing their entire home in a fire,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12022580\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12022580\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/01/AP25016124878838-scaled-e1737665727227.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Residents embrace in front of a fire-ravaged property after the Palisades Fire swept through the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2025. \u003ccite>(Etienne Laurent/AP Photo)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Tenants’ rights groups still largely support the bill — arguing that some protections are better than none — but they’re disappointed it’s now been watered down. Alfred Twu, secretary for the California Democratic Renters Council, said, “SB 522 is weaker without the rent cap.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ideally, said Joey Flegel-Mishlove with East Bay Housing Organizations, just cause eviction protections should be coupled with other policies that support renters, such as rent caps and anti-harassment protections.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The affordable housing advocacy group endorsed SB 522 when it was first introduced. “Rent stabilization is undermined when landlords can evict tenants without cause and set rents for new tenants at an uncontrolled level. Just Cause protections are undermined when landlords can carry out de facto evictions by raising rents to levels tenants cannot afford, forcing them to move out.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Still, any renter protections that keep people housed, especially after a natural disaster, can provide relief to tenants, he added, “even if we aim to do more in the future.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lisa Geduldig benefited from similar protections when she lost her apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District to a fire in 2016.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Around 8:30 a.m., she said she heard a crackling sound. She went to her window and saw a little fire in the brush next door. Geduldig and 14 neighbors exited the building, figuring the fire would be put out shortly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We thought we were just going to be displaced for a year,” she said. Instead, it took more than three years to complete reconstruction on the severely damaged building. By then, she said, “There were five of us, I believe, who moved back in.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She was able to return because her landlord was required to keep it rent-controlled, even after it was rebuilt. Though Geduldig would not have been covered under SB 522, even if it had been in place then, she said the bill would be more effective if it included rent control. If she had to return to her old apartment at a new, market-rate price, she wouldn’t have been able to afford it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I wouldn’t have been able to move back into the building, and I likely wouldn’t have been able to live in San Francisco,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "as-flood-risk-grows-suisun-city-weighs-annexing-california-forever-land",
"title": "As Flood Risk Grows, Suisun City Weighs Annexing California Forever Land",
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"headTitle": "As Flood Risk Grows, Suisun City Weighs Annexing California Forever Land | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>Becky Carroll’s earthy yellow ranch-style home faces a vast marshland filled with migratory birds and boaters. She lives in a quaint, waterside neighborhood on the edge of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12043295/suisun-city-proposes-annexing-most-of-california-forevers-new-city\">Suisun City\u003c/a>, where streets have names like Dolphin Court.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even though Carroll lives right on the water, she isn’t worried that her property will flood. It hasn’t in the nearly 20 years since she and her husband moved in. And, she has faith in the marsh’s natural ability to soak up the water like a sponge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We feel very safe,” Carroll said. “We have our boat right outside our back door, so it’s perfect.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this neighborhood, and a large swath of the marshy city, is located in what climate scientists call one of the Bay Area’s top \u003ca href=\"https://www.greenbelt.org/hotspots/suisun-city/\">sea level rise hot spots\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Suisun City, a working-class community on the edge of San Francisco Bay, faces a slow-moving crisis: rising seas could swallow parts of the town within decades. It also faces an imminent budget crisis threatening insolvency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12052352\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12052352\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-38-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-38-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-38-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-38-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Becky Carroll looks out at the Suisun Slough from her deck in Suisun City, Solano County, on Aug. 4, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Among other solutions, city leaders are eyeing a controversial fix — annexing thousands of inland acres from California Forever, a tech billionaire-backed company — a move that could raise tax revenue and secure higher ground, but risks fierce fights over growth, climate adaptation and the city’s future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For years, city officials have debated how to prepare for climate change. Suisun City Mayor Alma Hernandez, who grew up in a tan apartment blocks away from the waterfront, said that point hit home a few years back, when she hiked up a hill nearby and saw how the marsh — the \u003ca href=\"https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/suisun-marsh#:~:text=Suisun%20Marsh%20is%20where%20fresh,of%20plants%2C%20fish%20and%20wildlife\">largest brackish wetland\u003c/a> in California — seemed to dwarf her tiny city of about 30,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My city will be affected by flooding, and no one really knows about it,” Hernandez said.[aside postID=news_12043295 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/06/250513-CaliforniaForeverAnnexExplainer-38-BL_qed.jpg']City Hall and restaurants like Bab’s Delta Diner are right on the water. Hernandez is worried that the area — considered the city’s playground — could be inundated in the coming decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She wonders whether the annexation deal with California Forever could help solve both the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12044266/suisun-city-could-grow-by-9-times-its-current-size\">budget deficit threatening the city’s stability\u003c/a> and climate-induced flooding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company, which did not respond to KQED’s request for comment, is proposing to build a mega-development with tens of thousands of homes several miles inland. Unlike Suisun City, the land where California Forever wants to build does not face risks from rising seas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If we didn’t have the annexation opportunity, we would know that we would be a shrinking city over time,” Hernandez said. “And we would have nowhere else to go.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Annexation of California Forever’s land could present at least two sea level rise solutions: tax revenue from future residents could help pay for potentially expensive adaptation efforts, or the project could provide housing for displaced residents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12052433\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12052433\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/SUISUN-SEALEVEL-RISE-KQED.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1240\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Blue indicates inundation. Models used in the state’s latest sea level rise guidance show a range of flooding scenarios. \u003ccite>(Animation by Darren Tu/KQED. Data from Our Coast, Our Future, USGS and Pacific Institute)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But climate experts argue that annexation isn’t a guaranteed fix for the city’s climate issues. Mark Lubell, a professor of environmental science and policy at UC Davis, said that while the opportunity sounds “juicy,” the development might cost too much, it may not set aside homes for displaced residents and the city might not choose to spend the tax revenue on protecting flood-prone areas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think there’s any way in which you could ever consider California Forever as a solution to Suisun City’s climate risk, either in terms of revenue generation or as a place that could be an escape hatch for climate migration,” Lubell said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last year, California Forever released a \u003ca href=\"https://www.thereporter.com/2024/07/19/solano-releases-california-forever-report/\">report\u003c/a>, claiming its project would generate billions of dollars in revenue for the county. Days later, county staff released their \u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/07/SolanoCountyReport.pdf\">own study\u003c/a>, which showed the project would cost more than it would generate.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Suisun City is a sea level rise hot spot\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Suisun City has a long history of flooding dating back to \u003ca href=\"https://www.solanoarticles.com/history/index.php/weblog3/more/floods_of_1880s_washed_over_solano/#:~:text=On%20that%20note%2C%20the%20storm,quite%20a%20few%20winter%20battles\">the 1800s\u003c/a>. During winter months, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12018103/king-tides-foreshadow-far-wetter-future-sf-shoreline\">king tides\u003c/a> — caused by a stronger-than-normal gravitational pull when the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1955598/king-tides-are-here-why-they-happen-and-what-they-teach-us\">sun, moon and Earth align\u003c/a> — can cause the marsh to spill into the city, flooding sidewalks and roadways.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those stronger tides foreshadow a far wetter future as human-caused climate change drives sea level rise. Since the 1880s, oceans have risen globally by about \u003ca href=\"https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level\">eight inches\u003c/a> on average.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12052349\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12052349\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-21-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-21-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-21-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-21-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mayor Alma Hernandez walks along a path used for Flood Walks near the Suisun Slough in Suisun City on Aug. 4, 2025. The guided walks educate residents about local flood risks, climate resilience and the city’s natural waterways. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>State regulators have mandated that every coastal city and county develop \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1984830/california-mandates-coastal-cities-plan-for-future-sea-level-rise\">vulnerability assessments\u003c/a> of what’s at risk and lay out potential solutions, telling places like Suisun City to expect nearly a foot of sea level rise by 2050, in a “\u003ca href=\"https://opc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/California-Sea-Level-Rise-Guidance-2024-508.pdf\">most likely\u003c/a>” scenario, and up to 6.6 feet in a worst-case scenario by the end of the century. Coastal communities also have to contend with storm surges and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1997954/lawmakers-push-to-map-groundwater-before-it-swamps-americas-infrastructure\">shallow groundwater rise\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jaclyn Perrin-Martinez, climate adaptation planning manager with the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, said the state agency’s maps show that with two feet of sea level rise, there will be “significant overtopping” and flooding in Suisun City, which could happen by 2050.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That would put much of the area south of Highway 12 under water, flooding a middle school, City Hall, downtown businesses and a rail line, impacting “some of the most vulnerable members of the community,” Hernandez said.[aside postID=science_1996746 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2021/03/RS48091_GettyImages-507138914-qut-1020x686.jpg']Local leaders have begun to plan for sea level rise. They’re working on a \u003ca href=\"https://www.fairfieldsuisunsewer.ca.gov/public-outreach/solano-bayshore-resiliency-roundtable/#1685576399759-dd121c72-a336\">regional adaptation plan\u003c/a> with potential solutions from Vallejo to Suisun City. The Fairfield-Suisun Sewer District leads it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Already, king tides push brackish water into a sewage treatment plant, minorly disrupting its operations. “The problems that we begin to see at king tides would be likely more frequent and likely more severe,” said Jordan Damerel, the local agency’s general manager.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Damerel said the group could complete the assessment as soon as next year, and a list of potential solutions could come in 2027. Even with Suisun City’s marshland absorbing water, rising seas could someday drown large parts of the wetland and flow into the city. Local leaders said solutions could range from sea walls to levees to pumps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Damerel wants an “everyone wins scenario” where communities, businesses and sewer infrastructure are safe from floodwaters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that plan is separate from discussions around annexation. Officials from the sewer district said the vulnerability assessment would only consider Suisun City’s existing boundaries.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The complicated process of moving inland\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Even in public discussions around the potential annexation, Suisun City officials rarely talk about flood risk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During a \u003ca href=\"https://media.avcaptureall.cloud/meeting/b98f7eea-cb47-42be-a06b-f85281aa6d5a\">public meeting\u003c/a> in January, City Manager Bret Prebula, wearing a bright blue suit, briefly mentioned sea level rise in his plan to fix budget issues. He argued annexation could help the city become an attractive candidate for federal funding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12052353\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12052353\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-44-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-44-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-44-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-44-KQED-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An aerial view of the Suisun Slough in Suisun City, Solano County, on Aug. 4, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“If we do not create an area in both downtown and expansion that is worth saving, it is going to be a difficult conversation years down the line with the federal government,” Prebula said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He then pointed to an even bleaker possibility: adaptation efforts might not work, and the city may not be able to stop flooding, meaning some residents and businesses may have to relocate inward.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lubell, the UC Davis researcher, said that in the future, there may “have to be some retreat there given the extent of the flooding.”[aside postID=science_1984643 hero='https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/35/2023/10/03242023_kqed_pajaroreturning-1305-qut-1020x678.jpg']The strategy, called “\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1984643/reluctant-retreat-one-familys-fight-against-climate-induced-flooding\">managed retreat\u003c/a>,” is often regarded as a last resort for cities imminently facing sea level rise. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1945874/when-it-comes-to-wildfire-solutions-relocating-communities-is-a-tough-sell\">complicated process\u003c/a> involves residents leaving their homes, often receiving government compensation for their property and moving to higher ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Charisma Acey, an associate professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, is not opposed to the strategy, she said it is often politically charged and can be “a dirty word,” especially in a country with strong property rights.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If people don’t see the water rising right now, they’re thinking the government is just trying to take land below fair market value,” Acey said. “And take their communities away.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Acey added, when communities discuss how to adapt to climate change, often the most vulnerable residents are left out because participation requires time and effort, a scarce resource for people working multiple jobs or commuting long distances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If managed retreat is seriously considered, Acey said city officials will have to regard solutions equitably, for homeowners and renters alike. According to data from the \u003ca href=\"https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST5Y2023.S1101?q=Suisun+City+city,+California&t=Housing\">2023 American Community Survey\u003c/a>, nearly 40% of Suisun City residents rent their homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>‘We absolutely need to look for higher ground’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Involving California Forever in talks about solutions could further complicate the debate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hernandez admitted that sea level rise had not been a central issue in discussions with the company because the city’s budget crisis is “taking priority,” and the threat of insolvency is more immediate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But she added, while she has the company’s attention, it’s time to address the risk of flooding as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12052347\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12052347\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-13-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-13-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-13-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-13-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mayor Alma Hernandez sits in her office at Suisun City Hall in Suisun City, Solano County, on Aug. 4, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Many residents and advocacy groups, however, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11996536/farmers-are-divided-over-california-forevers-plan-in-solano-county\">do not trust\u003c/a> California Forever to work in their best interests, partly because of its rocky history of \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/land-purchases-solano-county.html\">quietly acquiring land\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11970694/california-forever-lawsuit-looms-as-solano-county-farmers-fight-back\">suing farmers\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11985195/billionaire-backed-bid-for-new-solano-county-city-will-likely-be-on-the-ballot\">pushing\u003c/a> — \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12001435/california-forever-pulls-ballot-measure-to-build-new-city-in-solano-county-for-now\">and then pulling\u003c/a> — a ballot initiative last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Residents, including Carroll, still have questions about how the project would affect the county’s existing infrastructure and are concerned that newcomers would further crowd Highway 12, which Carroll said is already “a disaster” to drive on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And she questions whether it would ever be necessary to leave her dockside home — even if seas rise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even with a tsunami coming through,” Carroll doesn’t believe her property could flood because San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta would take the brunt of high water. It would then have to go through the marsh before reaching her backyard dock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nate Huntington, a resilience manager with the environmental advocacy group Greenbelt Alliance, said the way Suisun City chooses to adapt to sea level rise should center on what residents want for their future. His organization is part of the local community coalition, Solano Together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12052356\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12052356\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-58-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-58-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-58-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-58-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Nate Huntington, a member of the Solano Together coalition, sits in Suisun City, Solano County, on Aug. 4, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It shouldn’t be a decision that’s dictated by a development group that doesn’t have the land zoned how they want it right now,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hernandez argued that with annexation, the city actually holds the power. Earlier this summer, she and other officials signed \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12043295/suisun-city-proposes-annexing-most-of-california-forevers-new-city\">an agreement\u003c/a> that allows them to exit negotiations, no strings attached. If the annexation deal is approved, she said Suisun City will have the ultimate say in what gets built, not the developer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She is eager to look for other solutions, but with annexation on the table, retreat could be worth exploring too — even if it’s a last resort.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s really hard to hear the same individuals tell us that our downtown will be flooded in 50 years [and] also tell us, ‘But don’t look for higher ground,’” Hernandez said. “We absolutely need to look for higher ground.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Suisun City, one of the Bay Area’s fastest-rising sea level hot spots, is weighing whether to annex a massive inland parcel from the California Forever project to boost its tax base — and potentially protect residents from climate change.",
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"title": "As Flood Risk Grows, Suisun City Weighs Annexing California Forever Land | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Becky Carroll’s earthy yellow ranch-style home faces a vast marshland filled with migratory birds and boaters. She lives in a quaint, waterside neighborhood on the edge of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12043295/suisun-city-proposes-annexing-most-of-california-forevers-new-city\">Suisun City\u003c/a>, where streets have names like Dolphin Court.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even though Carroll lives right on the water, she isn’t worried that her property will flood. It hasn’t in the nearly 20 years since she and her husband moved in. And, she has faith in the marsh’s natural ability to soak up the water like a sponge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We feel very safe,” Carroll said. “We have our boat right outside our back door, so it’s perfect.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But this neighborhood, and a large swath of the marshy city, is located in what climate scientists call one of the Bay Area’s top \u003ca href=\"https://www.greenbelt.org/hotspots/suisun-city/\">sea level rise hot spots\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Suisun City, a working-class community on the edge of San Francisco Bay, faces a slow-moving crisis: rising seas could swallow parts of the town within decades. It also faces an imminent budget crisis threatening insolvency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12052352\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12052352\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-38-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-38-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-38-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-38-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Becky Carroll looks out at the Suisun Slough from her deck in Suisun City, Solano County, on Aug. 4, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Among other solutions, city leaders are eyeing a controversial fix — annexing thousands of inland acres from California Forever, a tech billionaire-backed company — a move that could raise tax revenue and secure higher ground, but risks fierce fights over growth, climate adaptation and the city’s future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For years, city officials have debated how to prepare for climate change. Suisun City Mayor Alma Hernandez, who grew up in a tan apartment blocks away from the waterfront, said that point hit home a few years back, when she hiked up a hill nearby and saw how the marsh — the \u003ca href=\"https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/suisun-marsh#:~:text=Suisun%20Marsh%20is%20where%20fresh,of%20plants%2C%20fish%20and%20wildlife\">largest brackish wetland\u003c/a> in California — seemed to dwarf her tiny city of about 30,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My city will be affected by flooding, and no one really knows about it,” Hernandez said.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>City Hall and restaurants like Bab’s Delta Diner are right on the water. Hernandez is worried that the area — considered the city’s playground — could be inundated in the coming decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She wonders whether the annexation deal with California Forever could help solve both the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12044266/suisun-city-could-grow-by-9-times-its-current-size\">budget deficit threatening the city’s stability\u003c/a> and climate-induced flooding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The company, which did not respond to KQED’s request for comment, is proposing to build a mega-development with tens of thousands of homes several miles inland. Unlike Suisun City, the land where California Forever wants to build does not face risks from rising seas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If we didn’t have the annexation opportunity, we would know that we would be a shrinking city over time,” Hernandez said. “And we would have nowhere else to go.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Annexation of California Forever’s land could present at least two sea level rise solutions: tax revenue from future residents could help pay for potentially expensive adaptation efforts, or the project could provide housing for displaced residents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12052433\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12052433\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/SUISUN-SEALEVEL-RISE-KQED.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1240\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Blue indicates inundation. Models used in the state’s latest sea level rise guidance show a range of flooding scenarios. \u003ccite>(Animation by Darren Tu/KQED. Data from Our Coast, Our Future, USGS and Pacific Institute)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>But climate experts argue that annexation isn’t a guaranteed fix for the city’s climate issues. Mark Lubell, a professor of environmental science and policy at UC Davis, said that while the opportunity sounds “juicy,” the development might cost too much, it may not set aside homes for displaced residents and the city might not choose to spend the tax revenue on protecting flood-prone areas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t think there’s any way in which you could ever consider California Forever as a solution to Suisun City’s climate risk, either in terms of revenue generation or as a place that could be an escape hatch for climate migration,” Lubell said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Last year, California Forever released a \u003ca href=\"https://www.thereporter.com/2024/07/19/solano-releases-california-forever-report/\">report\u003c/a>, claiming its project would generate billions of dollars in revenue for the county. Days later, county staff released their \u003ca href=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/07/SolanoCountyReport.pdf\">own study\u003c/a>, which showed the project would cost more than it would generate.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Suisun City is a sea level rise hot spot\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Suisun City has a long history of flooding dating back to \u003ca href=\"https://www.solanoarticles.com/history/index.php/weblog3/more/floods_of_1880s_washed_over_solano/#:~:text=On%20that%20note%2C%20the%20storm,quite%20a%20few%20winter%20battles\">the 1800s\u003c/a>. During winter months, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12018103/king-tides-foreshadow-far-wetter-future-sf-shoreline\">king tides\u003c/a> — caused by a stronger-than-normal gravitational pull when the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1955598/king-tides-are-here-why-they-happen-and-what-they-teach-us\">sun, moon and Earth align\u003c/a> — can cause the marsh to spill into the city, flooding sidewalks and roadways.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those stronger tides foreshadow a far wetter future as human-caused climate change drives sea level rise. Since the 1880s, oceans have risen globally by about \u003ca href=\"https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level\">eight inches\u003c/a> on average.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12052349\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12052349\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-21-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-21-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-21-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-21-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mayor Alma Hernandez walks along a path used for Flood Walks near the Suisun Slough in Suisun City on Aug. 4, 2025. The guided walks educate residents about local flood risks, climate resilience and the city’s natural waterways. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>State regulators have mandated that every coastal city and county develop \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1984830/california-mandates-coastal-cities-plan-for-future-sea-level-rise\">vulnerability assessments\u003c/a> of what’s at risk and lay out potential solutions, telling places like Suisun City to expect nearly a foot of sea level rise by 2050, in a “\u003ca href=\"https://opc.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/California-Sea-Level-Rise-Guidance-2024-508.pdf\">most likely\u003c/a>” scenario, and up to 6.6 feet in a worst-case scenario by the end of the century. Coastal communities also have to contend with storm surges and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1997954/lawmakers-push-to-map-groundwater-before-it-swamps-americas-infrastructure\">shallow groundwater rise\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jaclyn Perrin-Martinez, climate adaptation planning manager with the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, said the state agency’s maps show that with two feet of sea level rise, there will be “significant overtopping” and flooding in Suisun City, which could happen by 2050.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That would put much of the area south of Highway 12 under water, flooding a middle school, City Hall, downtown businesses and a rail line, impacting “some of the most vulnerable members of the community,” Hernandez said.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Local leaders have begun to plan for sea level rise. They’re working on a \u003ca href=\"https://www.fairfieldsuisunsewer.ca.gov/public-outreach/solano-bayshore-resiliency-roundtable/#1685576399759-dd121c72-a336\">regional adaptation plan\u003c/a> with potential solutions from Vallejo to Suisun City. The Fairfield-Suisun Sewer District leads it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Already, king tides push brackish water into a sewage treatment plant, minorly disrupting its operations. “The problems that we begin to see at king tides would be likely more frequent and likely more severe,” said Jordan Damerel, the local agency’s general manager.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Damerel said the group could complete the assessment as soon as next year, and a list of potential solutions could come in 2027. Even with Suisun City’s marshland absorbing water, rising seas could someday drown large parts of the wetland and flow into the city. Local leaders said solutions could range from sea walls to levees to pumps.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Damerel wants an “everyone wins scenario” where communities, businesses and sewer infrastructure are safe from floodwaters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that plan is separate from discussions around annexation. Officials from the sewer district said the vulnerability assessment would only consider Suisun City’s existing boundaries.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>The complicated process of moving inland\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Even in public discussions around the potential annexation, Suisun City officials rarely talk about flood risk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During a \u003ca href=\"https://media.avcaptureall.cloud/meeting/b98f7eea-cb47-42be-a06b-f85281aa6d5a\">public meeting\u003c/a> in January, City Manager Bret Prebula, wearing a bright blue suit, briefly mentioned sea level rise in his plan to fix budget issues. He argued annexation could help the city become an attractive candidate for federal funding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12052353\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12052353\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-44-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1334\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-44-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-44-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-44-KQED-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">An aerial view of the Suisun Slough in Suisun City, Solano County, on Aug. 4, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“If we do not create an area in both downtown and expansion that is worth saving, it is going to be a difficult conversation years down the line with the federal government,” Prebula said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He then pointed to an even bleaker possibility: adaptation efforts might not work, and the city may not be able to stop flooding, meaning some residents and businesses may have to relocate inward.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lubell, the UC Davis researcher, said that in the future, there may “have to be some retreat there given the extent of the flooding.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>The strategy, called “\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1984643/reluctant-retreat-one-familys-fight-against-climate-induced-flooding\">managed retreat\u003c/a>,” is often regarded as a last resort for cities imminently facing sea level rise. The \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1945874/when-it-comes-to-wildfire-solutions-relocating-communities-is-a-tough-sell\">complicated process\u003c/a> involves residents leaving their homes, often receiving government compensation for their property and moving to higher ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Charisma Acey, an associate professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, is not opposed to the strategy, she said it is often politically charged and can be “a dirty word,” especially in a country with strong property rights.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If people don’t see the water rising right now, they’re thinking the government is just trying to take land below fair market value,” Acey said. “And take their communities away.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Acey added, when communities discuss how to adapt to climate change, often the most vulnerable residents are left out because participation requires time and effort, a scarce resource for people working multiple jobs or commuting long distances.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If managed retreat is seriously considered, Acey said city officials will have to regard solutions equitably, for homeowners and renters alike. According to data from the \u003ca href=\"https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST5Y2023.S1101?q=Suisun+City+city,+California&t=Housing\">2023 American Community Survey\u003c/a>, nearly 40% of Suisun City residents rent their homes.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>‘We absolutely need to look for higher ground’\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Involving California Forever in talks about solutions could further complicate the debate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hernandez admitted that sea level rise had not been a central issue in discussions with the company because the city’s budget crisis is “taking priority,” and the threat of insolvency is more immediate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But she added, while she has the company’s attention, it’s time to address the risk of flooding as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12052347\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12052347\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-13-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-13-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-13-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-13-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Mayor Alma Hernandez sits in her office at Suisun City Hall in Suisun City, Solano County, on Aug. 4, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Many residents and advocacy groups, however, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11996536/farmers-are-divided-over-california-forevers-plan-in-solano-county\">do not trust\u003c/a> California Forever to work in their best interests, partly because of its rocky history of \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/25/business/land-purchases-solano-county.html\">quietly acquiring land\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11970694/california-forever-lawsuit-looms-as-solano-county-farmers-fight-back\">suing farmers\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11985195/billionaire-backed-bid-for-new-solano-county-city-will-likely-be-on-the-ballot\">pushing\u003c/a> — \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12001435/california-forever-pulls-ballot-measure-to-build-new-city-in-solano-county-for-now\">and then pulling\u003c/a> — a ballot initiative last year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Residents, including Carroll, still have questions about how the project would affect the county’s existing infrastructure and are concerned that newcomers would further crowd Highway 12, which Carroll said is already “a disaster” to drive on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And she questions whether it would ever be necessary to leave her dockside home — even if seas rise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even with a tsunami coming through,” Carroll doesn’t believe her property could flood because San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta would take the brunt of high water. It would then have to go through the marsh before reaching her backyard dock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nate Huntington, a resilience manager with the environmental advocacy group Greenbelt Alliance, said the way Suisun City chooses to adapt to sea level rise should center on what residents want for their future. His organization is part of the local community coalition, Solano Together.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12052356\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12052356\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-58-KQED.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-58-KQED.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-58-KQED-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/08/250804-CALIFORNIAFOREVERSUISUNCITY-58-KQED-1536x1024.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Nate Huntington, a member of the Solano Together coalition, sits in Suisun City, Solano County, on Aug. 4, 2025. \u003ccite>(Beth LaBerge/KQED)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>“It shouldn’t be a decision that’s dictated by a development group that doesn’t have the land zoned how they want it right now,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hernandez argued that with annexation, the city actually holds the power. Earlier this summer, she and other officials signed \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12043295/suisun-city-proposes-annexing-most-of-california-forevers-new-city\">an agreement\u003c/a> that allows them to exit negotiations, no strings attached. If the annexation deal is approved, she said Suisun City will have the ultimate say in what gets built, not the developer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She is eager to look for other solutions, but with annexation on the table, retreat could be worth exploring too — even if it’s a last resort.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s really hard to hear the same individuals tell us that our downtown will be flooded in 50 years [and] also tell us, ‘But don’t look for higher ground,’” Hernandez said. “We absolutely need to look for higher ground.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The deaths of at least 27 children and staff at Camp Mystic in Kerr County, Texas have some parents and guardians questioning the safety of summer camps, especially as global warming increases risks of extreme weather.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of summer camp’s allure is that children are outside in nature. But that can also raise the possibility of heat illness and risks from greater proximity to wildfire or flood-prone areas, says Tracey Gaslin, chief executive of the nonprofit \u003ca href=\"https://allianceforcamphealth.org/\">\u003cu>Alliance for Camp Health\u003c/u>\u003c/a> in Kentucky.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Outside of regulations that apply to all businesses, there are no federal standards that are specific to camps, says Henry DeHart, interim chief executive of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.acacamps.org/\">\u003cu>American Camp Association\u003c/u>\u003c/a> (ACA). The ACA has a national accreditation program that includes some health and safety standards, but it’s voluntary and only about 12% of the country’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.acacamps.org/resources/national-economic-impact-study-camp-industry\">\u003cu>roughly 20,000\u003c/u>\u003c/a> camps have participated, he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the state level, DeHart says some state agencies conduct camp health and safety inspections. But oversight and protections vary considerably from state to state, and some states have very little regulation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are a lot of states that have very little or no regulation related to camp,” DeHart says. “The regulatory framework is wide and varied and, in some places, it’s not very robust.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because of the gaps in the current regulatory framework, some experts on climate-related risks say parents and guardians should ask more detailed questions about campers’ safety. Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.floods.org/about/staff/\">\u003cu>Association of State Floodplain Managers\u003c/u>\u003c/a>, dropped off his 8-year-old daughter at Girl Scout Camp earlier this month, and realized he, too, had many more questions about his daughter’s camp’s flood precautions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even as a floodplain manager,” he says, “I don’t think I even had appreciation for what, as a parent, I should be thinking about when sending kids to camp.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, Berginnis has a list of points to cover. For parents or guardians sending children to any kind of camp, here are the top questions experts say you should be asking about increased risks of heat, wildfires and floods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12048822\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12048822\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-10.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1800\" height=\"1350\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-10.jpg 1800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-10-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-10-1536x1152.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1800px) 100vw, 1800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Camps can be great for kids, but can also expose them to heat. Children and teenagers’ developing bodies aren’t as good at regulating their body temperatures as adult bodies. \u003ccite>(Serhii Bezrukyi/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2 class=\"edTag\">\u003cstrong>What is the camp doing to reduce risk of heat-related illness and death?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>This question is important because heat-related illness and death are major and growing risks in the U.S. — and that threat is often underestimated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID=news_12045055 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/06/GettyImages-1450590312-2000x1334.jpg']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, children and teenagers’ developing bodies aren’t as good at regulating their body temperatures as adult bodies, says Rupa Basu, senior science advisor for the University of California, San Francisco \u003ca href=\"https://climatehealth.ucsf.edu/\">\u003cu>Center for Climate Health and Equity\u003c/u>\u003c/a>. That makes them more at risk for heat illness, she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think that people don’t even think of children often as being high risk populations,” Basu says. “ But they absolutely are.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For these reasons, Gaslin at the Alliance for Camp Health thinks parents and guardians should be asking camps how they are thinking about heat and hydration. She suggests parents and guardians ask about how the camp’s physical site is designed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Do you have things like shade structures? Misting systems?” Gaslin says. “A really solid infrastructure build is important.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaslin also thinks parents and guardians should be asking about how “climate-aware” the campers’ schedules are. That can look like an activity in a cool location, then an activity outside in a warmer location, then back into the cool, she says. Also it’s important to ask about how frequently counselors are reminding campers to hydrate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s really about giving conscious thought to how do we manage that impact of heat,” she says. “If we’re gonna be outdoors, guess what? Water activities are a great thing to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12048823\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12048823\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-11.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1800\" height=\"1201\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-11.jpg 1800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-11-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-11-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1800px) 100vw, 1800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, thinks parents and guardians need to know if their kids’ camp is in a floodplain, and what the camp is doing about it. \u003ccite>(Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>What is the camp doing to reduce risks from flooding?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>This question is key because many camps are located in flood-prone areas, Berginnis says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says — in many ways — that’s understandable. “To me, it makes logical sense that you’d have a lot of camps there because it has really interesting habitats. It has interesting animals and geology and everything, and kids can learn a lot there,” Berginnis says.[aside postID=news_11834305 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2020/08/RS44514_GettyImages-1261921915-qut.jpg']But he thinks parents and guardians need to know if their kids’ camp is in a floodplain, and what the camp is doing about it. Berginnis says adults can look up risks on this \u003ca href=\"https://msc.fema.gov/portal/home\">\u003cu>FEMA website\u003c/u>\u003c/a>. Parents and guardians can also plug in \u003ca href=\"https://firststreet.org/\">\u003cu>addresses to this database from First Street\u003c/u>\u003c/a>, a climate risk modeling company. If it’s a sleep-away camp, Berginnis says it’s important to ask where the kids’ sleeping quarters are located.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If it’s an overnight camp, any kind of residential lodging overnight for the kids, if it’s in a floodway, that should be a huge red flag right there,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And he says parents and guardians should ask camps about things like flood sirens and specifics of emergency action plans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I would be very blunt with a campground: I wanna know the procedure. If a flash flood warning is declared for the area, what does the camp do? What do the counselors do? So that they can talk it through with you,” he says in an email. “Do not be satisfied with a generic answer like ‘we have an emergency action plan’. Ask them about specific actions like is there anyone monitoring the weather at night? What are the designated evacuation areas? And if they cannot talk that through with you, again, I would say, that’s another red flag.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12048824\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12048824\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-12.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1800\" height=\"1213\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-12.jpg 1800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-12-160x108.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-12-1536x1035.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1800px) 100vw, 1800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tracey Gaslin at the Alliance for Camp Health says parents and guardians should make sure that all camp emergency action plans are regularly updated and reviewed by local emergency partners, including emergency medical staff. \u003ccite>(Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>What is the camp doing to reduce risks of wildfires and wildfire smoke?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>As with flood risks, parents and guardians should be asking about emergency action plans and preparedness for wildfire and smoke, Gaslin says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Parents can ask camps, do they monitor air quality?” she says, “What’s their evacuation plan? How are they gonna communicate with families? So families are gonna be able to say, in a moment of crisis, I wanna be able to communicate with you in some way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaslin says it’s important to make sure that all camp emergency action plans are regularly updated and reviewed by local emergency partners, including emergency medical staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaslin says parents and guardians should make sure there are always staff monitoring the weather, and at sleepaway camps there should be a solid communication system so at night, individuals are alerted to environmental changes or concerns. That means at least some staff with cell phones and radios at all hours, to monitor for wildfire risk, flash floods, or any other hazards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Part of summer camp's allure is that children are outside in nature. But that can also raise the possibility of heat illness and risks from greater proximity to wildfire or flood-prone areas. Here are some expert tips questions to ask your kids' camp.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The deaths of at least 27 children and staff at Camp Mystic in Kerr County, Texas have some parents and guardians questioning the safety of summer camps, especially as global warming increases risks of extreme weather.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Part of summer camp’s allure is that children are outside in nature. But that can also raise the possibility of heat illness and risks from greater proximity to wildfire or flood-prone areas, says Tracey Gaslin, chief executive of the nonprofit \u003ca href=\"https://allianceforcamphealth.org/\">\u003cu>Alliance for Camp Health\u003c/u>\u003c/a> in Kentucky.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Outside of regulations that apply to all businesses, there are no federal standards that are specific to camps, says Henry DeHart, interim chief executive of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.acacamps.org/\">\u003cu>American Camp Association\u003c/u>\u003c/a> (ACA). The ACA has a national accreditation program that includes some health and safety standards, but it’s voluntary and only about 12% of the country’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.acacamps.org/resources/national-economic-impact-study-camp-industry\">\u003cu>roughly 20,000\u003c/u>\u003c/a> camps have participated, he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the state level, DeHart says some state agencies conduct camp health and safety inspections. But oversight and protections vary considerably from state to state, and some states have very little regulation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are a lot of states that have very little or no regulation related to camp,” DeHart says. “The regulatory framework is wide and varied and, in some places, it’s not very robust.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because of the gaps in the current regulatory framework, some experts on climate-related risks say parents and guardians should ask more detailed questions about campers’ safety. Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.floods.org/about/staff/\">\u003cu>Association of State Floodplain Managers\u003c/u>\u003c/a>, dropped off his 8-year-old daughter at Girl Scout Camp earlier this month, and realized he, too, had many more questions about his daughter’s camp’s flood precautions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Even as a floodplain manager,” he says, “I don’t think I even had appreciation for what, as a parent, I should be thinking about when sending kids to camp.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, Berginnis has a list of points to cover. For parents or guardians sending children to any kind of camp, here are the top questions experts say you should be asking about increased risks of heat, wildfires and floods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12048822\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12048822\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-10.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1800\" height=\"1350\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-10.jpg 1800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-10-160x120.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-10-1536x1152.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1800px) 100vw, 1800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Camps can be great for kids, but can also expose them to heat. Children and teenagers’ developing bodies aren’t as good at regulating their body temperatures as adult bodies. \u003ccite>(Serhii Bezrukyi/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2 class=\"edTag\">\u003cstrong>What is the camp doing to reduce risk of heat-related illness and death?\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>This question is important because heat-related illness and death are major and growing risks in the U.S. — and that threat is often underestimated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, children and teenagers’ developing bodies aren’t as good at regulating their body temperatures as adult bodies, says Rupa Basu, senior science advisor for the University of California, San Francisco \u003ca href=\"https://climatehealth.ucsf.edu/\">\u003cu>Center for Climate Health and Equity\u003c/u>\u003c/a>. That makes them more at risk for heat illness, she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think that people don’t even think of children often as being high risk populations,” Basu says. “ But they absolutely are.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For these reasons, Gaslin at the Alliance for Camp Health thinks parents and guardians should be asking camps how they are thinking about heat and hydration. She suggests parents and guardians ask about how the camp’s physical site is designed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Do you have things like shade structures? Misting systems?” Gaslin says. “A really solid infrastructure build is important.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaslin also thinks parents and guardians should be asking about how “climate-aware” the campers’ schedules are. That can look like an activity in a cool location, then an activity outside in a warmer location, then back into the cool, she says. Also it’s important to ask about how frequently counselors are reminding campers to hydrate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s really about giving conscious thought to how do we manage that impact of heat,” she says. “If we’re gonna be outdoors, guess what? Water activities are a great thing to do.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12048823\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12048823\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-11.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1800\" height=\"1201\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-11.jpg 1800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-11-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-11-1536x1025.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1800px) 100vw, 1800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Chad Berginnis, the executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, thinks parents and guardians need to know if their kids’ camp is in a floodplain, and what the camp is doing about it. \u003ccite>(Ronaldo Schemidt/AFP)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>What is the camp doing to reduce risks from flooding?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>This question is key because many camps are located in flood-prone areas, Berginnis says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says — in many ways — that’s understandable. “To me, it makes logical sense that you’d have a lot of camps there because it has really interesting habitats. It has interesting animals and geology and everything, and kids can learn a lot there,” Berginnis says.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>But he thinks parents and guardians need to know if their kids’ camp is in a floodplain, and what the camp is doing about it. Berginnis says adults can look up risks on this \u003ca href=\"https://msc.fema.gov/portal/home\">\u003cu>FEMA website\u003c/u>\u003c/a>. Parents and guardians can also plug in \u003ca href=\"https://firststreet.org/\">\u003cu>addresses to this database from First Street\u003c/u>\u003c/a>, a climate risk modeling company. If it’s a sleep-away camp, Berginnis says it’s important to ask where the kids’ sleeping quarters are located.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If it’s an overnight camp, any kind of residential lodging overnight for the kids, if it’s in a floodway, that should be a huge red flag right there,” he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And he says parents and guardians should ask camps about things like flood sirens and specifics of emergency action plans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I would be very blunt with a campground: I wanna know the procedure. If a flash flood warning is declared for the area, what does the camp do? What do the counselors do? So that they can talk it through with you,” he says in an email. “Do not be satisfied with a generic answer like ‘we have an emergency action plan’. Ask them about specific actions like is there anyone monitoring the weather at night? What are the designated evacuation areas? And if they cannot talk that through with you, again, I would say, that’s another red flag.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12048824\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12048824\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-12.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"1800\" height=\"1213\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-12.jpg 1800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-12-160x108.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/07/npr.brightspotcdn-copy-12-1536x1035.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1800px) 100vw, 1800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Tracey Gaslin at the Alliance for Camp Health says parents and guardians should make sure that all camp emergency action plans are regularly updated and reviewed by local emergency partners, including emergency medical staff. \u003ccite>(Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003ch2>What is the camp doing to reduce risks of wildfires and wildfire smoke?\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>As with flood risks, parents and guardians should be asking about emergency action plans and preparedness for wildfire and smoke, Gaslin says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Parents can ask camps, do they monitor air quality?” she says, “What’s their evacuation plan? How are they gonna communicate with families? So families are gonna be able to say, in a moment of crisis, I wanna be able to communicate with you in some way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaslin says it’s important to make sure that all camp emergency action plans are regularly updated and reviewed by local emergency partners, including emergency medical staff.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Gaslin says parents and guardians should make sure there are always staff monitoring the weather, and at sleepaway camps there should be a solid communication system so at night, individuals are alerted to environmental changes or concerns. That means at least some staff with cell phones and radios at all hours, to monitor for wildfire risk, flash floods, or any other hazards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Floods Exposed Weaknesses in California Prisons’ Emergency Plans. They Still Aren’t Ready",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was originally published by \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/\">CalMatters\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/subscribe-to-calmatters/\">Sign up\u003c/a> for their newsletters.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2023, amid record-breaking rain and snow, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/tag/prisons/\">two prisons\u003c/a> in the southern San Joaquin Valley faced a \u003ca href=\"https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-04-26/newsom-visits-flood-threatened-corcoran\">serious risk of flooding\u003c/a>. But neither prison, California State Prison, Corcoran or the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, had a robust evacuation plan on hand and ready for the looming disaster.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, the prisons developed a joint plan to transfer roughly 8,000 incarcerated people to other state prisons within 11 to 14 days — or longer. Wheelchair-bound individuals, the plan stated, would take six days to evacuate. And department buses intended to shuttle people to safety could take up to a day to arrive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The floods that year ultimately did not reach the prisons, but the threat they posed illustrated how California’s 90,000-prisoner corrections system has failed to prepare for natural disasters. That’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.oig.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Audit-of-the-California-Department-of-Corrections-and-Rehabilitations-Natural-Disaster-Emergency-Preparedness-and-Mitigation-Efforts.pdf\">according to a report issued last week\u003c/a> by an independent agency that oversees the department’s disciplinary process and internal investigations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“While California’s prisons are vulnerable to wildfires, floods, and earthquakes, we found they are not adequately prepared to respond to emergencies posed by natural disasters,” stated the report by the Office of Inspector General, which reviewed emergency plans for 30 state prisons after fielding concerns about the department’s disaster response.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report detailed deep fractures in the department’s emergency preparedness, including issues of transportation, varied risk assessment methodologies, lacking mutual aid agreements, timely evacuations, and prison overcrowding. As of December, California’s prison system was operating at roughly 120% — or 16,000 people — over its designed capacity, according to the report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Not only are some prisons overcrowded, but the department is unable to evacuate the incarcerated population and staff at most prisons within the first critical 72 hours of an emergency,” the report noted. “Without the ability to quickly evacuate prisons, it is likely that wildfires, floods, and earthquakes will result in loss of life within the incarcerated population.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID=news_12038872 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/gettyimages-2210243092-1020x680.jpeg']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Notably, the inspector general found that none of the prisons included a plan to evacuate incarcerated people outside their gates, but rather focused on moving “the incarcerated population to and from locations within the prison.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report concluded with a list of 18 recommendations, including ones that would bring the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation into compliance with California regulations around emergency planning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carlee Purdum, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Houston who researches how disasters impact incarcerated people, said the report is a “first step” in identifying more resources to support prisons and corrections agencies as they plan and prepare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Purdum said. “Prisons and corrections agencies are very marginalized and isolated in the emergency and disaster planning space. The significant takeaway should be that we have not engaged in these kinds of discussions, and put forth the kind of state level resources and accountability into these institutions.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advocates for years have been sounding the alarm over the ways in which California prisons are ill-equipped to confront climate hazards due to issues such as overcrowding and aging infrastructure. A \u003ca href=\"https://ellabakercenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Hidden-Hazards-Report-FINAL.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2023 report (PDF)\u003c/a> by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the nonprofit organization Ella Baker Center for Human Rights chronicled those concerns and urged the state to implement safeguards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People inside have a fear that the actual plan is to abandon them in the case of an emergency. It is deeply troubling,” said James King, director of programs for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “In these public health crises, it’s not just going to affect the people in the prisons, either incarcerated there or working there. It’s going to impact the entire county, the entire community.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://calmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/031623-Corcoran-Flood-LV_05-1024x682.jpg\" alt=\"\">\u003cfigcaption>Trucks driving through the flooded intersection on Highway 43 near Corcoran on March 15, 2023. The flood was caused by rising water levels on the Tule River after a series of storms. \u003cem>Larry Valenzuela/CalMatters/CatchLight Local\u003c/em>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Those concerns were echoed by Dax Proctor, statewide coordinator for Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a statewide coalition of organizations that view climate hazards as a key reason to close prisons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The number one solution to address these issues at hand is to reduce the number of people locked up in California prisons as rapidly as possible,” Proctor said. “A good starting place would be those most vulnerable to climate hazards.”[aside postID=science_1996303 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2025/03/19-1115_0531-1020x679.jpg']Officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services answered questions about the report before lawmakers at a hearing Thursday. They assured lawmakers that the department would not work alone in a large-scale emergency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“California has a vast amount of resources and we would rely heavily on our federal, state and local partners to assist us with the evacuation of an entire prison,” said Melissa Prill, special agent-in-charge at the corrections department’s Office of Correctional Safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Sen. Laura Richardson, a Democrat from Inglewood, said that in an unpredictable situation, those partners “may be busy assisting other people.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“To assume that these other agencies are going to be available to help you, or to help us in a prison environment is not something, going forward, we have the freedom to assume,” Richardson said. “I would give this (office of inspector general)’s report of your organization — I would consider it an ‘F’ — frankly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sen. Kelly Seyarto, a Republican from Murrieta, said he wasn’t “extremely critically concerned.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think we’re getting a little overboard in terms of thinking that we are going to have to evacuate entire prisons,” Seyarto said. “It’s just not a practical thing to think that somehow the whole prison is going to catch on fire.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a statement to CalMatters, department spokesperson Mary Xjimenez said prisons take an “all-hazards” approach to emergency planning and that it coordinates its plans with the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. The department “follows the FEMA National Incident Management System, which is the national doctrine that provides all federal, state, and local response agencies with a consistent set of principles, management structures, and a systematic approach to emergency response.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>King said the department has a history of being unprepared for climate hazards and instead reacts to them once they inevitably occur.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These are simply facts,” King said. The department “could accept these facts and do something about them — or they could try to manage their response to the report. Disappointedly, it seems like they’ve chosen the latter. This is an opportunity to improve their response, to see the gaps and to create plans that address the gaps. ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This article was \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/05/prisons-natural-disasters/\">originally published on CalMatters\u003c/a> and was republished under the \u003ca href=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives\u003c/a> license.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was originally published by \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/\">CalMatters\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/subscribe-to-calmatters/\">Sign up\u003c/a> for their newsletters.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2023, amid record-breaking rain and snow, \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/tag/prisons/\">two prisons\u003c/a> in the southern San Joaquin Valley faced a \u003ca href=\"https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2023-04-26/newsom-visits-flood-threatened-corcoran\">serious risk of flooding\u003c/a>. But neither prison, California State Prison, Corcoran or the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility, had a robust evacuation plan on hand and ready for the looming disaster.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, the prisons developed a joint plan to transfer roughly 8,000 incarcerated people to other state prisons within 11 to 14 days — or longer. Wheelchair-bound individuals, the plan stated, would take six days to evacuate. And department buses intended to shuttle people to safety could take up to a day to arrive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The floods that year ultimately did not reach the prisons, but the threat they posed illustrated how California’s 90,000-prisoner corrections system has failed to prepare for natural disasters. That’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.oig.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Audit-of-the-California-Department-of-Corrections-and-Rehabilitations-Natural-Disaster-Emergency-Preparedness-and-Mitigation-Efforts.pdf\">according to a report issued last week\u003c/a> by an independent agency that oversees the department’s disciplinary process and internal investigations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“While California’s prisons are vulnerable to wildfires, floods, and earthquakes, we found they are not adequately prepared to respond to emergencies posed by natural disasters,” stated the report by the Office of Inspector General, which reviewed emergency plans for 30 state prisons after fielding concerns about the department’s disaster response.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report detailed deep fractures in the department’s emergency preparedness, including issues of transportation, varied risk assessment methodologies, lacking mutual aid agreements, timely evacuations, and prison overcrowding. As of December, California’s prison system was operating at roughly 120% — or 16,000 people — over its designed capacity, according to the report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Not only are some prisons overcrowded, but the department is unable to evacuate the incarcerated population and staff at most prisons within the first critical 72 hours of an emergency,” the report noted. “Without the ability to quickly evacuate prisons, it is likely that wildfires, floods, and earthquakes will result in loss of life within the incarcerated population.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Notably, the inspector general found that none of the prisons included a plan to evacuate incarcerated people outside their gates, but rather focused on moving “the incarcerated population to and from locations within the prison.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report concluded with a list of 18 recommendations, including ones that would bring the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation into compliance with California regulations around emergency planning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carlee Purdum, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Houston who researches how disasters impact incarcerated people, said the report is a “first step” in identifying more resources to support prisons and corrections agencies as they plan and prepare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Purdum said. “Prisons and corrections agencies are very marginalized and isolated in the emergency and disaster planning space. The significant takeaway should be that we have not engaged in these kinds of discussions, and put forth the kind of state level resources and accountability into these institutions.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advocates for years have been sounding the alarm over the ways in which California prisons are ill-equipped to confront climate hazards due to issues such as overcrowding and aging infrastructure. A \u003ca href=\"https://ellabakercenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Hidden-Hazards-Report-FINAL.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">2023 report (PDF)\u003c/a> by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and the nonprofit organization Ella Baker Center for Human Rights chronicled those concerns and urged the state to implement safeguards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“People inside have a fear that the actual plan is to abandon them in the case of an emergency. It is deeply troubling,” said James King, director of programs for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “In these public health crises, it’s not just going to affect the people in the prisons, either incarcerated there or working there. It’s going to impact the entire county, the entire community.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure>\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://calmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/031623-Corcoran-Flood-LV_05-1024x682.jpg\" alt=\"\">\u003cfigcaption>Trucks driving through the flooded intersection on Highway 43 near Corcoran on March 15, 2023. The flood was caused by rising water levels on the Tule River after a series of storms. \u003cem>Larry Valenzuela/CalMatters/CatchLight Local\u003c/em>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Those concerns were echoed by Dax Proctor, statewide coordinator for Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a statewide coalition of organizations that view climate hazards as a key reason to close prisons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The number one solution to address these issues at hand is to reduce the number of people locked up in California prisons as rapidly as possible,” Proctor said. “A good starting place would be those most vulnerable to climate hazards.”\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Officials from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services answered questions about the report before lawmakers at a hearing Thursday. They assured lawmakers that the department would not work alone in a large-scale emergency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“California has a vast amount of resources and we would rely heavily on our federal, state and local partners to assist us with the evacuation of an entire prison,” said Melissa Prill, special agent-in-charge at the corrections department’s Office of Correctional Safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Sen. Laura Richardson, a Democrat from Inglewood, said that in an unpredictable situation, those partners “may be busy assisting other people.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“To assume that these other agencies are going to be available to help you, or to help us in a prison environment is not something, going forward, we have the freedom to assume,” Richardson said. “I would give this (office of inspector general)’s report of your organization — I would consider it an ‘F’ — frankly.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sen. Kelly Seyarto, a Republican from Murrieta, said he wasn’t “extremely critically concerned.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think we’re getting a little overboard in terms of thinking that we are going to have to evacuate entire prisons,” Seyarto said. “It’s just not a practical thing to think that somehow the whole prison is going to catch on fire.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a statement to CalMatters, department spokesperson Mary Xjimenez said prisons take an “all-hazards” approach to emergency planning and that it coordinates its plans with the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. The department “follows the FEMA National Incident Management System, which is the national doctrine that provides all federal, state, and local response agencies with a consistent set of principles, management structures, and a systematic approach to emergency response.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>King said the department has a history of being unprepared for climate hazards and instead reacts to them once they inevitably occur.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These are simply facts,” King said. The department “could accept these facts and do something about them — or they could try to manage their response to the report. Disappointedly, it seems like they’ve chosen the latter. This is an opportunity to improve their response, to see the gaps and to create plans that address the gaps. ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Cayla Mihalovich is a California Local News fellow. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This article was \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/justice/2025/05/prisons-natural-disasters/\">originally published on CalMatters\u003c/a> and was republished under the \u003ca href=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives\u003c/a> license.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"slug": "miles-of-delta-levees-are-at-risk-of-floods-repairs-could-cost-3-billion",
"title": "Miles of Delta Levees Are at Risk of Floods. Repairs Could Cost $3 billion",
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"headTitle": "Miles of Delta Levees Are at Risk of Floods. Repairs Could Cost $3 billion | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was originally published by \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/\">CalMatters\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/subscribe-to-calmatters/\">Sign up\u003c/a> for their newsletters.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As winter storms soaked California in \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/01/california-floods-sacramento-valley/\">early 2023\u003c/a>, the Sacramento River swelled toward flood stage. Levees protecting large expanses of farmland and many towns sprung leaks. At one site, response crews drove metal sheets into the earthen berm and lined the levee face with heavy rock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The work cost almost $700,000, paid by local farmers who had to take out a loan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was way beyond our means, but we had to do it,” said Daniel Wilson, a farmer near the Delta town of Walnut Grove and trustee of the management agency responsible for the levee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because the region was declared a disaster zone, funding help was available through the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_dr-4699-ca-public-notice-004.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Federal Emergency Management Agency (PDF)\u003c/a>. But two years later, the money still hasn’t arrived. Other districts in the region also are waiting for reimbursements.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is facing a funding crisis that has bogged down efforts to repair and maintain an aging network of about 1,100 miles of levees that protect the region from floods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These protective ridges of dirt and rocks, mostly on private land, are at growing risk of rupturing, which would endanger half a million people, mostly in Stockton but also in smaller towns and farmsteads. Also threatened are thousands of acres of farmland, highways and water supply pumps that send water to much of the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The summer of 2004 saw a major failure when the privately owned levee surrounding a large parcel of farmers’ fields called \u003ca href=\"https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/programs/bay_delta/california_waterfix/exhibits/docs/PPorgans/porgans_301.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jones Tract (PDF)\u003c/a>, which mostly sits below sea level, burst. Water surged through the break, flooding 12,000 acres, which remained swamped for months. Dozens of barns and a few homes were submerged. The response and repair effort — including rebuilding hundreds of feet of levee and pumping out the water — cost $90 million in government and private funding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More recently, last year, water seeped under a levee that rings Victoria Island west of Stockton, just a few miles north of pumping stations that send water to 30 million Californians and vast tracts of farmland. A breach would have created powerful suction, drawing in large volumes of brackish San Francisco Bay water and forcing the pumps to shut down for weeks. Crews drove sheet piles deep into the levee to stem the leak and stop the flow of water under the levee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without substantial improvements to Delta levees in the next 25 years, “more than $10 billion in agricultural, residential, commercial, and infrastructure assets and nearly $2 billion in annual economic activity would be exposed to flooding,” according to an estimate from the Delta Stewardship Council.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jeffrey Mount, a geomorphologist and water infrastructure expert with the Public Policy Institute of California, said the recent near-miss at Victoria Island could be a harbinger of more dangerous levee breaks to come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID=news_12025860 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/09/GettyImages-1252054830-1020x574.jpg']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That is considered one of the really good levees, and they nearly lost it,” Mount said. “So what about the other ones?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With state and federal assistance programs falling behind on reimbursements or losing funding, landowners are struggling to keep pace with maintenance. Many are in debt from recent projects, and the backlog of upgrades and repairs is growing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Billions of dollars are needed to upgrade the Delta’s levees to basic safety standards, but the estimated costs far exceed the funding metered out by state and federal agencies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Repairing Delta levees could cost at least $3.2 billion by 2050, according to the \u003ca href=\"https://deltacouncil.ca.gov/pdf/delta-plan/2024-11-18-delta-adapts-draft-adaptation-plan.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Delta Stewardship Council (PDF)\u003c/a>. State water officials estimate that about \u003ca href=\"https://water.ca.gov/-/media/DWR-Website/Web-Pages/Work-With-Us/Grants-And-Loans/Delta-Levees-Special-Flood-Control-Projects/Files/Compilation-of-2018-Delta-Levees-Five-Year-Plan-Data.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$1.06 billion (PDF)\u003c/a> is needed for Delta levee upgrades in just the next five years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Across the entire Central Valley, the problem balloons to $30 billion in overdue upgrades to protect against worst-case scenario flooding, which could cause $1 trillion in damage, according to the state’s 2022 \u003ca href=\"https://cvfpb.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Central_Valley_Flood_Protection_Plan_Update_2022_ADOPTED.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Central Valley Flood Protection Plan (PDF)\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All the districts in the Central Valley have a list of projects that they would like to get accomplished,” said Meegan Nagy, general manager of the Sacramento River West Side Levee District, which manages levees upstream of the state capital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few miles southeast of Sacramento, a privately owned levee system beside the Cosumnes River ruptured on New Year’s Eve in 2022 during a powerful downpour. The \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/01/california-floods-sacramento-valley/\">flooding\u003c/a> killed three people, swamped homes, shut down Highway 99 and washed away vehicles. The local levee management agency, funded by its landowners, was \u003ca href=\"https://www.therivervalleytimes.com/2025/02/05/522291/sloughhouse-levee-erosion-prompts-emergency-declaration\">reportedly still waiting\u003c/a> for federal emergency relief money two years later and, as of January, still owed the bank $7 million.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12035463\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12035463\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1402\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy-800x561.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy-1020x715.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy-160x112.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy-1536x1077.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy-1920x1346.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Crews repair a levee on the north side of the Cosumnes River on Jan. 2, 2023, after it was breached by heavy rains that flooded Sacramento County roads and properties near Wilton. \u003ccite>(Fred Greaves/Reuters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Stockton, on the eastern edge of the Delta, faces a constant risk of flooding. U.S. Rep. Josh Harder, a Democrat from Tracy, said the problem stems from inadequate federal funding for levee upkeep and red tape that hinders maintenance and repairs by local agencies. He has co-authored a bill, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5304/text\">Safeguarding Our Levees Act\u003c/a>, that would address some of these issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For too long we’ve been left behind in federal funding,” Harder said. “No family should have to watch floodwater pour into their living room while government stalls.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parts of the region are essentially on borrowed time, with levees facing a uniquely overbearing workload, said Steven Deverel, a hydrologist at HydroFocus, Inc., who has studied Delta levees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most levees, he explained, hold back water only during high flow events. But in the Delta, “levees are really more like dams in that they have to hold back water 24–7.” This unique arrangement makes much of the region particularly vulnerable to flooding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You basically have holes in the ground as much as 25 feet deep, and the only thing that holds back the water is levees,” Mount said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pumping the water out is increasingly expensive because of rising electricity rates, said engineer Gilbert Cosio with River Delta Consulting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The last few years have been a perfect storm for expenditures,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Landowners in debt for fixing levees\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Since the 1970s, California has invested \u003ca href=\"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36t9s0mp#:~:text=%3E%20%24700%20million%20since%20the%20mid%2D1970s\">more than $700 million\u003c/a> in Delta levee work. Just the last two budget cycles have dedicated $560 million to flood response and flood protection statewide, plus other investments, according to Laura Hollender, the California Department of Water Resources’ deputy director of flood management and dam safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Delta locals worry that critical programs protecting their region are being sidelined. The state cut a key levee maintenance fund from the budget this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sluggish state reimbursements on cost-shared projects through the \u003ca href=\"https://water.ca.gov/Work-With-Us/Grants-And-Loans/Delta-Levees-Maintenance-Subventions\">Delta Levees Maintenance Subventions Program\u003c/a> leaves local landowners — who must front the costs of repairs — accruing interest on loans they can’t pay back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s expensive and these districts go into debt to do these projects,” said Emily Pappalardo, an engineer with the local firm that designed and directed Wilson’s levee repair in 2023, DCC Engineering Co., in Walnut Grove. “Every dollar these districts spend should be on improving and maintaining their levees instead of chasing after the money to do it … or paying interest on loans.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilson said that the FEMA reimbursement would not cover the costs of borrowing money to pay for the repairs. “The whole time the interest clock is ticking,” he said. That means less money for further levee upkeep. “If we had an issue this winter or last winter, we’d have been in a world of hurt,” Wilson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12035467\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2500px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12035467\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2500\" height=\"833\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6.jpg 2500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6-800x267.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6-1020x340.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6-160x53.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6-1536x512.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6-2048x682.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6-1920x640.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2500px) 100vw, 2500px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: River Road, also known as State Route 160, runs along a levee on the Sacramento River. Right: A repaired section of the levee near Isleton on the Sacramento River. \u003ccite>(Miguel Gutierrez Jr./CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Until several years ago, according to sources, levee upgrades completed in the fall were followed by state reimbursements in the spring. “By the end of June, everyone had their money” in time to start working on spring and summer levee projects, said Cosio, at River Delta Consulting. “Now, it’s not until the fall or later that we get the money.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Farmer Harvey Correia, who has orchards near Isleton, said state claim filing requirements and slow processing mean that in some cases more than two years can pass before landowners are reimbursed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So we’re paying interest on loans while we’re waiting for money from the state,” Correia said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jason Ince, a spokesperson at the Department of Water Resources, said the agency strives to process payments “as quickly as possible” but said each request must be investigated and verified through site visits and coordination with other agencies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilson, near Walnut Grove, said many local levee managers are financially swamped. “They’re in debt beyond their ability to pay it back.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pappalardo, who grew up in the Delta, wants to see more consistent funding of the levees subventions program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, the program relies on periodic bond funding. The current cash pool amounts to about $14 million and derives from bonds that voters approved in 2014 and 2006, Ince said.[aside postID=science_1994168 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2024/09/240820-PajaroFolo-112-BL-2-1020x680.jpg']Late last year, voters approved \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2024/11/california-election-news-proposition-4-environment/\">Proposition 4\u003c/a>, a $10 billion water, wildlife and climate bond, directing \u003ca href=\"https://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2024/general/pdf/prop4-text-proposed-laws.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$150 million (PDF)\u003c/a> to Delta flood protection, levee upgrades and climate resiliency work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sources said they expect it will provide more money for the program, but they emphasized that it, too, will run out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These levees aren’t going anywhere,” Pappalardo said. “This is infrastructure and these costs are always going to be here … this is general maintenance.” Ideally, she said, money would come from the state’s general fund.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also frustrated at the trickling pace of subventions funding for Delta levees is Stockton attorney Dante Nomellini, Jr., who has represented the Central Delta Water Agency and several Delta reclamation districts. He said the program is “well-oiled” but that its funding could be more reliable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The funding dries up every few years and we have to fight to get more,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chris Neudeck, a levee engineer whose firm — Kjeldsen, Sinnock & Neudeck, Inc — repaired the Victoria Island breach this winter, believes the flagging funding for levees has a simple explanation:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s called the flood memory half-life,” he said. “How long does a politician hold memory of a disaster? Many say it’s six months, others say nine months … If we don’t have a flood event every year, we’re screwed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>An uncertain future for the Delta\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Levee upgrades come in different forms. Some are relatively quick and easy, involving basic materials — like riprap, the rocks and boulders that line many levees — to provide armoring against erosion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Others are more sophisticated. One nearly finished project near the Delta town of Isleton, along Highway 160, builds in fish and bird habitat in the form of vegetated “benches” near the water line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The benches serve a double purpose,” said Pappalardo, whose firm designed the project. “While they provide habitat, they also reduce the velocity of the river.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because Pappalardo’s project provides multiple benefits, the upgrade qualified for a 94% funding reimbursement from the state. But the total cost was about $18 million for 1.4 miles of levee, and the 6% that the reclamation district must cover on its own “is still a heavy lift for them,” Pappalardo said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12035471\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12035471\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Emily Pappalardo, principal engineer at DCC Engineering Co. Inc., is shown on the banks of the Sacramento River near Isleton. Pappalardo helped oversee the Sacramento River Erosion Repair and Habitat Enhancement Project to reduce bank erosion by planting native vegetation along the Sacramento River and levees. \u003ccite>(Miguel Gutierrez Jr./CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12035473\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2500px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12035473\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2500\" height=\"833\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7.jpg 2500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7-800x267.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7-1020x340.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7-160x53.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7-1536x512.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7-2048x682.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7-1920x640.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2500px) 100vw, 2500px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">First: Native vegetation is protected by beaver fencing on the bank of the Sacramento River near Isleton. Last: Tule was planted along the banks of the Sacramento River near Isleton. The native plants reduce erosion of the river’s levee system. \u003ccite>(Miguel Gutierrez Jr./CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Though costly and tangled in thickets of program and agency acronyms, most levee upgrade projects are not terribly complicated. They often involve dump trucks dropping material on top of or down a slope of a levee. Barges can help. The goal in most projects is to build the levee, vertically and horizontally, to dimensions defined by several distinct \u003ca href=\"https://water.ca.gov/-/media/DWR-Website/Web-Pages/Work-With-Us/Grants-And-Loans/Delta-Levees-Special-Flood-Control-Projects/Files/Compilation-of-2018-Delta-Levees-Five-Year-Plan-Data.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">standards (PDF)\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These federal and state standards call for a range of parameters in levee height, width and slope steepness. Among these standards is that of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers known as \u003ca href=\"https://www.usace.army.mil/Missions/Emergency-Operations/PL-84-99/#:~:text=Public%20Law%2084%2D99%2C%20Emergency,and%20after%20a%20flood%20event.\">Public Law 84-99\u003c/a>. Certain levees built to this standard are eligible for support from the Army Corps should they leak or break.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 2019, the \u003ca href=\"https://cvfpb.ca.gov/news/dwr-has-released-the-flood-maintenance-assistance-program-fmap-guidelines/\">Flood Maintenance Assistance Program\u003c/a>, enacted by the Department of Water Resources, has provided local levee maintenance agencies with $40 million to help their levees comply with the federal standard.[aside postID=news_12016813 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/12/170111_KingTide_bhs14-1020x680.jpg']This has leveraged massive amounts of federal funding when levees damaged by high waters need to be repaired, said Nagy at the Sacramento River West Side Levee District.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In my district alone, since 2017, we have had about $30 million worth of federal funding for post-flood repairs,” Nagy said. The program “is one of the most successful programs the department has executed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the state’s Flood Maintenance Assistance Program was put “on hold” this year due to budget constraints, according to the Department of Water Resources. Nagy worries this could accelerate levee deterioration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If we have multiple years when that program is not funded, then every year we get closer to losing eligibility for federal funding post-flood,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In an \u003ca href=\"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36t9s0mp\">assessment\u003c/a> of Delta levee vulnerability in 2016, Deverel and several coauthors wrote that although general compliance with various standards is “encouraging,” fully protecting any given island in the Delta “requires 100% compliance.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nomellini thinks full protection is achievable. “This is not rocket science,” he said. “This is dirt and rock. If there was the political will, we could have the best levees west of the Mississippi.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mount said the amount of money needed to maintain the Delta’s levees may be the most insurmountable obstacle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What do you do if you don’t have the money?” he said. “What is the long-term vision for the Delta?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the Delta Stewardship Council, Jeff Henderson, deputy executive officer of planning and performance, said parts of the western Delta more exposed to the influence of tides and rising sea level may face an uncertain future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In such locations, reinforcing levees may become technically or financially unsustainable over time, prompting conversations about alternative strategies,” Henderson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Erosion and weathering are just two factors gnawing at levee integrity. Burrowing beavers cause occasional collapses. So have invasive \u003ca href=\"https://wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Invasives/Species/Nutria/Infestation\">nutria\u003c/a>, semi-aquatic rodents native to South America and now a recognized nuisance to California’s wetlands and levees. Toppling trees, too, can tear out the flank of a levee, and earthquakes are considered a constant danger — though just how serious is debated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another matter that has progressively compromised the Delta’s levees is subsidence — the land is sinking, an outcome of when \u003ca href=\"https://www.wri.org/insights/what-peat-subsidence-and-how-can-countries-prevent-environmental-disaster#:~:text=As%20a%20result%2C%20the%20previously,carbon%20losses%20%2C%20which%20triggers%20subsidence.\">peat soil\u003c/a> is exposed to oxygen and breaks down, emitting carbon dioxide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than 2 billion cubic meters of Delta soil volume has disappeared since the 1850s, according to Deverel’s 2016 paper. Today, much cropland and scattered residences lie a precarious 15 to 20 feet and more \u003ca href=\"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36t9s0mp#:~:text=Land%20surface%20elevations\">below sea level\u003c/a>. All the while, the ocean is rising, though slowly, and winter flooding is growing more extreme.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have rising sea level, increasing winter storms and atmospheric rivers, and the longer it’s been since the last earthquake the closer we are to the next,” Mount said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He predicts that lower-value land will eventually go underwater as levees wear out and the will to maintain them wanes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Will the Delta look like this forever?” he asked. “The answer is no.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was updated on April 8 to clarify a grower’s comments on why reimbursements sometimes take two years.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This article was \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/environment/water/2025/04/delta-levees-risk-of-floods-repairs-cost-3-billion/\">originally published on CalMatters\u003c/a> and was republished under the \u003ca href=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives\u003c/a> license.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "The Delta faces a funding crisis to repair and maintain an aging network of 1,100 miles of levees. These earthen berms, mostly on private land, could rupture and endanger half a million people and flood thousands of acres of farmland.",
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"title": "Miles of Delta Levees Are at Risk of Floods. Repairs Could Cost $3 billion | KQED",
"description": "The Delta faces a funding crisis to repair and maintain an aging network of 1,100 miles of levees. These earthen berms, mostly on private land, could rupture and endanger half a million people and flood thousands of acres of farmland.",
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"nprByline": "\u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/author/alastair-bland/\">Alastair Bland\u003c/a>, CalMatters",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was originally published by \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/\">CalMatters\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/subscribe-to-calmatters/\">Sign up\u003c/a> for their newsletters.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As winter storms soaked California in \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/01/california-floods-sacramento-valley/\">early 2023\u003c/a>, the Sacramento River swelled toward flood stage. Levees protecting large expanses of farmland and many towns sprung leaks. At one site, response crews drove metal sheets into the earthen berm and lined the levee face with heavy rock.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The work cost almost $700,000, paid by local farmers who had to take out a loan.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was way beyond our means, but we had to do it,” said Daniel Wilson, a farmer near the Delta town of Walnut Grove and trustee of the management agency responsible for the levee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because the region was declared a disaster zone, funding help was available through the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/documents/fema_dr-4699-ca-public-notice-004.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Federal Emergency Management Agency (PDF)\u003c/a>. But two years later, the money still hasn’t arrived. Other districts in the region also are waiting for reimbursements.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is facing a funding crisis that has bogged down efforts to repair and maintain an aging network of about 1,100 miles of levees that protect the region from floods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These protective ridges of dirt and rocks, mostly on private land, are at growing risk of rupturing, which would endanger half a million people, mostly in Stockton but also in smaller towns and farmsteads. Also threatened are thousands of acres of farmland, highways and water supply pumps that send water to much of the state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The summer of 2004 saw a major failure when the privately owned levee surrounding a large parcel of farmers’ fields called \u003ca href=\"https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/water_issues/programs/bay_delta/california_waterfix/exhibits/docs/PPorgans/porgans_301.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Jones Tract (PDF)\u003c/a>, which mostly sits below sea level, burst. Water surged through the break, flooding 12,000 acres, which remained swamped for months. Dozens of barns and a few homes were submerged. The response and repair effort — including rebuilding hundreds of feet of levee and pumping out the water — cost $90 million in government and private funding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More recently, last year, water seeped under a levee that rings Victoria Island west of Stockton, just a few miles north of pumping stations that send water to 30 million Californians and vast tracts of farmland. A breach would have created powerful suction, drawing in large volumes of brackish San Francisco Bay water and forcing the pumps to shut down for weeks. Crews drove sheet piles deep into the levee to stem the leak and stop the flow of water under the levee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Without substantial improvements to Delta levees in the next 25 years, “more than $10 billion in agricultural, residential, commercial, and infrastructure assets and nearly $2 billion in annual economic activity would be exposed to flooding,” according to an estimate from the Delta Stewardship Council.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jeffrey Mount, a geomorphologist and water infrastructure expert with the Public Policy Institute of California, said the recent near-miss at Victoria Island could be a harbinger of more dangerous levee breaks to come.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That is considered one of the really good levees, and they nearly lost it,” Mount said. “So what about the other ones?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With state and federal assistance programs falling behind on reimbursements or losing funding, landowners are struggling to keep pace with maintenance. Many are in debt from recent projects, and the backlog of upgrades and repairs is growing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Billions of dollars are needed to upgrade the Delta’s levees to basic safety standards, but the estimated costs far exceed the funding metered out by state and federal agencies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Repairing Delta levees could cost at least $3.2 billion by 2050, according to the \u003ca href=\"https://deltacouncil.ca.gov/pdf/delta-plan/2024-11-18-delta-adapts-draft-adaptation-plan.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Delta Stewardship Council (PDF)\u003c/a>. State water officials estimate that about \u003ca href=\"https://water.ca.gov/-/media/DWR-Website/Web-Pages/Work-With-Us/Grants-And-Loans/Delta-Levees-Special-Flood-Control-Projects/Files/Compilation-of-2018-Delta-Levees-Five-Year-Plan-Data.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$1.06 billion (PDF)\u003c/a> is needed for Delta levee upgrades in just the next five years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Across the entire Central Valley, the problem balloons to $30 billion in overdue upgrades to protect against worst-case scenario flooding, which could cause $1 trillion in damage, according to the state’s 2022 \u003ca href=\"https://cvfpb.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Central_Valley_Flood_Protection_Plan_Update_2022_ADOPTED.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Central Valley Flood Protection Plan (PDF)\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“All the districts in the Central Valley have a list of projects that they would like to get accomplished,” said Meegan Nagy, general manager of the Sacramento River West Side Levee District, which manages levees upstream of the state capital.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A few miles southeast of Sacramento, a privately owned levee system beside the Cosumnes River ruptured on New Year’s Eve in 2022 during a powerful downpour. The \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/environment/2023/01/california-floods-sacramento-valley/\">flooding\u003c/a> killed three people, swamped homes, shut down Highway 99 and washed away vehicles. The local levee management agency, funded by its landowners, was \u003ca href=\"https://www.therivervalleytimes.com/2025/02/05/522291/sloughhouse-levee-erosion-prompts-emergency-declaration\">reportedly still waiting\u003c/a> for federal emergency relief money two years later and, as of January, still owed the bank $7 million.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12035463\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12035463\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1402\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy-800x561.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy-1020x715.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy-160x112.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy-1536x1077.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/010323-WILTON-FLOODING-REUTERS-FG-CM-copy-1920x1346.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Crews repair a levee on the north side of the Cosumnes River on Jan. 2, 2023, after it was breached by heavy rains that flooded Sacramento County roads and properties near Wilton. \u003ccite>(Fred Greaves/Reuters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Stockton, on the eastern edge of the Delta, faces a constant risk of flooding. U.S. Rep. Josh Harder, a Democrat from Tracy, said the problem stems from inadequate federal funding for levee upkeep and red tape that hinders maintenance and repairs by local agencies. He has co-authored a bill, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/5304/text\">Safeguarding Our Levees Act\u003c/a>, that would address some of these issues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“For too long we’ve been left behind in federal funding,” Harder said. “No family should have to watch floodwater pour into their living room while government stalls.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Parts of the region are essentially on borrowed time, with levees facing a uniquely overbearing workload, said Steven Deverel, a hydrologist at HydroFocus, Inc., who has studied Delta levees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most levees, he explained, hold back water only during high flow events. But in the Delta, “levees are really more like dams in that they have to hold back water 24–7.” This unique arrangement makes much of the region particularly vulnerable to flooding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You basically have holes in the ground as much as 25 feet deep, and the only thing that holds back the water is levees,” Mount said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pumping the water out is increasingly expensive because of rising electricity rates, said engineer Gilbert Cosio with River Delta Consulting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The last few years have been a perfect storm for expenditures,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Landowners in debt for fixing levees\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Since the 1970s, California has invested \u003ca href=\"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36t9s0mp#:~:text=%3E%20%24700%20million%20since%20the%20mid%2D1970s\">more than $700 million\u003c/a> in Delta levee work. Just the last two budget cycles have dedicated $560 million to flood response and flood protection statewide, plus other investments, according to Laura Hollender, the California Department of Water Resources’ deputy director of flood management and dam safety.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Delta locals worry that critical programs protecting their region are being sidelined. The state cut a key levee maintenance fund from the budget this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sluggish state reimbursements on cost-shared projects through the \u003ca href=\"https://water.ca.gov/Work-With-Us/Grants-And-Loans/Delta-Levees-Maintenance-Subventions\">Delta Levees Maintenance Subventions Program\u003c/a> leaves local landowners — who must front the costs of repairs — accruing interest on loans they can’t pay back.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s expensive and these districts go into debt to do these projects,” said Emily Pappalardo, an engineer with the local firm that designed and directed Wilson’s levee repair in 2023, DCC Engineering Co., in Walnut Grove. “Every dollar these districts spend should be on improving and maintaining their levees instead of chasing after the money to do it … or paying interest on loans.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilson said that the FEMA reimbursement would not cover the costs of borrowing money to pay for the repairs. “The whole time the interest clock is ticking,” he said. That means less money for further levee upkeep. “If we had an issue this winter or last winter, we’d have been in a world of hurt,” Wilson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12035467\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2500px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12035467\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2500\" height=\"833\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6.jpg 2500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6-800x267.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6-1020x340.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6-160x53.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6-1536x512.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6-2048x682.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-6-1920x640.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2500px) 100vw, 2500px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Left: River Road, also known as State Route 160, runs along a levee on the Sacramento River. Right: A repaired section of the levee near Isleton on the Sacramento River. \u003ccite>(Miguel Gutierrez Jr./CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Until several years ago, according to sources, levee upgrades completed in the fall were followed by state reimbursements in the spring. “By the end of June, everyone had their money” in time to start working on spring and summer levee projects, said Cosio, at River Delta Consulting. “Now, it’s not until the fall or later that we get the money.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Farmer Harvey Correia, who has orchards near Isleton, said state claim filing requirements and slow processing mean that in some cases more than two years can pass before landowners are reimbursed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So we’re paying interest on loans while we’re waiting for money from the state,” Correia said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Jason Ince, a spokesperson at the Department of Water Resources, said the agency strives to process payments “as quickly as possible” but said each request must be investigated and verified through site visits and coordination with other agencies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wilson, near Walnut Grove, said many local levee managers are financially swamped. “They’re in debt beyond their ability to pay it back.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pappalardo, who grew up in the Delta, wants to see more consistent funding of the levees subventions program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, the program relies on periodic bond funding. The current cash pool amounts to about $14 million and derives from bonds that voters approved in 2014 and 2006, Ince said.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Late last year, voters approved \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/politics/elections/2024/11/california-election-news-proposition-4-environment/\">Proposition 4\u003c/a>, a $10 billion water, wildlife and climate bond, directing \u003ca href=\"https://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2024/general/pdf/prop4-text-proposed-laws.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$150 million (PDF)\u003c/a> to Delta flood protection, levee upgrades and climate resiliency work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sources said they expect it will provide more money for the program, but they emphasized that it, too, will run out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These levees aren’t going anywhere,” Pappalardo said. “This is infrastructure and these costs are always going to be here … this is general maintenance.” Ideally, she said, money would come from the state’s general fund.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also frustrated at the trickling pace of subventions funding for Delta levees is Stockton attorney Dante Nomellini, Jr., who has represented the Central Delta Water Agency and several Delta reclamation districts. He said the program is “well-oiled” but that its funding could be more reliable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The funding dries up every few years and we have to fight to get more,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Chris Neudeck, a levee engineer whose firm — Kjeldsen, Sinnock & Neudeck, Inc — repaired the Victoria Island breach this winter, believes the flagging funding for levees has a simple explanation:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s called the flood memory half-life,” he said. “How long does a politician hold memory of a disaster? Many say it’s six months, others say nine months … If we don’t have a flood event every year, we’re screwed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>An uncertain future for the Delta\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Levee upgrades come in different forms. Some are relatively quick and easy, involving basic materials — like riprap, the rocks and boulders that line many levees — to provide armoring against erosion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Others are more sophisticated. One nearly finished project near the Delta town of Isleton, along Highway 160, builds in fish and bird habitat in the form of vegetated “benches” near the water line.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The benches serve a double purpose,” said Pappalardo, whose firm designed the project. “While they provide habitat, they also reduce the velocity of the river.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because Pappalardo’s project provides multiple benefits, the upgrade qualified for a 94% funding reimbursement from the state. But the total cost was about $18 million for 1.4 miles of levee, and the 6% that the reclamation district must cover on its own “is still a heavy lift for them,” Pappalardo said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12035471\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2000px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12035471\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2000\" height=\"1333\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy-800x533.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy-1020x680.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/040125_Isleton-Delta_MG_10-copy-1920x1280.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2000px) 100vw, 2000px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Emily Pappalardo, principal engineer at DCC Engineering Co. Inc., is shown on the banks of the Sacramento River near Isleton. Pappalardo helped oversee the Sacramento River Erosion Repair and Habitat Enhancement Project to reduce bank erosion by planting native vegetation along the Sacramento River and levees. \u003ccite>(Miguel Gutierrez Jr./CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_12035473\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 2500px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-12035473\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"2500\" height=\"833\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7.jpg 2500w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7-800x267.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7-1020x340.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7-160x53.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7-1536x512.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7-2048x682.jpg 2048w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2025/04/Copy-of-KQED-side-by-side-downpage-image-7-1920x640.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2500px) 100vw, 2500px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">First: Native vegetation is protected by beaver fencing on the bank of the Sacramento River near Isleton. Last: Tule was planted along the banks of the Sacramento River near Isleton. The native plants reduce erosion of the river’s levee system. \u003ccite>(Miguel Gutierrez Jr./CalMatters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Though costly and tangled in thickets of program and agency acronyms, most levee upgrade projects are not terribly complicated. They often involve dump trucks dropping material on top of or down a slope of a levee. Barges can help. The goal in most projects is to build the levee, vertically and horizontally, to dimensions defined by several distinct \u003ca href=\"https://water.ca.gov/-/media/DWR-Website/Web-Pages/Work-With-Us/Grants-And-Loans/Delta-Levees-Special-Flood-Control-Projects/Files/Compilation-of-2018-Delta-Levees-Five-Year-Plan-Data.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">standards (PDF)\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These federal and state standards call for a range of parameters in levee height, width and slope steepness. Among these standards is that of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers known as \u003ca href=\"https://www.usace.army.mil/Missions/Emergency-Operations/PL-84-99/#:~:text=Public%20Law%2084%2D99%2C%20Emergency,and%20after%20a%20flood%20event.\">Public Law 84-99\u003c/a>. Certain levees built to this standard are eligible for support from the Army Corps should they leak or break.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 2019, the \u003ca href=\"https://cvfpb.ca.gov/news/dwr-has-released-the-flood-maintenance-assistance-program-fmap-guidelines/\">Flood Maintenance Assistance Program\u003c/a>, enacted by the Department of Water Resources, has provided local levee maintenance agencies with $40 million to help their levees comply with the federal standard.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>This has leveraged massive amounts of federal funding when levees damaged by high waters need to be repaired, said Nagy at the Sacramento River West Side Levee District.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In my district alone, since 2017, we have had about $30 million worth of federal funding for post-flood repairs,” Nagy said. The program “is one of the most successful programs the department has executed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the state’s Flood Maintenance Assistance Program was put “on hold” this year due to budget constraints, according to the Department of Water Resources. Nagy worries this could accelerate levee deterioration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If we have multiple years when that program is not funded, then every year we get closer to losing eligibility for federal funding post-flood,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In an \u003ca href=\"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36t9s0mp\">assessment\u003c/a> of Delta levee vulnerability in 2016, Deverel and several coauthors wrote that although general compliance with various standards is “encouraging,” fully protecting any given island in the Delta “requires 100% compliance.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nomellini thinks full protection is achievable. “This is not rocket science,” he said. “This is dirt and rock. If there was the political will, we could have the best levees west of the Mississippi.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mount said the amount of money needed to maintain the Delta’s levees may be the most insurmountable obstacle.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What do you do if you don’t have the money?” he said. “What is the long-term vision for the Delta?”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the Delta Stewardship Council, Jeff Henderson, deputy executive officer of planning and performance, said parts of the western Delta more exposed to the influence of tides and rising sea level may face an uncertain future.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“In such locations, reinforcing levees may become technically or financially unsustainable over time, prompting conversations about alternative strategies,” Henderson said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Erosion and weathering are just two factors gnawing at levee integrity. Burrowing beavers cause occasional collapses. So have invasive \u003ca href=\"https://wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/Invasives/Species/Nutria/Infestation\">nutria\u003c/a>, semi-aquatic rodents native to South America and now a recognized nuisance to California’s wetlands and levees. Toppling trees, too, can tear out the flank of a levee, and earthquakes are considered a constant danger — though just how serious is debated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another matter that has progressively compromised the Delta’s levees is subsidence — the land is sinking, an outcome of when \u003ca href=\"https://www.wri.org/insights/what-peat-subsidence-and-how-can-countries-prevent-environmental-disaster#:~:text=As%20a%20result%2C%20the%20previously,carbon%20losses%20%2C%20which%20triggers%20subsidence.\">peat soil\u003c/a> is exposed to oxygen and breaks down, emitting carbon dioxide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More than 2 billion cubic meters of Delta soil volume has disappeared since the 1850s, according to Deverel’s 2016 paper. Today, much cropland and scattered residences lie a precarious 15 to 20 feet and more \u003ca href=\"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36t9s0mp#:~:text=Land%20surface%20elevations\">below sea level\u003c/a>. All the while, the ocean is rising, though slowly, and winter flooding is growing more extreme.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You have rising sea level, increasing winter storms and atmospheric rivers, and the longer it’s been since the last earthquake the closer we are to the next,” Mount said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He predicts that lower-value land will eventually go underwater as levees wear out and the will to maintain them wanes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Will the Delta look like this forever?” he asked. “The answer is no.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story was updated on April 8 to clarify a grower’s comments on why reimbursements sometimes take two years.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This article was \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/environment/water/2025/04/delta-levees-risk-of-floods-repairs-cost-3-billion/\">originally published on CalMatters\u003c/a> and was republished under the \u003ca href=\"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/\">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives\u003c/a> license.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Cold Bay Area Storm Could Dust Mount Diablo With Snow, Drop Hail in Some Parts",
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"headTitle": "Cold Bay Area Storm Could Dust Mount Diablo With Snow, Drop Hail in Some Parts | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>Bay Area mountain tops could see snow on Thursday morning after a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12030924/bay-area-storms-bring-days-wind-rain-unsettled-weather\">cold front arrived in the region\u003c/a> overnight. While the powder dusting won’t reach San Francisco or San José, the wider Bay Area could be hit with hail and thunderstorms before a break in the rain late in the day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bulk of the rainfall from the storm that rolled through Wednesday has passed, according to the National Weather Service, but lingering moisture-rich clouds and low temperatures could create the perfect conditions for short, heavy downpours and thunderstorms throughout the morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brayden Murdock, a meteorologist at the weather service’s Bay Area office, said hail is likely to accompany any thunder, but the chance is slim — just about 15% across the region. The South and East Bay have the highest chances for pea-sized pellets of ice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Temperatures across the region will be 8 to 15 degrees below seasonal averages throughout the day, with San Francisco and San José’s highs at 55 and 56 degrees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The chilly air blown in by Wednesday’s winds is more likely to drop snow on the North and South Bay’s mountains. Snow levels will descend to about 3,000 feet, according to the weather service, which includes Mount Diablo, Mount Hamilton, and some of the Santa Lucias’ highest peaks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID=news_12029553 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2017/08/cleaner-1180x787.jpg']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s probably going to be what we call wetter snow, so not exactly like individual flakes, but dusting will be possible,” Murdock said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The chances will be short-lived, though, as rain peters out this evening before the next in \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12030575/bay-area-braces-for-rain-snow-potential-flooding\">a series of storms\u003c/a> this week moves in. Murdock said that that system, arriving overnight, will bring warmer air with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This next system is not going to be as cold, so we’re probably not looking at another chance for snow again in this part of the forecast,” he told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The heaviest rain on Friday will hit in the morning, and showers are expected throughout the day. Saturday looks fairly dry before a third storm is expected Sunday morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That storm is shaping up to hit the North Bay hardest, but the rest of the Bay Area shouldn’t see rainfall totals greater than an inch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The forecast into next week is still uncertain, but the first day of spring could be a wet one since the weather service said it’s picking up another potential storm late in the week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Northern California should see a break in rain by Thursday evening, but in the meantime, there will be a chance of some thunderstorms and snow as low as 3,000 feet. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Bay Area mountain tops could see snow on Thursday morning after a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12030924/bay-area-storms-bring-days-wind-rain-unsettled-weather\">cold front arrived in the region\u003c/a> overnight. While the powder dusting won’t reach San Francisco or San José, the wider Bay Area could be hit with hail and thunderstorms before a break in the rain late in the day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bulk of the rainfall from the storm that rolled through Wednesday has passed, according to the National Weather Service, but lingering moisture-rich clouds and low temperatures could create the perfect conditions for short, heavy downpours and thunderstorms throughout the morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brayden Murdock, a meteorologist at the weather service’s Bay Area office, said hail is likely to accompany any thunder, but the chance is slim — just about 15% across the region. The South and East Bay have the highest chances for pea-sized pellets of ice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Temperatures across the region will be 8 to 15 degrees below seasonal averages throughout the day, with San Francisco and San José’s highs at 55 and 56 degrees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The chilly air blown in by Wednesday’s winds is more likely to drop snow on the North and South Bay’s mountains. Snow levels will descend to about 3,000 feet, according to the weather service, which includes Mount Diablo, Mount Hamilton, and some of the Santa Lucias’ highest peaks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s probably going to be what we call wetter snow, so not exactly like individual flakes, but dusting will be possible,” Murdock said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The chances will be short-lived, though, as rain peters out this evening before the next in \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12030575/bay-area-braces-for-rain-snow-potential-flooding\">a series of storms\u003c/a> this week moves in. Murdock said that that system, arriving overnight, will bring warmer air with it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This next system is not going to be as cold, so we’re probably not looking at another chance for snow again in this part of the forecast,” he told KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The heaviest rain on Friday will hit in the morning, and showers are expected throughout the day. Saturday looks fairly dry before a third storm is expected Sunday morning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That storm is shaping up to hit the North Bay hardest, but the rest of the Bay Area shouldn’t see rainfall totals greater than an inch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The forecast into next week is still uncertain, but the first day of spring could be a wet one since the weather service said it’s picking up another potential storm late in the week.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The Bay Area is in for a wet rest of the workweek as a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12030575/bay-area-braces-for-rain-snow-potential-flooding\">series of storms\u003c/a> promising waves of wind and rain roll into Northern California on Wednesday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After early morning rain along the coast, the main weather system will hit the North Bay by late morning and spread south, hitting San Francisco around midday. The South Bay mountains and Central Coast are expected to get hit the hardest, according to Roger Gass, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Bay Area office.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Consistent, heavy rainfall and strong southerly winds will make for “nasty” conditions in the early afternoon, the weather service said, before a cold front arriving in the evening changes the storm pattern across the region. It said to be prepared for downed trees and related disruptions to roadways and power lines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A wind advisory is in effect until 8 p.m. Wednesday, with gusts up to 45 mph in many places and up to 55 mph along the coast and on ridgelines, according to the weather service.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As steady rain turns into more unstable showers, volatility will continue into Thursday, with heightened chances for thunderstorms and possibly hail. Rainfall is expected to ebb in the evening, offering a brief reprieve before more storms arrive through the weekend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re forecasting unsettled weather conditions to persist and be generally at or below average for this time of year, but the strongest storm system is the one today,” Gass said. “We’re expecting the subsequent ones to be less impactful, and the next week will be kind of unsettled and cool.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID=news_12028190 hero='https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2024/11/241115-PropKFolo-18-BL-1020x680.jpg']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Through Thursday afternoon, forecasters are expecting half an inch to an inch of rain across San Francisco. The highest totals will be in coastal ranges like the Santa Cruz Mountains, which could see up to 2 ½ inches, Gass said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The storm will also bring \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12029075/california-snowpack-rebounds-amid-a-wobbly-winter-with-more-storms-on-the-way\">more snow\u003c/a> to the Sierra Nevada with colder conditions Wednesday night. It could dump 8 to 12 inches on the Lake Tahoe area overnight, according to Gass, and another few inches throughout the day Thursday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second of three storms this week will arrive Friday, bringing more steady rain similar to Wednesday, though likely less intense, according to the National Weather Service. A third similar storm is expected to hit the Bay Area on Monday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The rainfall totals aren’t expected to threaten river \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12026874/bay-area-heavy-rain-flooding-landslides-thousands-without-power\">flooding\u003c/a> like the Bay Area saw in February, according to Gass, but streams, creeks and ponding on roadways could come as repeated storms dump a few inches at a time over the coming days.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Past Monday, the forecast is fairly uncertain, but the weather service said conditions continue to look “unstable,” so don’t expect spring sunshine just yet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re not seeing much dry weather,” Gass said. “There will be breaks in between the systems, but we’re not expecting them to last long as more systems are on the way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The Bay Area is in for a wet rest of the workweek as a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12030575/bay-area-braces-for-rain-snow-potential-flooding\">series of storms\u003c/a> promising waves of wind and rain roll into Northern California on Wednesday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After early morning rain along the coast, the main weather system will hit the North Bay by late morning and spread south, hitting San Francisco around midday. The South Bay mountains and Central Coast are expected to get hit the hardest, according to Roger Gass, a meteorologist in the National Weather Service’s Bay Area office.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Consistent, heavy rainfall and strong southerly winds will make for “nasty” conditions in the early afternoon, the weather service said, before a cold front arriving in the evening changes the storm pattern across the region. It said to be prepared for downed trees and related disruptions to roadways and power lines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Through Thursday afternoon, forecasters are expecting half an inch to an inch of rain across San Francisco. The highest totals will be in coastal ranges like the Santa Cruz Mountains, which could see up to 2 ½ inches, Gass said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The storm will also bring \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12029075/california-snowpack-rebounds-amid-a-wobbly-winter-with-more-storms-on-the-way\">more snow\u003c/a> to the Sierra Nevada with colder conditions Wednesday night. It could dump 8 to 12 inches on the Lake Tahoe area overnight, according to Gass, and another few inches throughout the day Thursday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The second of three storms this week will arrive Friday, bringing more steady rain similar to Wednesday, though likely less intense, according to the National Weather Service. A third similar storm is expected to hit the Bay Area on Monday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The rainfall totals aren’t expected to threaten river \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/12026874/bay-area-heavy-rain-flooding-landslides-thousands-without-power\">flooding\u003c/a> like the Bay Area saw in February, according to Gass, but streams, creeks and ponding on roadways could come as repeated storms dump a few inches at a time over the coming days.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Past Monday, the forecast is fairly uncertain, but the weather service said conditions continue to look “unstable,” so don’t expect spring sunshine just yet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re not seeing much dry weather,” Gass said. “There will be breaks in between the systems, but we’re not expecting them to last long as more systems are on the way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
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"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
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"order": 9
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"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
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"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"order": 18
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"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
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"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
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"masters-of-scale": {
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"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
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},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
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"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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"morning-edition": {
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"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
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"onourwatch": {
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"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"order": 11
},
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"on-the-media": {
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"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
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},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
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"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
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},
"perspectives": {
"id": "perspectives",
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"order": 14
},
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"planet-money": {
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"title": "Planet Money",
"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
"airtime": "SUN 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/planetmoney.jpg",
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"link": "/radio/program/planet-money",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id290783428?mt=2",
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},
"politicalbreakdown": {
"id": "politicalbreakdown",
"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Political-Breakdown-2024-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"order": 5
},
"link": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5Nzk2MzI2MTEx",
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.possible.fm/",
"meta": {
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"source": "Possible"
},
"link": "/radio/program/possible",
"subscribe": {
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/730YpdUSNlMyPQwNnyjp4k"
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},
"pri-the-world": {
"id": "pri-the-world",
"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 2pm-3pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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