The Rintaro restaurant staff was preparing osechi — a traditional meal to celebrate Japanese New Year. They’d been working on it all week, and on Dec. 31, 2022, they were just putting on the finishing touches.
That’s when they noticed water rising through the floor drains.
The staff climbed onto the tables. And as the water kept coming, they clambered through a window and waded out into the street, where needles and cars were floating around.
“It was flooded basically as far as you could see,” said Rintaro owner Sylvan Mishima Brackett, gesturing up and down 14th St. in San Francisco’s Mission district. “It was just one gigantic lake.”
This year, scientists are forecasting what could be another wetter-than-normal winter for California.
“Watersheds are already more saturated; reservoir levels are already running higher,” UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said. “So the background conditions are more favorable for a quicker development of flooding.”
The world is warmer than in recorded history, so the atmosphere can hold more water vapor.
“The storms that are out there are progressively more juiced-up than they used to be,” said Swain.
The Bay Area’s aging wastewater systems were not built for that volume of rain. Last winter, they spilled tens of millions of gallons of raw or partially treated sewage into waterways and streets. Sejal Choksi-Chugh, executive director of the environmental group Baykeeper, said cities need to upgrade their infrastructure.
“And one of the ones that’s been kicking and screaming the hardest not wanting to change is, surprisingly, San Francisco,” Choksi-Chugh said.
San Francisco is one of the few cities in California that runs stormwater and sewage through a single-pipe system. So when it floods, human waste rises from the sewer into the streets — or homes or businesses.
In 2021, the Regional Water Board ordered San Francisco to begin flood reduction work, which the city had been putting off since 1964.
“It’s making pipes bigger, it’s adding more pipes,” said Sarah Minick, utility planning manager at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. “It’s just increasing the capacity of our sewer system so that it can manage more rainwater.”
The city is now spending $634 million on projects in three low-lying neighborhoods. Work in the West Portal neighborhood near 15th Avenue and Wawona Street is expected to be completed this year. In the Mission near 17th and Folsom streets — the neighborhood where Rintaro is located — it’s scheduled to begin this fall and finish in 2027. The city is still planning its work along lower Alemany Boulevard, from Stoneybrook Avenue to Industrial Street.
The city is asking residents to purchase flood insurance and floodproof their properties. It has a grant program to help with costs.
Brackett says he applied for a grant, but the city told him he wasn’t eligible. He paid out of pocket to install a new waterproof fence and a backflow preventer so the city sewer pipes wouldn’t back up through the restaurant floor again.
He’s heard of the planned upgrades in his neighborhood but hasn’t seen any construction yet.
“I’d like to see them taking it seriously,” said Brackett. “Like for real. Because I think it’s going to happen again.”
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