The first Saturday of the year was Derek Bentley’s worst nightmare.
He was throwing a football in the backyard of his Sausalito home with his jersey-clad sons during a break in the morning’s light rain — mentally preparing to watch the San Francisco 49ers take on the Seattle Seahawks — when his phone buzzed.
It was a video from the landlord at his karate studio, and he watched in horror as water from San Francisco Bay poured through weak points in an asphalt levee and rushed into the studio.
“We were on that high for the big game, but then we were brought down,” Bentley said. “I immediately jumped in the car.”
But floodwaters had filled Highway 101, snarling traffic and blocking Bentley’s route. The karate master was gobsmacked. Over two decades as a teacher at Taylor’s House of Karate, a studio owned and operated by his family, he has witnessed countless storms more severe than that day.
Sometimes the road to his studio flooded, but it had been over a decade since water entered the building. This time, conditions aligned perfectly, catching residents and officials by surprise.
A king tide, already the highest of the year, rose higher than normal as it encountered soils saturated from earlier storms.
So when Saturday’s minor winter storm created a stronger-than-expected tidal surge, water overtopped levees, flooded city streets and surrounded hundreds of homes and businesses, like Bentley’s.
Climate scientists have long warned that when storms ride on top of high tides, bayside Marin County will flood and cause chaos, especially in low-lying areas like San Rafael. The city is situated along a narrow strip of land between the mountains and San Francisco Bay.
Flooding experts predict that the changing climate will turn today’s king tides into the everyday tides of the future. They want Marin County to learn from the recent disaster and to install better pumps, engineer new seawalls and even pilot out-of-the-box ideas like floating homes.
“I hope the flooding is a wake-up call because what’s at stake is people’s lives,” said Kristina Hill, a professor in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley.
A few hours later, Bentley surveyed the damage to his studio and said he felt “destroyed” by what he saw.
Brackish water had come up from the floor, pushing up the blue mats where students tumbled and refined their craft. The concrete floor was now exposed, where his landlord helped rip up the soaked carpet.
“I love the people I work with, but this is the first time that I’m now questioning, like, can we stay here?” Bentley said.
San Rafael’s Canal Neighborhood is one of Marin County’s and the Bay Area’s most flood-prone communities. San Rafael Creek originates in the hills and flows through the city, pouring into a tidal canal.
The city’s flatlands are shaped like a bowl, protected by makeshift levees — some constructed with plywood, cement or asphalt — and pumps that are already struggling.
This neighborhood, built primarily on wetlands and fill, regularly floods during king tides. Large parts of it are below sea level, and the community is sinking.
“The San Rafael canal district is the most at risk because once saltwater comes over that edge, it enters the bowl, and it can flood up to four feet,” Hill said.
California has experienced about 8 inches of sea level rise over the past century. The bay could rise by about a foot by midcentury and more than 6 feet by the end of the century — thanks mainly to human-caused climate change.
With a foot of sea level rise, tidal flooding will “become not just impacts that occur once or twice a year, but something that could be a more daily occurrence,” said Michelle Hummel, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, who is working on a federal project examining San Rafael’s flood risk.
Marin County, along with local cities and transportation agencies, has extensively studied the high tide flood risk. But despite a California mandate that every jurisdiction on the bay and coast develop plans to address sea level rise by 2034, none in Marin County has done so.
Kate Hagemann, a climate adaptation resilience planner with San Rafael, said the city is studying solutions and will eventually develop a formal plan.
The city published a sea level rise feasibility study in December that said land subsidence “will hasten the relative sea level rise felt locally” and that, in some areas, it is happening “several times faster than sea level rise.”
“This area will flood predictably in the next 25 years,” Hagemann said. “If you have more than 10,000 people living below the bay, there needs to be something really robust, strong, waterproof and professionally maintained to keep people safe.”
The city is hosting a public webinar on its study on Jan. 26 so “the community can choose collectively how to respond,” Hagemann said.
San Rafael is evaluating the feasibility of three potential fixes: installing a gate at the mouth of San Rafael Creek, building a sea wall along the canal, or redeveloping it. The city estimates that each solution could cost up to $2 billion.
“None of these options [are] a silver bullet, and they all have very real concerns that we need to address before moving forward,” Hagemann said.
Hill worries a gate would trap pollution in the creek and harm native plant and fish species. A sea wall would harden the canal, be complex to maintain and could be at risk of failure as seas rise, she said.
Redeveloping the canal would require the city, county or private developer to buy some or all of the 86 properties that border the canal, knock the buildings down, and have engineers build a taller barrier before rebuilding on top of it. Hill hopes it could be an earthen levee that future generations could transform for their own benefit.
Hill also proposed that San Rafael consider out-of-the-box ideas the Dutch have already “tested and proven,” such as floating homes. To float buildings, the city could dig large ponds and flood them. Developers could build multi-story complexes that float, like those in Amsterdam, or are being planned in Rotterdam.
“We should be ready to live in a bathtub,” Hill said. “Then I think we’re in business and will have a way to live for 100 years and preserve the city’s tax base.”
During winter months, king tides often disrupt life for people who live and work in San Rafael’s Canal Neighborhood. At least five people reported to Canal Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for residents, that floodwaters reached up to 10 inches deep in their apartments.
Omar Carrera, the group’s chief executive officer, said many people are nervous to report the damage because they’re undocumented. If landlords forced them to relocate, even temporarily, they’re unsure if they could find an affordable place to live in Marin.
“They’re coming to us to see if we can help them with furniture, clothing, and cars that have been damaged, but they don’t want us to get involved with their property managers,” Carrera said.
Carrera moved to San Rafael more than two decades ago, and said this conversation about flood planning is getting old.
“Inaction is not acceptable anymore,” Carrera said. “It’s time for us to have the complicated conversation we have been ignoring for a long time, and to put humans at the center of it.”
Dan Herz lives on a San Rafael street with water on two sides. The flood turned his home into an island and spilled into his garage.
“I was running from window to window, going: ‘Oh my god. Oh, my god. It’s still coming,’” Herz said.
The experience forced him to think about whether his blue-and-white two-story home next to a marina could be underwater in the coming decades.
“It was the first time I felt scared,” Herz said. “It’s not a good feeling to see water coming at your property and to know that you can’t do anything to stop it.”
But something good did come out of the flood. Herz and neighbors are banding together to ask the city for help.
“We’re all scared, and we don’t know how to make that fear go away,” Herz said. “What will make all of us feel better is to inform ourselves.”
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