Photos By Robert Twiss

 

Ongoing development is jeopardizing the well-being of the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, says a March 2007 report by the UC Berkeley–based Delta Initiative. The report presents the first-ever comprehensive map of development risk and urges the state to create a land trust to acquire parcels of land and flood easements to protect vulnerable areas. The hub of California’s water supply, the Delta is also the center of a large agricultural industry, a delicate wildlife habitat and home to 500,000 people. With much of its land below sea level, vulnerability to flooding or earthquake damage is extremely high. “The levees are the weak link,” says Robert Bea, Berkeley professor of civil and environmental engineering, who investigated New Orleans’s levees post-Katrina and is studying the Delta in hopes of preventing a similar disaster there. “If developers build 1,000 homes 15 feet below flood level, they have a 30 percent chance of losing all those homes in 30 years. We’re dealing with something dangerous, and the defenses we’ve got are tissue-paper thin.” For a copy of the report, Re-envisioning the Delta, go to http://landscape.ced.berkeley.edu/~delta.