PAJARO — Dump trucks stuffed with potato-sized rocks and half-ton boulders lined up along a strawberry field here Monday, all racing against time — and another oncoming storm — to help fill a destructive break in the Pajaro River.
Truck drivers made 120-mile round trips to quarries in Cupertino and Greenfield that normally shut down at 3:30 p.m. but promised to stay open into the night.
“My dispatcher told me, ‘You better pack a lunch,’ ” said Todd Mosley, waiting for his turn to empty his truck and help plug another section of what the day before was a 360-foot wide breach.
By midday Monday, boulders had filled in about 100 feet. The rest was an open spigot of muddy water, still flowing freely into the streets of the nearby Pajaro. It was too late to save the town from rising waters that have plagued it before. The quest now is to keep the river from doing even more damage.
“We are working 24/7 until this problem is resolved,” said Shaunna Murray, a senior water resources engineer at the Monterey County Water Resources Agency.
John Foxworthy, a dam-safety engineer with the agency, was on the levee when it burst late Friday night and was back Monday. He knows what is at stake. But the worst has already happened — more than a thousand residents in this farmworker town were forced to flee their homes in the middle of the night Saturday when the water rushed in.
“We’re doing all we can to get those people back in their homes,” said Foxworthy as he trudged across the levee and watched the boulders pile up, inching closer to connect with the opposite side.
Holding back a river is never easy.
In the midst of berry fields in the fertile Pajaro Valley, the earthen levee and the dirt road leading to it are soft and narrow. So the Super-10 dump trucks that can carry up to 16 tons of rock and the End Dumps that can hold up to 19 tons dropped their cargo at a staging area next to an old barn. A smaller truck that could cut through the mud loaded up and rumbled past the yellow farmhouse and the apple orchard and headed to the gaping hole.
“It’s a very hard site to access — and try to stabilize the breach,” Murray said. “We hope we have this whole thing buttoned up, but it’s really hard — there’s a whole lot of moving pieces.”
A contingency plan was already in place in case they couldn’t beat Tuesday’s oncoming storm. Helicopters working for the state Department of Water Resources were preparing to dump more rock from the sky.
The Pajaro River, which forms the border of Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, has flooded at least six times in the last 70 years — in December 1955, April 1958, February 1986, March 1995, January 1998 and February 1998.
In an error that has haunted the region for 75 years, the engineers who first designed the levee system lacked enough historic stream data and miscalculated the amount of water that could flow from Santa Clara and San Benito counties during big storms. They built the levees too small. They thought they were protecting against a 50-year flood. Instead, later studies found they were only offering about 15-year flood protection.
After decades of political wrangling, the state recently agreed to help fund a $400 million project with the federal government for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to strengthen the 12-mile levee system. Construction was expected to begin in 2025. But the rescue came too late.
“I remember saying, I hope to God it doesn’t rain before this gets done,” said State Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz. “We didn’t make it. We have worked so hard to try to prevent this day. It’s so disheartening.”
The flood fighters trying to prevent the breach Friday night felt the same way.
As rain poured down before midnight, crews scrambled from one “boil fight” to the next, Foxworthy said. The levee was springing leaks — boiling up through the mud — and crews built rings of sandbags around them. Sediment-laden water also poured through rodent holes. Plugging them up directly would only cause more back-up pressure.
Then, at about 11:40 p.m., a sinkhole started to form.
“The water was moving fast enough to where it was just milk chocolatey and moving the dirt from within the side of the levee,” Foxworthy said, “and that created a sinkhole that everyone was working around.”
But as the sinkhole widened, officials deemed it too dangerous to continue working, Foxworthy said. The levee could break and the crews could be stranded or swept into the river. The decision to abandon the levee, he said, wasn’t an easy one.
“I live here,” he said. “It’s not easy knowing all the people that would be affected.”
Within 20 minutes, he said, after they had counted every crew member as safe, he heard the sounds of the breach. The temporary “muscle wall” — linked plastic, water-filled containers atop a low portion of the levee that had saved Pajaro during January rains — buckled.
“The flood wall cracked and separated,” he said. “You can hear the joints in the plastic give way, and then you can hear the rush of the water.”
Four miles downstream, some 800 homes flooded in the early morning hours. Dozens of people were rescued in boats and high-water trucks. Many slept in their cars that night. But no one was killed.
A bit of good news came Monday afternoon. A second breach opened up near the mouth of the river, about nine miles from the first breach and close to the ocean. It had the effect of lowering water levels upriver where the crews were working.
“We are starting to see the water starting to recede,” Murray said Monday afternoon.
And on the edge of the apple orchard where storm clouds gathered and crews continued to dump boulders into the river, Foxworthy was hopeful.
“We’re just doing the best that we can,” he said, “and we’re trying to get to the other side before the next storm.”
Staff Writer Paul Rogers contributed to this report.
Source: www.mercurynews.com