SACRAMENTO, Calif — Mud, money, water, and time. Those are all the things Reclamation District 800 in south Sacramento is currently fighting.
Crews have been working around the clock to repair levee breaches and they say this is the worst levee break they have seen in decades.
ABC10's Alex Bell spoke with Leland Schneider, Reclamation District 800 about the recent rain and the stress on levees.
Below is a transcript of their conversation.
Alex Bell: My first question is -- is this catastrophic? It looks catastrophic.
Leland Schneider: This is catastrophic. This is the second-highest level in the Cosumnes River on record since 1907.
Alex Bell: How high are we talking?
Leland Schneider: We were 16.8' in Michigan Bar, which is our measuring gauge, and we were 67,000 CFS. The only one higher than that was 1997 and it was almost 19' and it was 97,000 CFS.
Alex Bell: Even the road that we're standing on right now, in the rocks behind us, this was not here earlier, was it?
Leland Schneider: This is not here. We started this project on Tuesday morning.
Alex Bell: How long did it take for you guys to get just this up and going again?
Leland Schneider: Less than 48 hours.
Alex Bell: I understand that you guys only have about $500,000 a year to maintain this one, what's the damage looking like right now?
Leland Schneider: So we don't even have hard numbers right now, but just from Friday, until today, to get this fixed and those projects done, we're looking at close to about $2 million. The force of the water and the erosion, it took all this material out and we estimate down there where the water is probably five to six feet deep and it brought it all the way straight through here, and then out into this farmer's field. And these fields, before this happens, they're all leveled to drain one way, to irrigate one way, and this farmer had a little bit of wheat planted here... And it's gone.
Alex Bell: Is it hard for you to see your own community like this?
Leland Schneider: Oh, it's very hard because the community, when something goes wrong and they got to blame somebody and guess who's getting blamed... RD 800. We work our butts off, I mean we do everything we possibly can with the budget that we have, we're limited. So, we start picking projects and we start plucking them off and we were in debt. We've been in debt since 2007 and we're trying to get out but it just seems like we could never get ahead of it.
Alex Bell: How soon do you anticipate this damage to be cleared up?
Leland Schneider: We need two weeks of dry weather. All the materials that we need to come in here and fill this in need to be dry. So, every stockpile that we can find we've scoured within a radius of here because we don't want to get too far away for trucking. We can't find any dry material. So, we need some drying times so that we can get in and get this thing put back and fixed right and it doesn't look like we're gonna get it done with the way this is weather stacking up. I understand we got 13 days of possible rain, they're talking about this river getting back up to 10 feet [at] Michigan Bar by Tuesday. The hardest part about all this is we're gonna stand back and watch. We can't get in here to work on it. We can't, you know, we barely got this done. This is only 360 loads of material to fill this levy back in. We could possibly be 4,000 truckloads of material.
