A federal judge ruled in November 2009 that massive flooding during Hurricane Katrina occurred because of failure on the part of the Army Corps of Engineers to maintain a navigation channel. The ruling was seen as another in a long line of failures on the part of the Corps to protect the people of New Orleans.

But to lay blame on one entity is ignoring the complexity of the problem, according to a group in California that studied the aftermath in New Orleans. The group sees some of the same complexities in its own backyard and fears that those factors could conspire to re-create the horror of Katrina, or worse, in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.

After analyzing Katrina’s aftermath, the University of California (UC), Berkeley’s Center for Catastrophic Risk Management turned its sights on the delta and embarked on a project that thoroughly examines its history, importance to California and vulnerabilities. After a year of GIS mapping and interviews with the multitude of players, the center confirmed what it thought: The delta is at risk. But it’s worse than that.

“Now we realize it may be the single most at-risk piece of property in the United States because the delta water alone that’s going through there basically fuels 22 million Californians,” said John Radke, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Department of City and Regional Planning. “If you had a catastrophic event there and you can’t get things built, you won’t just have people unable to go across a bridge, you’ll have people without drinking water — 22 million of them.

“I don’t think they like us going around saying that, especially homeland security,” he said, “because nobody really wants to know how at-risk we are.”

Photo: A major earthquake could wreak havoc on already weak levees, like this one on the Sutter Bypass in Northern California. Courtesy of the California Department of Water Resources.

The delta consists of a convergence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, forming the largest estuary on the West Coast. It’s a patchwork of nearly 60 islands and tracts surrounded by channels and sloughs, covering more than 700 square miles. And it’s a vital link in California’s water-delivery system.

Multiple studies have concluded that the delta is at risk and offer quantifiable remedies like patching a levee. But this latest project looks at the system and its interconnected infrastructures, how they relate to one another, and seeks answers for a holistic approach to protecting the delta and California from becoming the next Katrina. 

A major breach in a levee, that couldn’t be fixed quickly, would flood populated areas with cold water, possibly causing more death than Katrina, where the water was warmer. “There’s a huge difference,” Radke said. “Here, if you had a catastrophic flood, people would be in 47-degree water. They’d last less than 20 minutes, then they’d die of hypothermia.”

On top of that, a major breach could reverse water flows, causing fresh water to subside and allowing ocean water to push its way further into the estuary, possibly destroying the whole river system.

“The combination of a Sacramento Delta failure where you’d have an earthquake followed by a flood where you’re sort of left powerless, not in terms of electricity but you’re fighting everything at the same time and you can’t even get there,” said Gerry Galloway, noted civil engineer and former brigadier general, who was assigned by the White House to lead a committee assessing the Great Flood of 1993. “It’s impossible to anticipate how bad that would be.”

Galloway said in New Orleans in 2005 nobody could get to the sites of the levee breaches because they couldn’t get from one side of the city to the other, “because the roads had not been designed to permit this sort of cross-city transit.”

Laying Blame in New Orleans

The Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, fueled by a National Science Foundation grant, analyzed the New Orleans area shortly after the hurricane hit, before the evidence was gone. What it found changed the way researchers perceived the unfolding of the catastrophe.

“I was angry after Katrina. Why couldn’t they do this? Why couldn’t they do that?” the center’s Radke said. “I’m not angry anymore. Wow, I’m amazed they did anything given how complex it was.”

The center also saw alarming similarities in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, and embarked on a project to study the delta and all its complicated parts. The group’s researchers say it’s no wonder that Katrina happened as it did considering all the variables, the multitude of stakeholders and the lack of coordination among them.

“If you look at New Orleans, I don’t think anybody messed up,” Radke said. “Agencies get developed, people get good at what they do but they don’t coordinate very well, and they don’t really understand the impact of what they do on others. People made good decisions, but the decisions were based on bad information or their lack of knowledge to react in the field in a gallant or noble way.”

For instance, there are parts of the levees in New Orleans, overseen by independent levee boards, that didn’t adjoin properly and those were never fixed because the boards didn’t collaborate. The group found that other layers of the system were built and managed differently from each other. The navigation channel was managed differently from the levee system, houses and roads were built, and each layer of development had shortcomings in terms of flood management. The whole package added up to what was termed a “chokepoint” — an area with multiple weaknesses, managed by different entities that didn’t collaborate, which facilitated multiple system failure.

“In essence, the whole levee system is not a coherent design,” said the center’s Howard Foster, an analyst at UC Berkeley’s Geographic Information Science Center. “It’s a history of various efforts done by various groups of people at different times to different standards. The historical way in which these systems came about was completely underappreciated.”