20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY march 23-29, 2023 www.montereycountyweekly.com Congress authorized a restoration of the Pajaro River levee in 1966. More than half a century later, the work remains undone. By David Schmalz Pressure Valve In the summer of 1926, heavy rains across the Midwest swelled the Mississippi River to record levels, precipitating a catastrophe that would unfold in slow motion: The following spring, some levees along the river—they stretched 1,100 miles, from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico—started to fail, which ultimately culminated in the largest river flooding disaster in American history. It became known as the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, and 27,000 square miles in seven states were inundated with the floodwaters. In Mississippi, Black men—sharecroppers and tenant farmers who were ostensibly free men—were forced, under the watch of rifle-toting men from the National Guard, to raise the height of the levees with sandbags until the moment the levee breached north of Greenville. Up to 1,000 people died and hundreds of thousands were displaced, and the flood helped fuel the Great Migration, when many Blacks in the South resettled in states further north. In many ways, that flood reflected realities that have played out in communities all across America in the decades since, including the one that hit the Pajaro community starting on March 11, when the Pajaro River levee breached just after midnight, 2.9 miles east of the town of about 2,900 residents. The same is true for the floods that hit Pajaro in previous decades, including in 1995 and 1998. One common thread is that the flooding in Pajaro has disproportionately impacted low-income residents. Many homes have been damaged, and according to initial inspections by Cal Fire officials, three residences were destroyed. Another is that the levees were designed by U.S. Army engineers, and in the case of both rivers, there were those who long predicted the systems would fail. That’s in part because the levees constrained the rivers into too narrow of a channel, which gave the raging waters more power than the levees could contain. The Pajaro River levee system was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1949, and first failed just six years later, in 1955. It breached again in 1958, 1995 and in 1998. In the latter case, it was on the northern bank of the river west of Highway 1, and largely impacted agricultural land. A project to improve the levee system was authorized by Congress in 1966, but for more than 50 years, it languished. Initially, according to an Army Corps report, it was deferred due to lack of local support. But as time went on, the primary reason was that the rubric the Army Corps long used to determine whether to fund a project was based on a math calculation, a benefit-cost ratio (BCR) predicated on the property values that a project would protect. How benefits are calculated is an inherently subjective metric, but the math is simple: Benefits divided by cost equals x. (A project with $2 in benefits and that costs $1 would have a BCR score of 2.0.) In the case of Pajaro, where property values are lower than more affluent communities, it never penciled out according to the Army Corps’ benefit-cost ratio. Per the 2020 census, around 81 percent of the homes in Pajaro are worth less than $500,000, and over 20 percent are valued below $300,000. More than 73 percent of its residents are renters. (Countywide, The flooded Pajaro River seen from an airplane on March 13, two days after the breach. Jotham Fisher-Smith
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