The liquor cabinet came through unscathed.
I’ve been agitated—not really worried, but not at ease either, ever since I left the river house early Tuesday afternoon. That was just ahead of the evacuation orders, but I also needed to get through the storm to make a 3 pm work meeting in Martinez.
Just before I drove away, I walked into the backyard, to be enveloped by the sound of the rushing river. I could see the water boiling up the slope, already nearly to the house level and rising a foot an hour.
The next morning—Wednesday— I was up early to drive to Napa and deliver a half-day training workshop. Then back to Martinez to facilitate a big multi-agency meeting.
Then driving-like-hell-in-the-still-pouring-rain to pick up the kid at the Albany library. She’d arranged a playdate, so I let the two girls make a mess in the kitchen while I sat in the El Cerrito home office and refreshed the data on current river elevations, over and over.
The data wasn’t surprising—the surprise had come a day and a night previously, when, after a listening to hours and hours of nonstop downpour, I’d checked the flood forecast and saw the river was going to get to 46 feet in Guerneville, which is higher than most of the big floods of record.
But viewing the real-time data was distressing, because it meant that the water was eight feet deep under the river house right now, and still rising. I’d moved the power tools and some unused furniture out of there, and stowed some of it upstairs in the living room, and some of the rest on the porch outside. But the boats and paddleboards, the hand tools and some work tables, were all down in the flooded basement swirling around in the dark. And the water was creeping up toward the loft, where I’d put some boxes that I was too tired to move, and too short of time to move, up on the seats of some old chairs and was just hoping for the best.
And now there was nothing to do but wait for the water recede. I couldn’t even get near the house if I’d wanted to go there, because the roads were closed.
I realize that it’s kind of crazy—especially since I’ve consulted, during my career, on flood management and how to avoid flood damages—that I’ve become an owner of floodplain property. I’m a fan and exponent of Gilbert White (“floods are acts of God, flood losses are largely acts of men”).
The flip side is that a floodplain is a lovely place to have a house, which is why people build there. It’s especially lovely to have a house nestled under towering redwoods, which keep it cool on the hottest summer days, and to have a beach and swimming hole just down the path.
The way to have it all, I guess, is to build houses that are suitably elevated above floods—in the case of the river house, that means a first floor about 13 feet above grade, which is 2 feet above the 100-year base flood elevation (BFE).
(I’ve been fired as a consultant only twice in my career. Once was by a big-shot manager of a flood control agency. And it was for advocating, a bit too avidly, to make 2 feet above BFE a standard for single-family home construction within that agency’s jurisdiction. Tonight I’m feeling validated.)
The house was raised to that elevation, and rebuilt, with FEMA funding after the 1995 flood. Last night was the first time the now-elevated house has been hit with a comparable flood, and so the first time to test the FEMA standards in effect at the time.
I was distracted all Thursday morning. Around noon I got a kind-of-urgent request from a client. I could have just let it go and headed north to check on the house, but the data said there was no point in doing that—the flood was slowly receding, but the water was still well above the elevation of the roads in and out.
So I finished the what I needed to do for the client and waited until after dinner.
I left El Cerrito at 7:20. The drive up Highway 101 was strangely routine. I got used to seeing this during the fires—just outside a disaster area, everything seems almost hyper-normal, as everybody goes about their regular business.
That lasted as I drove the limit all the way down River Road toward the lower river, even past the Forestville turnoff at Mirabel Road, and on down the leafy, winding canyon where the Russian River cuts through to the Pacific Ocean.
And then there were flashing lights and barriers, and I was diverted on to Old River Road, and up and down steep hills for a mile or two. And then I was across the street from the house. I could see the lights were on, and I could pick up my wifi signal.
And I could see that the street itself was still flooded a few feet deep.
I waited. I watched an abandoned truck left parked on the street, now slowly emerging from from total inundation. When the water level fell below its bumper, I figured the water in the street was shallow enough to drive through the remaining current, and I could make it to my driveway.
That done, I pulled on some hip waders and started walking around. The backyard brush pile was distributed around the yard and some if it had floated through the open door and into the basement. The 250 gal. propane tank was gone, the anchoring hoops now advertising their own failure. Inside the basement, the boats and ladders still where they belong. The work tables and a lot of odds and ends redistributed amid a lot of mucky sediment. The in-line water heater had been about half-immersed; it might be OK, or not. In the loft, the legs of the chairs were wet, and the seats, and the boxes they held, still dry. I could see the high-water mark just a couple of feet below the rafters.
All in all, I got off easy. I’ll get a good night’s sleep and start the cleanup in the morning.
