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.
