Folsom Dam has long quietly served as a backstop for Sacramento, offering critical flood protection to one of the most at-risk metropolitan areas in the country. But a few scary winter storms in the 1980s and 1990s proved that the dam and the region’s extensive system of river levees weren’t as fail-safe as thought.
That’s prompted several billion dollars of flood control work since then.
Three years ago, water began seeping out of yards and pooling in roadways in the Sacramento Pocket neighborhood.
But the water wasn’t from a recent storm.
“It hadn’t rained for a couple of weeks,” said Rick Johnson, executive director of the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency.
At the ripe old age of 64, Folsom Dam is about to hit a growth spurt.
Federal crews have begun a five-year effort to raise the height of the dam by 3.5 feet to increase flood protection for 440,000 downstream residents in metropolitan Sacramento, including areas of Arden-Arcade, Rosemont and many areas in the city of Sacramento as far south as the Pocket area and north to upper Natomas.
It’s a new year, and a time to take stock in California’s most precious commodity: water.
While October marks the start of the new water year, state hydrology leaders opened the new year with the first measure of snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, east of Sacramento.
It is the tallest earthen dam in the country, standing at 770 feet. The central feature standing over the town of Oroville, the dam brings water and electricity to parts of the state using water from the Feather River.
Today, construction crews are still busy doing some final grading on work that has spanned more than two years. It all began in February 2017 when the main and emergency spillways were damaged. More than 180,000 people were forced to evacuate downstream from the dam.
It was a Sunday tradition at Bethany Slavic Missionary Church. After morning services, Florin Ciuriuc joined the line of worshipers waiting to fill their jugs with gallons of free drinking water from a well on the property, a practice church leaders had encouraged.
“I take it for my office every week,” said Ciuriuc, a 50-year-old Romanian immigrant and a founding member of the largely Russian-speaking church, which claims 7,000 congregants.
The Water News Network is San Diego County’s source for water news and information.
