Officials have known for decades that the Pajaro River levee that failed this weekend was vulnerable but never prioritized repairs in part because they believed it did not make financial sense to protect the low-income area, interviews and records show.
since it was completed, including a breaching event in 1995 in which two people drowned and economic damage was estimated to range between $50 million and $95 million. Flooding occurred again in 1997, and in 1998 President Clinton issued a disaster declaration. More recently, there was a near-flooding event in 2017 and again this past January.
And they’re currently designing a system that they were hoping to move into construction in the next two years, he said, funded by the Infrastructure Jobs Act and state money — secured by a 2021 bill that directed the Department of Water Resources to pay 100% of the state’s cost for reconstruction of the Pajaro/Watsonville levee system.
Farshid Vahedifard, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Mississippi State University, said communities living near levees are often underserved or economically disadvantaged. Pajaro is in unincorporated Monterey County, and despite being in a different county than and across the river from Watsonville, the two communities share a ZIP Code. Pajaro does not have its own post office.
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