July 16, 1996

Today I called Joe Franzini. I had heard that he had been asked to look at the site of the failure by some lawyers who were invoved in the inevitable lawsuit. I figured he could tell me where the failure had been, something I had yet to ferret out for myself, having concluded that the area that Mr. N_______ showed me must have been the wrong place because it was on the north side of the river, and the principal flood had been on the south side. Joe had visited the levee failure a few days after the event, and he told me there had been a large hole in the field where the water had rushed through. We talk about levee failures in the past, and he tells me about one in the Sacramento delta area that occurred a few years ago when a farmer attempted to reinforce the levee by digging into the foundation during a big flood. I make sketches as Joe talks. Thinking also of Bethel Island. I needed a map of the area so I drove over to the USGS in Menlo Park and bought a 7.5 minute map of the Pajaro Valley. Then I stopped by the new USGS library. They had several air photos covering the area. Here is one showing the river in flood in 1982. Notice the "M" shape of the river, just like the map, which I've placed by the photo. I can tell from the way that the phtos are filed that someone else has been in to look at them.

footnotes [1] Joe Franzini is the author of the principle text on water resource engineering Water Resources Engineering. For many years he taught at Stanford University and has been in recent years a consultant on many cases of flood litigation. [2] I am thinking in particular of Bethel Island, an island in the delta area which is below river level and protected only by the spongiest old levees, built by wheelbarrow by Chinese labor in the late 19th century. A few years ago I had a consulting assignment there that lasted until I attempted to get the local folks to take a rational look at the potential hazard that would result from dredging the river next to the levee. Here the plan was to dig on the river side instead of the land side (or the protected side as levee engineers call it.) More on this later. Next page.