Sacramento: America’s most flood-threatened city not named New Orleans

From the Los Angeles Times:

California’s capital city may be best known for politics, but it has another claim to fame: It’s America’s most flood-threatened city not named New Orleans.

A recent state report predicts that the right combination of unlucky weather conditions could put some parts of the city under more than 20 feet of water, causing a $25-billion disaster that would cripple state government and ripple through the California economy.

Authorities are racing against time to strengthen the earthen levees that ring nearly the entire city to hold back the swollen American and Sacramento rivers. “Every winter we hold our breaths and hope this isn’t the year something happens before we can finish the work,” said Sacramento County Supervisor Roger Dickinson. “There is a sense of the clock ticking.”

When heavy rain begins to fall, folks here peer nervously at the sky and riverbanks. And Stein Buer — the person perhaps most responsible for their fates — frets and prepares. “I never sleep during storms,” said Buer, executive director of the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency, which is working with the state and federal governments in a multibillion-dollar effort to avert catastrophe. “It’s the nature of my responsibility.”

Worst-case scenarios project 500 dead, 102 square miles flooded, 300,000 people uprooted, an international airport and state agencies under water, and years of recovery.

Read the full text of this story from the Los Angeles Times by clicking here.

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