It may still be August, but winter is again looming large in Pajaro, where construction crews are at work shoring up the battered levee. Soon it will be the second winter since the Pajaro River levee failed in March 2023 and left 3,000 people homeless in the north Monterey County community.
The 400-foot gash in the levee here was fixed long ago, but now, Mark Strudley, executive director of the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency, said workers are adding some height to the structure.
“Over time, levees settle, they compact, they erode, and they lose material, basically,” he said. “And you have to periodically come in and replace that material and build them back up a little bit to spec. So that's what we're doing here.”
Speaking at the levee on Tuesday, Strudley said they’ll increase the levee’s height as much as two feet in some places. That should help—but only so much. He says the work will bring the levee back roughly to its height when it was built 75 years ago.
It has failed five times since.
“It is still the same old levee system. It's still vulnerable. It still needs to be rebuilt,” Strudley said.
And that is finally getting closer. Construction is set to begin this fall on a new, $600 million levee system. It took action both in Congress and from the state legislature to get those plans, and dollars, in place.
But that new system is still at least five years away.
“Projects of this size are so huge. There are so many moving parts, and some of those moving parts are out of our control,” Strudley said. “For example, we have to move some utilities, like with PG&E and other large utility operators. We have to fall in line with their schedule to do that.”
The new levee is being designed to provide 100-year flood protection, which should be a big improvement from the roughly 8-year protection that will be back in place in Pajaro this winter.
Ezra David Romero, from KQED News, contributed to this report.
