Be Careful What River You Ask for

SACRAMENTO — It’s a wild river you want? Where do you want it? Through your kitchen? In your upstairs bedroom?

Save the river, you say? What type would you like? One of those picture-book streams with wide boulders to stand on and pluck the leaping trout from deep, emerald pools (please, no barbed hooks) while, nearby, white rapids skip past the pine forest carrying rafts crammed with people and six-packs?

Sorry. That river’s saved for June and July.

This is January. We’ve saved a different river for you now. The boulders are rolling like runaway freights down chocolate waters hauling trees, garbage and pets, smashing bridges, crumbling homes and destroying dreams.

Yeah, better keep your head in the sand. The scene’s ugly. This river’s not for purists.

This river’s for the poor sucker who doesn’t fancy himself a kayaker or get inspired rereading “Deliverance.” He’s more likely to have an old fishing boat in the yard and a camper shell on a rusting pickup, all submerged under eight feet of gunk along with his clapboard house and tool shed.

Try to explain to this guy and his wife and kids--and tens of thousands more like them--just why it is we no longer need to build dams.

Too expensive? Lousy cost-benefit ratio? Destroys the land? It’s the old way? Pat Brown’s way?

“This is a different era; times change,” Pat Brown’s grandson, environmentalist Charlie Casey, told Times columnist Peter H. King last June.

Times have changed? Does that mean it’s not going to rain anymore? There’ll be no more floods? The rivers can run wild and we’ll never need to worry?

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There are a few untamed, undammed rivers left in California. One is the little-known Cosumnes, which begins east of Sacramento and flows through the Gold Country down into the flatland, creating a lovely, marshy wildlife sanctuary before spilling into the Mokelumne River just south of the capital. Last Thursday, the Cosumnes was the first Sierra river to go, exploding over its banks and also bursting its levees.

More than 15,000 people fled, leaving behind their flooded farmhouses, barns and livestock.

“This is the third 100-year flood I’ve seen,” said Priscilla Kammerer, a soggy evacuee with dry humor.

On other rivers, those monstrous dams the revisionists now snicker about--Shasta on the Sacramento, Oroville on the Feather, Folsom on the American, New Melones on the Stanislaus, and others--have saved billions of dollars in property and thousands of lives since New Year’s.

See, purists will say, the system worked!

For most people, yes. For those standing on their car tops and house roofs praying for helicopter rescues, the system stank. Don’t talk up the system to the 100,000-plus who fled levee breaks along the Feather and Bear rivers north of Sacramento, losing all their belongings. For the five who lost their lives, the system no longer matters.

But most did dodge another bullet. As they did in the 1986 floods, when 12,335 homes were destroyed and 15 people died.

At the height of the present flood, roughly 500,000 CFS, cubic feet per second of water, was roaring past Sacramento, either in the river or in the bypasses. Just a steady daylong flow of one CFS will produce two acre-feet of water, enough to supply two families for a year. Virtually all of it was racing hellbent for the Golden Gate--but wasted water is a topic for another day.

The Sacramento and American rivers came within four feet of topping their levees in the capital city.

“I mean, how close to the edge of the cliff do we want to drive?” asked U.S. Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-Rocklin). “We know that someday we’re going to have a flood in Sacramento.”

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Doolittle is one of those--snicker--dam promoters from a different era. No major dam has been built in California in 18 years, not since New Melones, which just helped save Modesto. Doolittle has been trying to prod Congress and the administration into building a new $1-billion dam upstream from Folsom, on the untamed north fork of the American River.

Purists wail. It’s great kayaking down there in the canyon with the rattlers. Anyway, Congress isn’t anxious to spend big money on California waterworks.

Build the levees higher, environmentalists say. But as we’ve seen, those levees erode and break.

It’s a different era, all right. There now are twice as many people living in California as when Pat Brown was building dams. There’s less open land for the water runoff, but just as much rain.

Want wild rivers? Somebody better figure out how to keep people out of their paths. You can’t control their shapes. They’re not always going to be suitable for a Sierra Club calendar.