Levee Failure Has Disastrous Consequences

Aging Earthen Levees Leave Flood-Prone Area Of California In Danger Zone

(CBS)  When wind rain and high water start battering the levees, it's too late to think about repairs.

But when the weather is sunny and dry, it's easy to forget how crucial these flood barriers have become to millions of American homeowners.

The levees in West Sacramento, Calif. are more vulnerable than Phil Hinkle and his wife Natalie thought when they bought their house three years ago.

"If water can find a way, it will," Phil Hinkle tells CBS News correspondent John Blackstone.

When levees fail, as they did along the Missouri River at the town of Big Lake in May, the results are immediate and disastrous.

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Blackstone Blogs: Levee Failure
Only On The Web: More On West Sacramento's Levees

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"This one was just a whoops — all of a sudden we've topped the levees," levee manager Glen Dieckmann said.

When the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers inspected some 2,000 levees this year, 122 were deemed “at risk of failure;” 19 of those are on the Sacramento River.

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Click here to see the entire list (PDF).

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From the air, Stein Buer, the head of the Sacramento flood control agency, sees plenty to worry about.

“If this levee below us broke, these houses would be under 20 feet of water?” observes Blackstone.

" Approximately, yeah,” says Buer.

In Sacramento, two of California's great rivers come together — the Sacramento and the American — and that means trouble right here in River City as a huge new population growing up behind aging crumbling levees.

"So these creaky old levees are being asked to do things they were never designed to do a 100 years ago," says geologist Jeffrey Mount of U.C. Davis.

Mount says these earthen levees were often built haphazardly by farmers. Now its not crops that are at risk, but homes and lives.

"Somebody has just dumped rock here. You have to put in engineered rock in order to make this a strong levee,” he says.

"You've got junk holding the levee up here, and a hundred yards that way, millions of dollars worth of homes,” observes Blackstone.

"Funny how that works,” says Mount.

Now, homeowners like Phil Hinkle are getting stuck with the bill. A self described fiscal conservative, he led a successful campaign to raise taxes in West Sacramento to help pay for the levee fix.

But people don’t often vote to raise their taxes.

“No they don't,” Hinkle says. “I don't, that's for sure.”

But piecemeal repairs to the nation's levee system worry Jeffrey Mount.

"It's old, it's out of date, it's in very poor condition and we're basically spending hundreds of millions of dollars right now to put Band-Aids on it,” he says.

Band-Aids, however, seem the only choice. Like so much of the nation's aging infrastructure, replacing thousands of miles of levees seems prohibitively expensive — at least until you tally the cost of a levee failure.