ANOTHER DAMN DAM EVENT

by Bob Walsh

Lake Don Pedro is a decent size reservoir in the formerly great state of California. When completely full it holds a tad more than 2 million acre-feet of water. It is completely full.

The Turlock Irrigation District, which operates the reservoir under the oversight of the Army Corps of Engineers, anticipates that they will have to open the gates of the emergency spillway about 3 p.m. on Monday. This is an interesting set-up. I have taken a few photographs of it, it is visually interesting. You have this good-size industrial thing right at the top of this mild, short slope of rock and scrub. Unfortunately a major road, Bonds Flat road, crosses the path of the spillway. I drove up there yesterday to take a few photos. It is a good thing I did as the road is closed today. Maintenance people are taking out the guard rails and trenching the road so that the rail sections and slabs of blacktop do not travel down into the river.

When this happened 20 years ago the water flow and pressure ruptured 20 levees in the Manteca area and led to extensive local flooding and damage. It nearly flooded out Deuel Vocational Institution, the state prison where I worked at the time. It was "interesting." About ten years before that it did flood. It was a challenge running a prison with no electricity, no telephones and no functional sewer system. We walked across the parking lot in hip boots. The basement areas did flood but no water reached into the actual housing units. Fortunately there was very little trouble from the inmates. It was clear that we were not screwing with them, we had a very real situation and were doing out best to deal with it.

In the near-flood of 1997 they decided to move out a lot of the inmates. We moved slightly over 1,000 inmates out to other institutions in slightly over 24 hours, evacuating the bottom tiers of all the celled housing units. You learn a lot about creative problem solving under such circumstances.

The Tuolumne River and the San Joaquin River are expected to be under severe pressure the next few days as a storm may dump as much as 4 inches of water into the area.

I expect the firing range at the Manteca Sportsman's Club is currently under water. Oh well, excrement occurs. When you have property directly adjacent to the river these things can happen from time to time.