Officials move to reinforce Pajaro River levees after waters ‘rose quicker than anticipated.’

As Monterey County gets hit with yet another series of severe rainstorms that threaten flooding, county officials are keeping a close eye on the region's main waterways—with the Pajaro River commanding particular attention.

Crews were at work Friday morning, March 10, reinforcing the Pajaro River’s levees after the river’s water level “rose a lot quicker than we expected,” according to Shaunna Murray, senior water resources engineer with the Monterey County Water Resources Agency.

Murray says the river’s water levels are expected to peak “later today into the evening” and will likely approach levels seen during January’s storms, when officials moved to protect the banks of a waterway with a long history of flooding.

Aided by “flood-fighting specialists” from the California Department of Water Resources, county crews are working to strengthen the barriers previously installed atop the Pajaro River’s levees and lay sandbags where necessary, according to Murray. She adds that forecasts indicate that this time around, “it’s going to be a shorter high-river event, so that’s good news for the levees.”

Until work starts in the coming years on a $400 million project to rebuild the Pajaro River’s flood prevention infrastructure, county officials are left to patch together a 74-year-old levee system and do their best to ensure residents are kept out of harm’s way. Pajaro was among several river-adjacent communities under evacuation orders on Friday, joining parts of Carmel Valley and Arroyo Seco.

“The longer you study a river, the more you understand how much [water] flow might come through,” Murray notes. Once rebuilt, the new Pajaro River levees will be “much taller and [offer] much higher flood protection,” she says, while the flood-threatening water levels seen this winter “won’t be near the top” of the levees’ capacity.

While this current storm system’s ferocity saw Monterey County’s rivers rise faster than anticipated, there is optimism that the rain forecasted for the coming days will be lighter and the flood risk less severe. 

“From a hydrological perspective, it looks like a lot less rainfall than we just got,” Murray says. “This was a short, 12-hour period where we received a lot of rain, and that’s not projected next week…We’ll continue to be vigilant about it.”