The county counts millions in damage to water infrastructure from storms.

With January’s onslaught of storms now past, Monterey County officials are counting the toll of rain and flood damage on the local water infrastructure – and hoping that federal relief funds will help them shore up the main rivers, dams and reservoirs.

Both during and after the storms, the Monterey County Water Resources Agency has been focusing on three primary areas of water infrastructure under its jurisdiction: the county’s two main dams and reservoirs, at Lake Nacimiento and Lake San Antonio; the Pajaro River’s levees; and the Old Salinas River slide gate, which connects that channel to the Salinas River Lagoon.

The good news is that, on all three fronts, the county was able to monitor the damage and act accordingly, according to Lew Bauman, interim general manager of the Water Resources Agency. However, there was millions of dollars worth of damage sustained, and officials will be leaning on Federal Emergency Management Agency funds to help cover the costs.

While ongoing drought conditions meant the reservoirs were previously “at very low levels,” Bauman says the storms dumped enough rain to prompt the Water Resources Agency to release water from Lake Nacimiento in order to preserve a buffer against potential overflow.

Those releases caused further erosion to the reservoir’s plunge pool, where the dam’s spillway dumps water into the Nacimiento River, so the agency “engaged a contractor to retrofit the sides of the plunge pool with riprap to prevent erosion,” Bauman notes.

At the Pajaro River’s levees, the agency installed roughly 3,000 feet worth of muscle wall, concrete K-rail barriers and other flood prevention infrastructure “to ensure that the levee didn’t overtop,” Bauman says. “Those activities were successful in preventing the flooding of the [Pajaro] community,” he adds, with the agency continuing improvements to the levees during the wet season.

At the Old Salinas River channel, a combination of swelling river flows and high tides crashing in from Monterey Bay caused serious damage to both the slide gate and an access road. The damage was enough that the county has engaged a design firm to draw up the requisite repairs.

In total, the various repairs could cost the county up to $7.5 million, according to Bauman: $3.5 million for the reservoir’s plunge pool, $2.5 million for the slide gate and access road, and $1.5 million for the Pajaro River levees. Immediate repairs through February are fully reimbursable by FEMA, Bauman notes, with longer-term improvements 75-percent covered by the federal agency. The county will also look to California disaster assistance funding to help with the work.