Hundreds of residents and business owners sue over Pajaro flooding.

It was one year ago that all of us got a crash course in learning how to read hydrological tables on river levels. There was the potential for “Monterey Peninsula Island,” with bridge access cut off. There were intermittent evacuation warnings and orders at various points along the Pajaro, Salinas and Carmel rivers. Everyone was on edge, but some of the worst predictions never came to pass, or if they did, they came with plenty of warning. “This is a slow-moving event,” Sheriff Tina Nieto said on Jan. 12, 2023.

But the rain continued. Just after midnight on Saturday, March 11, the Pajaro River levee broke 2.9 miles upstream from Pajaro. It was a fast-moving emergency as roads, homes and businesses flooded, and the National Guard was called in, among other agencies, to assist with rescuing people, as staff reporter Celia Jiménez reported.

For some evacuees, it was deja vu – they remember floods in 1998 and 1995. The levee system, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1949, had failed before then, too – its first of repeated failures came just six years after construction, in 1955, as staff writer David Schmalz has reported.

That we knew catastrophic flooding was coming for Pajaro again is by now old news. What is different is the question of how much impacted residents, property owners and business owners are entitled to in damages, and who should pay those damages – which are destined to be increasingly present questions in this era of climate crisis.

As the Weekly reported in July, some 800 Pajaro Valley plaintiffs are seeking legal recourse. They filed a claim in June, and followed up with a lawsuit filed on Dec. 22 in Monterey County Superior Court against seven government agencies: the counties of Monterey and Santa Cruz; the State of California; the City of Watsonville; Caltrans; the Pajaro Regional Flood Management Agency; and Santa Cruz County Flood Control and Water Conservation District. (The lawsuit also addresses flooding on the north side of the river, in Santa Cruz County.)

The suit focuses not on the Army Corps’ failure to build a new project – that was authorized 58 years ago, in 1966 – but alleges failures to maintain existing infrastructure.

“It’s a product of California having a decentralized system of regulating water channels. We have an aging water infrastructure,” says Shant Karnikian, an attorney with the Los Angeles-based firm Kabateck LLP, which is representing the plaintiffs, and also has similar cases in Merced and Tulare counties. “There is a lack of clarity as to who’s responsible for what.”

The lawsuit alleges specific failures by agencies, claiming negligence for things like improperly designed culverts, drains and roads. The lawsuit also argues that ineffective vegetation clearing in the riverbed contributed to flooding.

This is a message I’ve heard elsewhere – and it raises broader questions about how a river should be treated. Is it a river that changes course depending on the flow, or a channel we can control? I asked Miles Reiter, the former CEO of Driscoll’s, about the 2023 flooding, which he said was a repeat of 1995. The big difference this time, he says, was the outpouring of public concern: “In ’95 it got totally ignored,” he says. “It was dramatically different this time. But the real issue is a battle that’s been going on for at least 40 years, on how the river bed should be managed. I don’t think it needs to be scorched earth, but it’s a mess.”

That idea, that a riverbed thick with willow trees and wildlife is “a mess,” is a common framing among advocates of rigorous channel maintenance – and channel maintenance is often a euphemism for cutting down trees. There are obvious tradeoffs there.

In November, Schmalz reported on a momentous signing of agreements to get the Army Corps project finally moving along. But meanwhile, more immediate repair needs remain unfinished. In December, the Monterey County Board of Supervisors and Monterey County Water Resources Agency sent a letter to federal officials urging the Army Corps to speed up repairs to segments of the levee impacted in 2023: “Any storm system this winter that elevates river water levels… jeopardizes the protection of life and property adjacent to the Pajaro River in those locations.”

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com