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9 1 Sacramento and the Struggle to Manage Flood Risk SETTLING IN TIIE FLOODPLAIN Sacramento, California, was settled literally on the banks of the Sacramento and American Rivers (see Figure 1.1) shortly after gold was discovered upstream at nearby Sutter's Mill in 1848. It has been plagued by frequent floods ever since. The problem of understanding and coping with flood risk was faced early (the first flood to inundate Sacramento occurred in January 1850) and often by the original settlers and continues today as a major scientifically underpinned public policy issue. It has subsequently been determined that the to"TI of Sacramento was built in the middle of what was essentially an inland sea that local Native Americans warned appeared almost annually (Kelley, 1989). Presently, more than 400,000 people and $40 billion worth of property are vulnerable to flooding, including most of the city's downtown business and government areas, including the state capitoL RISK REDUCTION EFFORTS Since its founding, the city has struggled to protect itself from periodic floods by employing structural and land management measures. In a meeting of citizens it was decided to build Sacramento's first levee immediately following the January 1850 flood (Kelley, 1989). At present, much of the population lives behind levees along the two rivers (see Figure 12). Local and federal land use criteria govern the develop- ment that occurs in floodprone areas. In addition to Folsom Dam, completed in 1956, several small privately owned reservoirs upstream of the American River act to attenuate the flood runoff peaks issuing from headwaters. A major flood in 1986 served as impems for efforts by federal, state, and local entities to identify an acceptable and feasible set of measures to increase Sacramento's level of safety from American River floods. Numerous options were identified in 1991 by the U $. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in a report known as the American River Watershed Investigation (USACE, 1991). Due to the controversial nature of many of the alternatives identified in that report, study participants were not able to reach consensus on any of the flood control options, including the construction of a dry dam (with no permanent storage of water) at Auburn, which was uhimately recommended by the USACE. In response, Congress directed the USACE to reevaluate available flood control options and, at the same time, asked the USACE to engage the National Research Council as an independent advisor on these difficult studies. -