Can California fix the Delta Before Disaster Strikes?

When visiting Sherman Island in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, it is easy to forget the region’s ever-present threat of catastrophic floods and instead revel in the West Coast’s largest estuary, which supports farmers, anglers, and more than 700 native species of plants and animals, including some that are endangered.

“You drive out there and you see that cows are grazing, birds are chirping; but it’s deceptive,” said Robert Bea, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. “As you start to dig in, you find out how incredibly complex and vulnerable we’ve made this place.”

At least 220 government agencies have jurisdiction in the Delta, which is home to half a million residents in 25 villages, towns and cities, including Sacramento, Stockton and Pittsburg. The region is under continual threat from floods, prevented only by a vast — and fragile — network of earthen levees.

Sherman Island, said Bea, is an example of a critical chokepoint in the Delta for the tangled networks of highways, railroads, and electrical, gas and telecommunication lines that serve as lifelines for the San Francisco Bay Area and large swaths of the state. The Delta also serves as the hub for aqueducts that channel drinking water for two-thirds of the state’s population — more than 23 million people — and irrigation water for 3 million acres of agriculture responsible for half the nation’s fruits and vegetables and one-quarter of its dairy products.

Finding ways to better manage the overlapping agencies is the goal of a four-year, $2 million project headed by Bea and funded by the National Science Foundation. The project, called Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructures (RESIN), brings together 20 researchers in disciplines ranging from engineering to law to organizational behavior (a full list of researchers is online). The team also includes experts from the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Bea and other investigators on the RESIN team are among a significant number of UC Berkeley researchers who are using their expertise to tackle the extraordinary challenges of the Delta. In addition to the team members on the RESIN project, which is in its early stages, there are UC Berkeley researchers in urban planning, law, policy and biometeorology who also are studying the unique problems of the Delta region.