2002 July 17 Sacramento Bee Tony Bizjak
Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
Funding Troubles Threaten Sacramento, Calif.-Area Flood-Prevention Project

Jul. 17--Facing serious cost overruns, Sacramento officials say they are asking Congress for $80 million to finish a major levee-strengthening project aimed at giving residents 100-year flood protection.

Three years into a project stretching from Watt Avenue to downtown Sacramento, Army Corps of Engineers officials say they are scrambling for ways to cut costs but fear they will reach their $121 million federal budget limit next year before their 19-mile levee "slurry wall" is complete.
After consultations with the Corps, Rep. Robert Matsui, D-Sacramento, has formally requested that Congress authorize the extra money in this year's federal water bill, Matsui aides said.

But the cost overruns already have become hot political fodder locally and nationally, making further funding iffy.
Republican Rep. John Doolittle of Rocklin last week accused the Corps of wasting taxpayers' money, echoing recent complaints nationally about cost overruns at many other Corps projects.

Doolittle, a longtime advocate of a multibillion-dollar Auburn dam, could not be reached Monday night to say if he intends to oppose the request.
The congressman, however, told The Bee last week he is opposing another Matsui-backed local flood control proposal that would raise the height of Folsom dam by 7 feet to give Sacramento 213-year flood protection.

A 100-year protection level is defined by the Corps as leaving the area with one chance in 100 each year of being flooded. With 100-year protection, people with federally backed mortgages no longer would be required to buy flood insurance.

Matsui and local flood officials want 200-year protection, which they say can withstand a series of storms 50 percent larger than anything seen locally in paleontological flood research. An Auburn dam has been said to have the potential to provide Sacramento with 400-year protection.

Currently, people living in the city of Sacramento have on the average an estimated 77-year flood protection.

According to an aide, Matsui questioned the Corps on its budget and concluded the project cost overruns were not the result of mismanagement, but instead stemmed from dealing with numerous unknowns when digging into the levees and with unknowns on how a new "jet grouting" technology would work.

"We're going to do everything we can to get Sacramento the flood protection it needs," Matsui spokesman Cody Harris said Monday evening.
"These projects need to get done and get done right, no matter what else happens with flood control. The levees have to be strong, period."
The Corps already has created 19 miles of slurry walls in levees in central Sacramento by pouring a mixture of concrete, dirt and clay into 3-foot-wide trenches dug 60 to 80 feet deep along the levee crown.

But one of its toughest tasks is ahead -- extending the slurry wall at 27 spots under roads and railroad lines that bridge from levee to levee, as well as under some power lines.

For that, officials hired a company to inject slurry horizontally under the roads -- a process called jet grouting -- so that traffic does not have to be stopped while trenches are dug.

Local Corps official Jim Taylor said the technique has had good success in Europe, but this is the first time the Corps has used the process and it has proved to be more costly than expected.

"We are entering an unknown," he said. "We found it is costing more than expected, so we are trying to find alternatives to stay under the ($121 million) cost ceiling."

The Corps has set up a test site west of the Capital City Freeway at the American River to experiment on how the grouting can be done more cheaply but still effectively.

Taylor argues the Corps has been doing a good job on the Sacramento project, given initial unknowns about disrepair and cracks in the area's aged levees. He said the Corps does not intend to compromise levee strength in searching for less expensive ways of finishing the work.

"We are going to do the best job we can," Taylor said, "and make it as safe as possible for people who live behind the levees. But there is always going to be some risk when you live in a flood zone." He said the Corps would expect to finish the project next year, if it got the money.