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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Work to repair a breach in a levee in the Middle Creek area continued into Monday evening, with plans for crews to continue efforts to repair the damage on Tuesday morning.
The breach, first reported to Lake County Water Resources at around 9:30 a.m. Monday, resulted in numerous state and local agencies working throughout the day to stabilize the aging levee.
Converging on the site Monday were the Lake County Department of Water Resources, Office of Emergency Services, Lake County Sheriff's Office, Cal Fire, California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation hand crews from Konocti Conservation Camp, Lakeport and Northshore Fire districts, Supervisor Denise Rushing, Robinson Rancheria Tribal Police and California Department of Fish and Game.
Work continued until about 9 p.m. Monday, when Cal Fire and the Konocti Conservation Camp crews were finally released from the scene.
“At this point is looks stable,” said Mark List, incident commander for the California Department of Water Resources.
List said there were plans to leave someone on scene throughout the night to monitor the levee.
He said three hand crews are scheduled to return on Tuesday and continue shoring up the area.
The National Weather Service in Sacramento extended a flash flood warning from 5 p.m. Monday until Tuesday morning. Flooding, however, was not expected.
Sheriff's Lt. Dave Perry, who also oversees the Office of Emergency Services, was on the scene throughout the day Monday, with Sheriff Frank Rivero joining him to survey the situation in the late afternoon.
Perry said there were 20 homes in the area, but only eight were under a voluntary evacuation that the Office of Emergency Services had suggested.
Rivero said the department was not enforcing mandatory evacuations as of Monday evening.
Lake County Water Resources Director Scott De Leon explained that the leak took the form of an underground channel had developed alongside the larger of the two pipes.
That channel had allowed water to begin pushing out of Clear Lake and into the nearby fields.
De Leon, Water Resources and the Office of Emergency Services managed the scene earlier in the day until the arrival of officials from the California Department of Water Resources, which maintains the levee, estimated to have been built in the 1950s.
During the late morning and early afternoon, De Leon and his staff – including Water Resources Engineer Tom Smythe – had worked at the scene, putting down sandbags along with local residents who volunteered to come out and assist the crews. Smythe also retrieved a pump to try to take pressure off the breach.
In all, De Leon said the county brought out about 3,000 sandbags and five yards of sand.
Near the levee is a pump station, with two large pipes that extend out from the station for about 30 yards before going under a road that runs parallel to the levee. The pipes then emerge on the other side of the levee berm and empty into Clear Lake.
The efforts Monday included creating a secondary containment area where the pump station pipes emerged from under the easement road that runs along the levee.
Shortly before 6:30 p.m., under the direction of California Department of Water Resources, a contractor began pumping concrete slurry into the leak, which allowed the secondary containment area to be emptied out.
The hand crews then dug into the easement road, using shovels and pickaxes, to locate where the leak had developed alongside the pipe, with more concrete slurry being injected into those holes. Nearby, other inmate crew members worked on building a new sandbag line out closer to the pump station.
At about 7:45 p.m., List began to dismiss the hand crews, which had worked steadily through the day.
Then he and other state Department of Water Resources staff spotted water beginning to force its way out of another hole on the easement road.
The crews had to be called back to begin putting down a new line of sandbags in order to deal with that new leak before finally being released just over an hour later.
The area where the breached levee is located is part of the Middle Creek Restoration Area, the goal of which is to return about 1,400 acres of reclaimed land to wetland.
The project – years in the making, and still many years and dollars from completion – is meant not only to improve the health of Clear Lake by reducing sediment and nutrient loading, but also get rid of the aging levees which are becoming increasingly unreliable.
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