River work is paying off

Dear editor,

I'm a retired wildlife biologist in Sonoma County, but a long time ago, like 1989, I was working for the California Department of Water Resources in the urban streams restoration program. I came over to Napa a couple of times to help them come up with an urban stream restoration project. It morphed into an Army Corps of Engineers project that treated flood protection as if the community was as important as the flood protection structures.

I was so proud of Napa County for insisting on a project design that made environmental sense, as well as addressing the alleviation of flood damage.

I watched over the years as funds needed to complete the plan were dribbled out and pieces of the project were completed. I saw it as a horse race, with a big rain event likely to come before the project construction schedule could address the channel capacity and drainage problems. The rains held off longer than I thought they would, and local interests pitched in with watershed protection work and vineyard management requirements I had only hoped for. Napa in the old days would have been demolished by the record stages coming through St. Helena, but the works to date prevented an enormous amount of damage. It wasn't perfect. Millions in damages still hurt, but hundreds of millions in avoided damage amounts to real money!

Napa Rocks!

Earle Cummings

Geyserville

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