Forty Miles of Creek, Six Adaptation Projects

Santa Clara County

By Robin Meadows

In 2017, a perfect storm hit the City of San Jose in Santa Clara County. Coyote Creek, which winds through the heart of the city, overtopped its banks, flooding businesses and hundreds of homes up to depths of six feet. Thousands of people were evacuated and property damages exceeded $70 million. “If I’ve learned anything in my 25 years here, it’s that you have to give creeks room to move, which also creates more resilience to climate change,” says Valley Water district planning engineer Afshin Rouhani, explaining that this slows the water, decreasing flooding and bank erosion. As winter rains intensify with climate change, flooding will worsen in the county. In the hills edging the Santa Clara Valley, wildfire is also a threat. On the valley floor, where most of the people live, major threats in addition to riverine flooding are blistering hot summer days and shoreline flooding as San Francisco Bay rises. The Coyote Creek system—1,500 miles of waterways that drain a 350-square-mile watershed—connects half a dozen elements that are key to climate adaptation, from reservoirs to creek confluences to shoreline levees.

Read More

Previous Estuary News Stories

Radar Envy, March 2018

Coyote’s Cache of Intermittent Riches, December 2017

Background

Anderson Dam – Valley Water Video of Worst-Case Scenario

X-band Radar – Advanced Quantitative Precipitation Information (AQPI) System

South San Francisco Bay Shoreline Project

Upper Penitencia Flood Protection, Valley Water

Related Content

About the author

Robin Meadows is an independent science journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s a water reporter at Maven's Notebook, a California water news site, and contributor to Chemical & Engineering News, Ka Pili Kai, KneeDeep Times, and Scientific American. Robin is also a Pulitzer Center grantee, an Institute for Journalism & Natural Resources fellow, a contributor to The Craft of Science Writing, a mentor with The Open Notebook, and a UC Santa Cruz Science Communication Program graduate. Find her on Tumblr and Twitter.

Related Posts

American Avocet on managed, former salt ponds in the South Bay. Photo: Roopak Bhatt, USGS

One-of-a-Kind Stories

Our magazine’s media motto for many years has been “Where there’s an estuary, there’s a crowd.” The San Francisco Estuary is a place where people, wildlife, and commerce congregate, and where watersheds, rivers and the ocean meet and mix, creating a place of unusual diversity. In choosing to tell the...
dam spillway oroville

Supplying Water

Ever since the state and federal water projects were built in the 1930s and 1940s, California has captured snowmelt in foothill reservoirs, and moved the fresh water from dam releases and river outflows to parched parts of the state via aqueducts hundreds of miles long. A convoluted system of ancient...

Tackling Pollution

Though the Clean Water Act did an amazing job of reducing wastewater and stormwater pollution of the San Francisco Estuary, some contaminants remain thorny problems.  Legacy pollutants like mercury washed into the watershed from upstream gold mining, PCBs from old industrial sites, and selenium from agricultural drainage in the San...