Pajaro River floodplain housing viable after improvements
On Oct. 2, about a year-and-a-half after the Pajaro River levee failed, flood agencies broke ground on the long-awaited Pajaro River Flood Risk Management Project. The five-year, $599 million project sets out to protect the river valley and its tributaries from 100-year storms, by constructing stronger levees and working on improvements to the area. Following the celebration, the environmental watchdog group LandWatch commissioned a report from EcoDataLab … to get a better sense of whether the levee improvements would protect potential housing development within the floodplain. The resulting Pajaro River Flood Risk Report, released earlier in October, focuses on whether the project’s design sufficiently accounts for future climate impacts, assessing the area under both typical and extreme weather scenarios. The report concludes that, with proper levee maintenance, the area is suitable for housing development.
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