Summer Solstice 2010

Due to my commitment to lecturing at San Jose State University for the past 10 months, this blog has been reduced, for the time being, to a semi-annual salute to Earth's position in its annual cycle around the sun - the midway points of extreme posture toward our life-giving sun, days we call the Solstice. On this Solstice, in the northern hemisphere of the planet, the days are the longest, in the southern half of the Earth, the nights are the longest. On these days, Earthlings everywhere gather, as we complement each other with the same honoring ceremonies across the planet. It's a good time to remember and honor our Mother planet, who holds all our ancestors before us. We also celebrate the commonality of all peoples and all life on the planet.

These ceremonies predate what we call civilization, as people studied the stars for at least a millennium before science ever began to evolve in human consciousness and give us understanding of planetary physics and celestial movement. Today we can enjoy visualizing the entire universe through YouTube or any medium available for watching spectacular graphics and knowledge packaged by the best videographers available.

That wouldn't be me, with my 10-year old Olympus digital camera, but I will share some of the Summer Solstice ceremony in which I had the honor to attend, hosted and produced by Sergio Martinez and Angelica del Gato this past Sunday. They live along Coyote Creek also, about 300 feet upstream, on the bank next to the William St. bridge. Their home is the farmhouse where the Ferrari family lived and tended the orchard, which was here before becoming 8 duplexes. I'm in great awe and appreciate the great deal of work to organize and prepare their yard and the food for all the celebrants lucky enough to join them in this celebration of life at this significant place on our planet's journey around the sun.




The shaman for part of the ceremony spoke of the Aztec calendar and counting system based on 2o instead of 10, as most of the modern world uses for metrics of time and space, except for astrophysicists, who use light-years. My reading of Mayan and Aztec culture's had informed me that these cultures used 20 instead of 10 for the simple reason that we have 20 fingers AND toes, and they're what we first used to count with. And coincidentally, this year in the world's business calendar, it happens to be the year we call 2010. Sounds like a perfect year to bring together the old mezzo-American calendar and the modern world we are living in today.

For a great ride through time and space. I recommend viewing a segment of the series from the National Geographic Channel called Birth of the Universe We are truly star dust in awe of stardust.
Blessed Be!

A Meandering Demo(n)-stration on Coyote Creek

On Monday, June 1, the Santa Clara Valley Water District held a "Open House" in the Olinder School Cafeteria to discuss their flood control options with the surrounding neighborhoods. About 100 people showed up over a four-hour period to be given docent-guided explanations of the dozens of wall maps, charts and graphs depicting the 10 or so options that had so far been considered by the engineering staff of the Water District.


Many folks showed up to voice their protest about any plans that included removing homes from the creek banks or putting levees around the park to enhance its function as a flood detention basin. In a separate post, I describe why William Street Park and much of the Coyote Creek park chain was developed for the dual purposes of flood detention and recreation.


Purely by coincidence, the next day, the Water District conducted what may have appeared as a demonstration of what it would look like to remove a house along the creek. The pics and video below was taken by me on Tuesday. What you see is the pile of sticks which used to be the Jaffe home on the 300 block of South 17th Street in downtown San Jose on the west bank of Coyote Creek.











The story of why this home was demolished began a few weeks after the January 25, 1997 flood on the Coyote Creek. After the flood stage had passed, the Water District began releasing water from Andersen Reservoir, located 20 miles upstream, for the next six weeks or so. Once they reached the elevation of their "rule curve" someone ordered the valve closed at the dam and the water level in the creek downtown dropped 2-3 feet almost instantaneously. Without the water column as a buttress, the saturated banks did what gravity demands and began flowing out into the river and everything above it collapsed.

Another home next to and south of the Jaffe's completely tipped dangerously toward the river, and was soon red tagged and eventually demolished also. There was also some bank failure in the back yard of the home north of the Jaffe home as well. The slippage of the bank unfortunately occurred in the middle of the Jaffe home, so part of the house remained habitable for the time being.

Law suits were, of course, filed against both the District and the City. The District used the immediate defense that the sewer in front of these homes was damaged and leaking and was therefore the cause of the bank failure, not the operation of the reservoir. After I was deposed by the attorney for the home owners, the water District's attorney was not too happy that I supported the theory that the bank slipped due to "draw down failure." In response, they shopped around for someone to write them a report refuting this theory and found a Stanford professor that would back them up, for a considerable fee, of course.

The District won the case but never felt too good about it, apparently, for in about 2006, the District offered to buy the Jaffe's home and remove it, as they have now done. This bring the total to five lots on the west bank of Coyote Creek now restored by the Water District to undeveloped parcels between the William Street bridge and the San Antonio Street bridge. The term used by the District (and others) for homes that back up to the creeks is called "encroachment."

Prior to 1950, before the construction of Andersen Dam, large setbacks from the creek banks were the rule, and streets such as Arroyo Way and Brookwood Drive did not exist, in respect for the need for such setbacks. The City General Plan today includes a 100 ft. setback for new subdivisions, but is seldom enforced, especially if the developer claims they will lose many buildable lots that the City should buy in order to "create" the setback.

The District, for years, has been encouraging Cities and the County to not create subdivisions that allowed homes to back up against the creek banks. Streets were encouraged or at least tolerated, even when floodable, as the District could use these paved surfaces for maintenance, while building homes that backed up to the creeks blocked access and created a continuous source of complaints and often litigation.

In 2000, the voters approved a parcel tax by over a two-thirds margin to fund the "Clean,Safe Creeks and Natural Flood Protection Program." This would generate funds for a period of 15 years to begin several flood control projects throughout the County. One of these projects is the Mid-Coyote Creek planning study, which began near the end of 2007 and has progressed to the state which was on display at the Olinder Cafeteria on Monday.

Yesterday, our District 3 Council member, Sam Liccardo, notified the neighborhoods that a task force would be appointed from all the neighborhoods surrounding the mid-Coyote Creek, between East Hedding St. upstream to Hwy. 280. Over the course of the next year, alternatives will be evaluated and recommended for consideration by the District. Congress member Zoe Lofgren also sent a letter to the neighbors that stated that no project would move forward without her endorsement and that of the neighborhood.

Tomorrow, the Water District will conduct a bus tour for those that signed up on the Monday or Wednesday "open house." The tour will start at Andersen Dam and move downstream, following the virtual flood wave through the reservoir and the creek channel below, heading eventually to South San Francisco Bay. This will hopefully help some of the neighbors visualize the daunting task upon the Water District staff to route a flood wave up to 17,000 cubic feet per second through this highly developed metropolis. It will also be a great opportunity to compare the benefits of flood detention to the less popular and more expensive alternatives of channelization.

But even if most of the flooding can be prevented using the existing reservoirs and other detention facilities like Laguna Seca in Coyote Valley and Lake Cunningham next to Eastridge, the meandering of the river bed through downtown neighborhoods will continue to claim homes built adjacent to Coyote Creek and, in time, we will see a repeat of yesterday's demolition and the demonstration of the forces of the earth, constantly at work in this naturally meandering stream bed.

The Bridge That Never Was

This post IS NOT about one of the issues surrounding the Republican Party Vice Presidential candidate's "Bridge to Nowhere."

Instead, it's a story about how a bridge that never was played a role in determining a bit of our local history. As the City of San Jose grew larger even at the turn of the 20th century, local engineers planned to build an additional bridge over the Coyote Creek in San Jose but for some reason, the first design was never built. This bridge would have spanned the Coyote at the east end of San Salvador, near South 16th Street and connect to Williams Street's east-west alignment, south of and parallel to San Salvador . In 1911, the City of San Jose actually paid real money for the acquisition of a triangle of land on the creek center line to build a mid stream column to support the long bridge needed to span the fairly wide flood plain at this point in the river.

Either for economics or safety or both, this design option was abandoned, and a shorter bridge was constructed in its current location on E. William Street. The existing span is a shorter bridge and crosses the river at a skew. In order to have this shorter span, it was required that a embankment be created across much of the floodplain on which to build the western abutment, thereby restricting the flow of the river at flood stage. To mitigate this restriction of the floodway, the land that now is William Street Park was purchased as public open space but also to serve as a flood detention basin.

As subsequent storms proved the inadequacy of the storage volume in the upstream park, more riparian land was purchased upstream, giving us first Kelly Park and the connecting riparian lands in between, and then future purchases were added even further upstream, until urban and park planners realized that they were creating a park chain along one of the two main riparian corridors running through the watersheds draining the city of San Jose.

Today, the Coyote Creek Park Chain is one of San Jose's ecological and recreational assets with the potential to be one of its jewels. The trails along the creek are not yet contiguous from the bay to the base of Andersen Dam in Morgan Hill 30 miles south of the estuary. Our current Council member for District 3, San Liccardo, made one of the planks in his platform printed in his first ballot statement, continuing to connect the spot parks like Kelly, Williams, Roosevelt and Watson Park with creek-side trails.

Whether Sam considered the uproar that would arise from the 60 or so homeowners whose homes backed up to Coyote Creek downstream of the William Street bridge, I'm not sure. This idea had been pretty well vetted by the prior council member, Cindy Chavez during her tenure.

However, the Santa Clara Valley Water District has opened the door for achieving the extension of the creek side trails as part of the Mid-Coyote Creek flood protection project design that has been going on for about a year. The objective of this project is to prevent overflows of flood waters from entering their natural overflow channels to the east of the creek in order to protect the homes and businesses that the City of San Jose has allowed to be built in the bypass channels. The benefit of this project is obviously the prevention of flood damages from occurring, but also to relieve these bypass channel homeowners from the burden of paying annual flood insurance premiums to FEMA, whose regulations actually allowed these homes to be constructed in the floodable areas.

As downtown San Jose continues to densify the housing for its growing population, more demand will occur for contact with the natural environment that the riparian corridor of the Coyote Creek can offer. Despite the innovative approach Councilman Liccardo is proposing for bikeways on some of the one-way street around SJSU campus, continuous trails along the creek can provide off-road bicycle trails that are much more enjoyable and safer.

The Water District has so far ignored the fact that forcing the additional flows to stay within the main channel of the creek will constitute a inverse taking of the creek side properties downstream of the William Street bridge. Upstream diversion of some of the runoff from the Upper Silver Creek watershed has already augmented the flows through this reach of the river. Before the flood control project is implemented. the City and the District will have to address the inverse condemnation that results from the induced flooding of the Silver Creek and the newly proposed flood "protection" project.

I'm A Riparian Water Boy

Last month I posted a great takeoff of the Madonna hit "Material Girl" titled "Riparian Girl."

This month I want to tell a story about being a Riparian Boy, precisely, a Riparian Water Boy.

What follows is my story of coming to live along a vital riparian ecosystem in downtown San Jose.

When I arrived in San Jose in 1969, it was the "Summer of Love" and the spiritual energy level of the community of my peers was at peak and beyond for some. I was referred to San Jose State by Dr. Bill Strangio, who was an instructor at Loyola University. When I expressed to him my disillusion with working for Caltrans, he suggested I talk with Dr. Frank Agardi, the Environmental Engineering Department chair.

Dr. Agardi arranged for me to receive a fellowship stipend from the federal government. The Feds were in essence paying me to go to graduate school after relinquishing their hold on my testicles (I still had two at the time) by changing my draft board status to 4-F. So the money they saved not putting me through bootcamp was coming back to me as student support during the next year of graduate school.

My student housing was located in a 8-unit two-story apartment building near Roosevelt Middle School (now Roosevelt Park) off South 19th Street on a cul de sac named Calhoun Court. Think cheap motel, with cars parked a foot from your doors and windows. But it was cerebral time, right? This was no time for urban farming, like I like to do.

The cul de sac ended on the east bank of the Coyote River, a 100 ft. downstream of the Santa Clara Street bridge. After I graduated, and got married to my dear friend, Lexa, we moved to South 18th Street, into a duplex, with another friend Steve Matulich, moving into the front unit.

Our duplex was across the street from the homes that bordered the east bank of Coyote Creek, 100 ft. downstream of the San Antonio Street Bridge. Steve & I immediately took down a fence separating the back yard and dug in 100 gallons of fresh chicken manure from Olivera's egg ranch, still operating in the Berryessa District. After a rather wet winter, our first summer garden was incredible. We could practically see things growing. And sometimes in paisleys.

For the next two years, I worked for the Chicago-based engineering consultant business named Consoer-Townsend & Associates. I was hired after a referral from one of my SJSU graduate school colleagues, Ken Boyd. I did some work in their San Jose office, but my primary assignment was to work in San Francisco with a team of engineers from Bechtel. So I rode my bike to the Cahill Street train station and took the commuter train to San Francisco, a 90-minute commute each morning and evening. Since I was based in San Jose, I expensed my train tickets and put the travel time as OT on my time card. The extra money soon built into a small but adequate "nest egg" to actually buy a nest for Lexa and myself.

And we didn't have to go far before we found the perfect nest just a block away on Brookwood Drive, which crossed South 18th St. and turned left and followed the east bank of the Coyote Creek up to the William Street Bridge. So with 10% down, a 10% second mortgage and the rest from a real bank, we were finally settled right on the banks of Coyote Creek. Our home sits about 10 feet from the top bank of the creek, but sits 100 feet from the street. Our best topsoil is there in front, so everything but the driveway produces a great abundance of food, fuel and fragrant, festive wildflowers.

We moved into our new home with the help of our friends, Marty and Judith. Judith was a drafts-person-lady at the local engineering office. We had to psychically detach ourselves from our close neighbors, Patty & Ken MacKay and their children, Kirsty and Duff, although we were only moving about a 1000 feet away. The new house was actually a duplex, with two rental spaces already occupied as tenants of the former owner, Irene Segesvery, a lively Hungarian-born woman, who had grown tired of taking care of this amount of property.

We continued to have one tenant for many more years, but I immediately took possession of the probably-illegal third unit and made it my home office until my daughter, Chrysalis, born by my second wife Cari, in 1985. For a couple of years, our rental unit housed the Reverend Barry Verde+, a preacher at the Trinity Episcopal Church on First Street near St. James Park. Barry and his new Canadian-born bride, Trish Hardman, spent their extended honeymoon here on the creek, while working on both community and commercial TV in the early days of cable systems.

So here we were, in our home that is as close to nature as you can get in the middle of a city. I had come to San Jose to become an environmental engineer, and was just beginning to understand what that role in society actually means. From the ENGINEER perspective, it means building infrastructure that mitigates the impacts of the human community, so that natural systems continue to function unimpaired. That obviously does not always get done to the satisfaction of nature, and she takes revenge on her own terms, wiping out species and sometime threatening our own.

From the ENVIRONMENTAL perspective, it was most important for me to live as part of the natural systems as well as being a fairly typical American consumer. This helped me to continue to learn about this delicate human-natural interface that originally was enough to sustain a few humans, but now required that I help build the human-engineered systems to sustain us and our fellow million humans in the valley. What I had learned while working at Bechtel was that every city in the SF Bay area all planned for a population doubling in the next 30 years.

Starting with my studies of projected sewage volumes, I soon was thinking about water supplies for this pending doubling of population in our valley, as I would be elected to the Santa Clara Valley Water District in November of 1972, just four quick months after I had moved into my creekside habitat. Thanks to a warning letter from the Water District's attorney, my employer terminated our relationship the day after the election to avoid any conflict of interests, since the Water District had hired the consortium to do an addendum study with the intent of lessening the potential of water recycling that our original study had indicated was feasible. So considering that my expected monthly income was suddenly reduced to the two $50 per diems paid the Directors of the District at the time, I began to worry about making house payments so I could continue to live in my creekside piece of paradise.

Besides being one of the youngest elected officials in the county's history, I also became one of its youngest consultants. I named my company Water Brothers Environmental Consultants. My friend Ken, who stuck by me, despite everyone from Chicago to Bechtel's headquarters in San Francisco, wondering why he didn't see coming my radical departure from the norm of consulting engineers' everywhere. He made me a beautifully hand-carved shingle to hang at my home office.

So for the next five years, I found a various array of clients that allowed me to use my education and experience to help mitigate and enhance the quality of both humans and the environment by analyzing many engineering projects, from simple land subdivisions to 200 ft earthen dams on top of the San Andreas Fault.
My most interesting assignment was actually the first contract I executed after my departure from the mega engineering companies where I had spent the previous two years.

A new regional government had been created by the State Legislature called the Bay Area Sewerage Services Agency (BASSA) for the purpose of being able to better implement the basin plan for the entire nine counties surrounding the San Francisco Bay. The offices for this new agency were in the elegant Claremont Hotel in the Berkeley hills. I was contracted to be a planning consultant to help launch this new regional government. So I leased a new Volvo and began my consulting career with a 100 mile per day commute. BART was just about complete, but would not be available soon enough to avoid driving 500 miles a week to staff the offices until the Board could hire a manager to administer this new agency, that still needed to define itself.

BASSA was given the rare and powerful authority to sell revenue bonds without any public vote to finance the implementation of the basin plan adopted by the Bay Area Regional Water Quality Control Board, and thereby provide financing whenever a local wastewater authority could not or would not proceed with required construction to comply with the plan. Local governments generally detested the idea of regional government usurping any local authority. Knowing that the wastewater discharges respected no county lines while the cumulative impact of all the sewage outfalls took its toll on the estuary, I could see the State's rationale for creating this regional authority.

I also knew that the federal Clean Water Act had created the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) to gradually move treatment forward until waste(d)waters were clean enough to reuse the water after the pollution was removed from the water. This aspect of the water business was my greatest passion, knowing California's Delta was going to be in jeopardy someday. This water source for much of California, would be interrupted by droughts which would come both from natural causes as well as regulatory and court decrees that would drastically reduce the amount of water currently diverted from the estuary from flows of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers.

All this altruism was finally dashed when the Sanitary District members on the BASSA Board Of Trustees hired one of their own managers to take charge of the agency and declare it to be "the Friendly" Regional agency (unlike the Regional Water Board that issued the regulatory decrees and even fines in addition to developing the basin plan to protect the beneficial uses of San Francisco Bay.) This basically was a signal that this agency would do nothing and the trustees would just meet to have lunch and collect their $50 per diem. A few years later, John Knox, who authored the enabling legislation, introduced legislation to eliminate the agency, knowing it had become a sham government, lobbying against state efforts to protect water rather than helping to implement progressive steps to protect the Bay.

My consultant business continued for about five years when I decided for several reasons to cease this line of work. Since college, I had written enough to fill about three file cabinets with research note, drafts and final reports. I found that I was starting to get writer's block when it was time to draft yet another report.

In 1977, the state was in the midst of a second critically dry year and the bureaucrats in Sacramento were pushing local agencies to reduce per capita consumption and to reuse water to offset the reduced diversions available from the Delta. Many clients were suddenly interested in implementing water recycling systems. While I was designing a water recycling system for a client of another spinoff company from the old Consoer-Townsend staff in San Jose, they were contacted by the City of Gilroy to build a delivery system to bring recycled water to the Bonafonte Gardens and Nursery east of town on Hecker Pass Road. Since this project would have the Santa Clara Valley Water District as a partner, I was asked to terminate my contract to avoid any perception of conflict of interest. Since I was not really an employee of this company, I did not think there really was any conflict, but no one wanted this client to send the work elsewhere, so I terminated my contract and came home to contemplate what should be my next career move.

Coincidentally, during this drought year, I had met another Consoer-Townsend mechanical engineer, Dan O'Brien, at a friend's party. Dan was looking for a place to live with his wife, Mary. There was another house for sale on Coyote Creek just six houses north of ours right on Brookwood Drive. As soon as Dan bought the house and moved in, I proposed that he and I design and build a water pumping system to use the riparian water rights that was part of our property rights in California as creek-side property owners.

California water code is a very schizophrentic set of laws. The Spanish laws that had been applied to water were a very community based approach to sharing water, leading to the concept of Pueblo Water Rights being adopted into the new water code after California statehood was achieved in 1850. This law gives ownership of all the water from the upstream watersheds flowing through the Pueblo to that Pueblo.

The English law, however, used riparian ownership as a key to stake out one's claim for the right to use the water in a stream or river. Most of the cattle barons during early statehood tied up much of the state's stream flows under this law, keeping irrigated agriculture from becoming the vital industry it is today from taking hold in the State until early in the 20th century, when massive irrigation projects were constructed under the Federal Reclamation Act of 1902. These projects relied on yet a third leg of appropriations to use surface or groundwater away from the river or overlying land holdings. First in time, first in right ruled this piece of the water code.

Although the local Water District did not impose mandatory water rationing in the County in 1977, I did not want to ever be in the position of water cop with my immediate neighbors. That was one motivation for building a creek pump to make nonpotable irrigation water available for our landscaping and riparian creek banks vegetation. My other motivation was to demonstrate that nonpotable water systems were a feasible way to reduce costs and increase reliability of the District's water supplies and also benefit the environment. A large percentage of the valley's water supply could be supplied, not with creek water, necessarily, but primarily with reclaimed waste(d) water that we were currently treating to a high degree of purity and then throwing away into San Francisco Bay.

So Dan O'Brien and I designed a pumping and irrigation system for the eight homes adjacent to the creek and after an easy sell to our neighbors, founded the Brookwood Drive Green Watering Association (BDGWA) (BudGawa, as we called it.) For about $1500, we installed a one-horsepower pump and controls, plus 1000 ft. of PVC pipe and three remote timer switches that could activate the pump for up to an hour at a time. Our only out of pocket costs for operation was the power cost for about 800 hours per year of pump operation, costing about $100 per year for the entire street, or $12.50 per household for a full eight month irrigation season.

The pump delivered about 20 gallons per minute, so 800 hours of operation consumed about 1,000,000 gallons of water, or roughly 3 ac.-ft. Agricultural rates in South County were about the only cheaper water in the county, without considering the farmers' energy cost. Wholesale treated water costs from the Water District for urban users was about $120/ac.-ft in 1977, but rose to nearly $600 by 1997, the last year of operation of our pumping system. Since the retail costs of water was at least twice the wholesale cost, our initial payback for the entire capital cost of our irrigation system was about two years, based on the water rates in effect during the first two years. In the final year of operation, we saved our system users a total of $3,600.

The pumping system was severely damaged in January, 1997, when a 6,500 cfs flood wave crested about eight feet above the elevation of the pump level, destroying the control system and spinning the power pole until the romex power cable was wound around it like a spool of thread. I did pull the pump and motor days before the flood, as the upstream reservoirs were full and spilling, the usual antecedent conditions for a major flood in downtown San Jose. Since I was now 20 years older (but only slightly wiser), I decided that I was getting too old for the annual "rights of spring" that involved immersing myself in the decomposing organic sludge on the bottom of the creek bed in order to desilt our "clear well" which consisted of an upside-down shopping cart held in place with pieces of concrete rubble.

Since we had not had a serious drought since the six-year dry spell that ended in 1993, the neighbors did not push to rebuild the pumping system. So without my partner Dan, who had moved away by then, the pump remains in my garage waiting for the day when water costs get so outrageously high or mandatory rationing threatens all our permanent landscape vegetation. Currently water rates have risen so high, my water bill in mid-summer can now cost $100 for a single month, the amount that we used to spend to power a system that irrigated 8 homesteads for a full eight-month irrigation season. My cost for using my riparian water for a month was about $1.50.

Someday, maybe my son, Nick, will again be a riparian water boy.

Changing the Course of the Coyote River in San Jose

Upper Silver Creek Diversion
Or
The Effluent of the Affluent

October 30, 2006

Downtown San Jose Coyote creek-side residents are facing deeper water as the Santa Clara Valley Water District plans its current “flood protection” project. Storm sewage carrying sediment and pollutants from streets, parking lots and rooftops from the upper Evergreen Valley estates has already been diverted into an artificial flume that delivers it to Coyote Creek upstream of its more natural path down Silver Creek. This storm runoff flows into Coyote Creek about eight miles upstream of the normal confluence with the lower Silver Creek, opposite the City’s old incinerator plant, now know as Watson Park.

The engineers at the City of San Jose and the Santa Clara Valley Water District (SCVWD) decided in the early 1970’s to split the Silver Creek drainage area in order to reduce the floodwaters that had for centuries flowed into a upland wetland, now enshrined, and losing most of its former natural beauty, as Lake Cunningham. Part of the natural wetlands, however, was just where the City and developers wanted to place a new state of the art shopping mall, called Eastridge. Because the City immediately began counting the enormous sales tax revenue to be gained from this new cash register, their engineers arrived with a checkbook and an offer to help the Water District staff again change the course of (in this case, not-so-mighty) rivers.

Downtown creek-side residents and the neighborhoods didn’t notice or object to this stormwater diversion project, probably because they weren’t informed about the direct impact such a decision would have on the river running behind their homes. When first constructed, the diversion structure was limited to a flow capacity of about 1000 cubic feet per second. That’s equivalent to about 646 million gallons in a day. During a flood, that is the amount of extra water in the river that wouldn’t be there if the drainage area of Silver Creek was left to its natural course through the wetlands and discharging eventually through the lower Silver Creek into lower Coyote Creek and the Bay.

During the next 10-15 years, after the diversion was installed, this upper Evergreen Valley watershed began to rapidly develop, crowned by Shea Homes’ bellwether “Silver Creek Estates” project, including its golf course and country club. As the watershed was hardened by construction of this (sub)urban development, the runoff from these seven square miles of the diverted watershed began to shed more and more runoff with every storm. Soon, water started pooling at Highway 101, when flows exceeded the capacity of the constructed bypass. The engineers were again on the spot to fix the problem. Although Shea Homes had made modest efforts to contain some of the runoff within their project area, the aggregate runoff from all the development, was now exceeding the 1000 cubic feet per second (CFS) capacity of the diversion culvert under the freeway.

The City requested the Water District to enlarge the culvert capacity below Highway 101 asking for an 84-inch diameter culvert along side the existing culvert. The District decided that it should be a 108-inch diameter culvert to convey the 1% flood from the seven square mile area. Based on this discussion, the staff brought a cost-sharing agreement to the Water District Board where they approved the project on May 24, 1994.The total project would cost $1.227 million, and the District would pay for 17 percent.

The District wanted to appear to be concerned about induced flooding from the project, and wanted the culvert partly blocked to allow less water to be channeled to the upper Coyote until downstream capacity was somehow increased to handle the full 1% flood flows of the entire Coyote watershed from above the diversion discharge. The assumption being plied here was that the 2000 CFS (646 million gallons X2 = 1.3 billion gallons per day) was significant but the slightly reduced flow (@1200 CFS) was not. It makes one wonder which engineering schools induce this kind of thinking?

The District did place a clause in the agreement with the City that indicated that this entire project could be mitigated. In Recital #9 of the agreement it states
“The CITY and DISTRICT agree to cooperate in the preparation of a study evaluating the use of alternate methods of storm water management to reduce flooding and runoff from development within the Coyote Creek watershed upstream of the culvert at Yerba Buena Road and State Route 101.”

The world has changed dramatically for water engineers, even since 1994, when this diversion project was doubled in size without concern for the immediate and measurable impacts on downstream creek-side property owners. Things like Habitat Conservation Plans and hydro-geomorphic analysis are part of the regulations that confounds simple-minded terraforming proposals like the Upper Silver Creek Diversion Project. Even with the California Environmental Quality Act being on the books since the early 70’s, the City and District engineers concocted and build this project without any real consideration it would have on Coyote Creek-side property owners in downtown. Their engineers simply declared it to be insignificant.

The State of California, acting on behalf of the Federal Government in enforcing the Clean Water Act, ordered the communities in the South Bay region to begin to use stormwater detention devices to slow the discharge of runoff into local creeks, trying to avoid both the street pollutant loading and the increased soil erosion caused by increased flow velocities. The District, as a named discharger in the runoff permit, has tried to find a role in locating strategically placed stormwater detention facilities that can contribute to better overall watershed management.

Since this activity ties the Water District closer to the well-guarded function of land use management, the District has spent many dollars and time conducting a collaborative process to communicate its needs for protecting the riparian corridors along the counties 800 miles of streams, creeks and rivers. To date, the process has completed a 130-page Water Resources Protection Manual and an 11-chapter Users Manual: Guidelines and Standards for Land Use Near Streams
These documents can be downloaded from the Water District website at HYPERLINK "http://www.valleywater.org" www.valleywater.org. Unfortunately, the outcome of the collaborative process resulted in the Water District “punting” their role as watershed steward by agreeing that the fifteen cities, and not the District, would be responsible for protecting the riparian corridors, except for the 30% of the creek-side lands owned by the District.

The Upper Silver Creek Diversion has already taken from the full use and enjoyment of the lands of the Coyote Creek-side property owners, exposing them to an annual risk of deeper flooding of their properties, without, either the City of San Jose or the Water District ever offering or paying any compensation.

But if that is not enough pain and suffering to inflict on the creek-side property owners, there’s more at the door. The Water District is currently holding public meetings for the purpose of collecting input on a channeling project to keep more overflows from leaving the banks of the Coyote Creek, by somehow raising the capacity of the main channel to up to 17,000 CFS. The justification for this project, among others, is to remove other parcels of land not on the creek from the danger of flooding, since these properties were built in natural flood bypass channels, which have been clearly mapped by FEMA and available to land use planners for years. Since the District does not protect the community from flooding by advising the City not to build in these areas, they are now pressured by such property owners to protect them from flooding and relieve them from the burden of paying flood insurance.

FEMA Sidebar:
Flood insurance premiums are paid to FEMA, acting as the federal agency managing the National Flood Insurance Program. And it is FEMA regulations that allow homes to be built on the floodways, and then to mandate most lenders to require flood insurance. Despite FEMA being the insurer of many of the properties that flooded, FEMA joined in a local civil action against the City of San Jose and the Water District. FEMA initiated a subrogation proceeding to recover its emergency aid expenditures made during the 1983 flood in Alviso, claiming, as did the plaintiff/victims, that the flood was caused by the City of San Jose. A $300 million suit was settled for $13 million for the flood victim-residents and FEMA. FEMA walked off with $3million of the suit, nearly a quarter of the settlement funds.


This Water District’s current project for Coyote Creek intends to spend tens of millions of dollars in parcel taxes collected under the Clean Safe Creeks and Natural Flood Protection Program passed by two-thirds of the voters in the County in 2000. This program will collect a total of $350 million county-wide over 15 years and expects to spend $35 million on the Coyote Creek, far less than what is probably needed to buy the land, structures and build levees and new bridges to accomplish their goals.

The Water District and the City of San Jose should first confront and resolve the damages already occurring to the Coyote Creek-side landowners before they jointly or separately decide to worsen the condition of introducing additional floodwaters into the existing banks of the creek.