Excerpt from an interview with Dr. Jeffrey Mount:
Q. If you were making a bet, where would you say the next New Orleans will be?
A. I’d say the Sacramento area. The common denominator is concentrated urban development in the shadow of flooding and levees.
You have around 400,000 people at risk from flooding, and the number will grow in the next few years because of intense development.
The city’s main problem is that it is situated between the American and the Sacramento Rivers and at the base of the 12,000 foot Sierra Nevada range. Both rivers are prone to flooding. Additionally, powerful storms come in from the Pacific, slam against the mountains and dump heavy precipitation that ends up very quickly in the rivers.
Yet, around Sacramento — the capital of the seventh largest economy in the world — there’s intense building on the flood plains.
Twenty miles downstream is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a maze of leveed islands and channels that flow into San Francisco Bay. Because of past agricultural practices, the delta is sinking. Parts are 20 feet below sea level, lower than anything in New Orleans. Still, there are proposals to put up 130,000 new homes in the delta.