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Hamilton Hitchings vividly recalls exactly what he was doing on the night that the worst flood in living memory rolled up to his door in the Duveneck/St. Francis neighborhood.
He and his wife had just bought their house on at Channing Avenue and Heather Lane in late 1997, about four months before the devastating flood of February 1998, he said in an interview. He was home at 3 a.m. when he heard a loud noise.
“I didn’t know what it was. I’ve never seen anything like it. I look out the window and Channing is entirely covered. It’s a river,” he said.
He was among the lucky ones. That night, all the houses around his had their crawl spaces fully flooded; his crawlspace was half-flooded, he said. And as water from the San Francisquito Creek inundated homes in East Palo Alto, Palo Alto and Menlo Park, causing millions of dollars of damage, Hitchings was relieved to see the water stop just outside his doorway.
“If it has been one inch higher it would have come into our front door,” Hitchings said.
Like thousands of other residents in the three cities that surround the San Francisquito Creek, Hitchings has been closely following the regional effort to improve flood control along the creek, which flows from the upstream area around the Stanford University and the foothills to the downstream area around East Palo Alto and the U.S. Highway 101.
The three cities around the creek celebrated a major milestone in 2019, when the San Francisquito Creek Joint Powers Authority completed its first giant project, which included building levees and widening channels in the downstream area around Palo Alto’s golf course, near the East Palo Alto border. Known as “Reach 1,” the project offered instant flood protection to the area around the highway and in flood-prone residential neighborhoods like The Gardens in East Palo Alto.
Since then, however, the flood control project has faced a series setbacks. Its planned “Reach 2” project, which targets the area just upstream of Reach 1, between Newell Road and Pope Chaucer bridges, has faced years of delays and revisions. The main project funder, Valley Water, has expressed concerns about how the financing would be split between cities. Menlo Park residents have opposed the floodwalls that are proposed in the Reach 2 plan. And the entire plan was placed on hold after the Dec. 31, 2022, flood, which upended existing hydrological assumptions and forced the agencies back to the drawing board.
This month, however, residents and city leaders from the three cities finally had a few reasons to celebrate. The first major Reach 2 project, the replacement of Newell Road Bridge between East Palo Alto and Palo Alto, officially kicked off on May 21 with a groundbreaking ceremony. The undersized bridge, which was constructed in 1911, will be replaced with a larger structure under a project that is being led by the city of Palo Alto.
Funded largely through the state Department of Transportation, the long-awaited project on Newell Road is expected to be completed next spring. Once that’s done, work could commence on other parts of Reach 2, including floodwalls and channel widening. Completion of those elements would enable the San Francisquito Creek Joint Powers Authority to finally move on to the project that residents from Crescent Park in Palo Alto and from The Willows in Menlo Park have been clamoring for since 1998: the replacement of the Pope-Chaucer bridge.
Currently, the much-maligned Pope-Chaucer bridge fulfills a critical role as a regulator of water flow. Even though it gets breached during major floods, dumping water onto the streets of Crescent Park, it also contains some of the water that would otherwise flow to the downstream areas.
“Think of it like your thumb on a hose: it backs water up behind it and it shoots water out below it,” explained Margaret Bruce, executive director of the creek authority, at a recent meeting. “If we take the bridge out, downstream properties are going to be more vulnerable to flooding than they already are.
“So we need to protect the banks and protect those downstream properties by adding channel capacity, widening or flood walls. That needs to be done first and then and only then can we take the bridge out.”
The goal is to protect the areas around the creek from water flow of 7,200 cubic feet per second, the equivalent of the 1998 flood — the worst on record. While the exact design of Reach 2 has not yet been finalized, a new report from Bruce notes that the project would involve some combination of the following actions: replacement of the Pope-Chaucer Bridge, removal of significant modification of private pedestrian bridges, widening of the creek and floodwalls.
The creek authority’s board, which includes elected officials from Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, Menlo Park and the two water agencies on either side of the county line, will be asked to choose a preferred alternative for Reach 2 this fall, according to the newly released timeline. The board will hear an update on this project on June 25, according to the report.
While some of the details are yet to be worked out, the federal government is already moving ahead with its own plans that would boost Reach 2. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has been pursuing its own flood-control plans in the area for about two decades, confirmed last month that it plans to play a role in widening the channel in two of the four sites that have been identified in Reach 2. The creek authority, using a grant from the state Department of Water Resources and local funds, would then widen the channel at the other two sites.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has made some progress in recent months, completing a cost-benefit analysis that evaluated the potential economic damage from flooding to the areas around the channel, agency representatives said in April. Its projections showed that the areas could expect damages of about $19 million in any given year, which justifies the $15 million that it plans to spend on channel widening.
The federal agency also performed its own hydrology study, which showed the Reach 2 project significantly reducing, if not eliminating, the amount of water that spills out of the channel. The studies also indicated that the areas around the Pope-Chaucer will continue to see some flooding, even as the problem abates elsewhere. The U.S. Army Corps plans to complete its required analysis in the next two years, move on to design work in 2028 and begin construction in the channel in 2030.
Even if things go as planned, residents around the Pope-Chaucer bridge will likely have to wait for more than five years before construction crews come to their neighborhood. That said, some viewed last week’s ceremony around Newell Bridge as a long-awaited sign of progress.
Thomas Rindfleisch, a Crescent Park residents who has been following the creek authority’s flood-control efforts since 1998, welcomed the Newell Road bridge replacement, which will both improve flood protection in the immediate area and enable the creek authority to focus further upstream, where he and his neighbors vigilantly track creek levels during major storms.
“This is an important step,” Rindfleisch said in an interview. “It’s an example of the community coming together and, with the state and federal government, making a decision that will finally get something constructed. That’s an example of what we want to see in the first phase of Reach 2.”
Palo Alto Vice Mayor Greer Stone, who chairs the creek authority’s board of directors, emphasized at the May 21 ceremony the critical role that the Newell Road bridge replacement will play in the broader effort to contain the creek.
“As we continue confronting the realities of climate change and increasingly severe water events, investing in resilient infrastructure like this is absolutely essential to protecting our communities for generations to come,” Stone said.
He and East Palo Alto Vice Mayor Ruben Abrica both praised their regional partners for their role in implementing the bridge project and other elements of Reach 2. Abrica, who had served on the creek authority board for many years prior to this year, recalled the feedback he received when Reach 1 was completed. Some residents from The Gardens neighborhood came to the council meeting to tell the council that this was the first year that they feel safe from flooding, he said.
“I look forward to the day when it will happen (in the next phase) that people in Palo Alto, East Palo Alto and Menlo Park will also — unsolicited — come and say the same thing,” Abrica said.
