A South Bay Levee Breaks Ground, And Records

On a drizzly Thursday in April, dozens of reporters, government officials, military brass, conservationists, and bureaucrats gathered beside a weedy shoreline on the edge of San Jose to break ground on an effort worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

“We have a grave responsibility to take action, and what you see behind me is an example of that action,” declared Wade Crowfoot, the California Secretary for Natural Resources. 

The humble surroundings belied the significance of the South San Francisco Bay Shoreline Project Groundbreaking. The project will include four miles of new levee and 2,900 acres of restored habitats, like tidal wetlands, to buffer the South Bay from rising seas. It is the culmination of nearly two decades worth of planning. The project is also the first in the nation in which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has incorporated sea-level rise into its planning and design, according to a Valley Water press release. And crucially, it’s distinct from piecemeal city-by-city levee improvements in that it aims to protect a vast swath of the South Bay at once.

Valley Water (formerly the Santa Clara Valley Water District) hosted the groundbreaking event alongside an alphabet soup of contributing organization members: the San Francisco Water District, Bay Conservation and Development Commission, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, California State Coastal Conservancy, and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, alongside city, county, and state level elected officials.  For many involved, the project’s broad popularity and multi-use benefits represent a best-case-scenario for sea level rise adaptation, and they’re impatient to see it working.  

“We are at the crossroads and forefront of climate change,” said California Assemblymember Alex Lee. “It is very important that we continue to use natural solutions.” Nature-based infrastructure is the lynchpin of the South San Francisco Shoreline Project. Rather than walling off the most vulnerable areas from the Bay, the project will defend them from the encroaching sea with deployments of restored marshlands and sloping transition habitats along the levee.

These same defenses will also protect the San José-Santa Clara Regional Wastewater Facility, which serves over a million people. It is one of 36 wastewater treatment plants identified in California as vulnerable to sea level rise — 30 of which are in the Bay Area.