Endangered islands in the San Joaquin delta

San Francisco Chronicle has a long article laying out the sort of arduous choices many locations will face: …Fewer structures have been more critical to California's development than the 1,100 miles of earthen levees that help funnel water through the 1,300-square-mile confluence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. That water, mostly runoff from mountain snowpack, flows through a web of channels to mammoth pumps in the southern delta, sending billions of gallons of water to 25 million Californians.

But the levees are in trouble, experts say. Rising seas, earthquakes, subsiding land and floods pose dire threats on top of the escalating repair costs to the state. Rather than allowing nature to decide when and how the levees give way, many researchers and policymakers say, California should manage the inevitable reshaping of the delta by deciding which levees to repair after a disaster.

No rules exist yet. But beginning this year, government, scientists, planners, environmentalists and water agencies will attempt to reconcile their views on the barriers that have defined the delta for so long.

…The cost of buttressing all delta levees to widely used standards runs into the billions. "The delta means a lot of things, but what it doesn't mean (is) that all levees that presently exist must continue to exist and be maintained at taxpayers' expense without regard for benefit, difficulty or rationality of doing so," said Phil Isenberg, chairman of the governor's Delta Vision Blue Ribbon Task Force, a panel tasked with developing a sustainable delta management plan….

Sunset on Mildred Island in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta with view of Mount Diablo. Shot by Captndelta, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License