This is the first of a three-part Washington Examiner series on California’s aging infrastructure and its impact on the lives of residents after years of failed spending programs and neglect from elected officials.

California’s
outdated
infrastructure
is teetering on the brink of disaster, exposed to a
Katrina-style flood
that will cover areas with billions of gallons of water.

State and federal lawmakers have been warned about the looming crisis for decades but haven’t created a way to pay for upgrades to 70-year-old dams in danger of overflowing or springing a leak, according to officials.

$2.7 BILLION BOND FUND TO BUILD RESERVOIRS SITS IDLE IN CALIFORNIA

Old levees with no modern upgrades spilled over into towns during January’s bomb cyclone storm, prompting Gov.
Gavin Newsom
(D-CA) to make a trip to survey the damage.

And the world’s largest man-made aqueduct isn’t faring much better in central California because the ground has sunk dozens of feet, choking off the water supply. The collapse is so severe it can be
seen from space
.

“Back in 2005, I was warning that we were way behind getting our infrastructure even to minimal levels to reduce risk of flooding. In some places, it remains absolutely true,” Jeffrey Mount, an Earth scientist with the Public Policy Institute of California, told the Washington Examiner.

“It will be an inland tsunami.”

Given the issues, the state’s decision to allocate
$37 billion
to fight climate change in 2022 while various methods to store and move water remain woefully underfunded and sometimes ignored has been panned by
Republicans
.

The Oroville Dam sprung a leak in its overflow channel in 2017 and was in danger of sending a 30-foot wall of water crashing down on a community below. More than 180,000 people were evacuated. Repairs exceeded $1 billion.

“An independent forensic team has already concluded that inadequate maintenance and inspections were at least partially to blame for the disaster,” Rep. Doug LaMalfa (D-CA), whose district includes Oroville Dam, said at the time. “The price tag of this project only continues to rise, and we must ensure the rebuilt spillways will increase safety and functionality of the lake for nearby residents.”

LaMalfa has introduced dozens of bills both in the House and before that as a state assemblyman. Most have died in committee because Democratic majorities don’t see any benefit to allocating money for water infrastructure despite a debilitating decadelong
drought
.

“I got one passed during the Trump administration — the Water Infrastructure Investment Act of 2016. That started the process to change environmental regulations to deliver more water to the farmers,” he said.

It also gave federal authorization to build
Sites Reservoir
in Northern
California
, but the project remains frozen in the planning stage a dozen years after voters appropriated $3.6 billion in construction costs.

“California has been asking for
water
infrastructure for a long time, and the likes of Gavin Newsom has sabotaged even voter-approved propositions designed to expand our storage,” freshman Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) said. “That is going to be a high priority for me — using the resources at our disposal to push for greater water storage and speed along projects.”

Newsom said this month that he will be
funding an additional $827 million
in the budget to repair existing
infrastructure
and expedite new projects “above and below ground, during times like these, reshaping our water systems for the 21st century and beyond.”

Disastrous dams, levees, and aqueducts

California may be getting nearly $1 billion in water-related funding, but that’s a fraction of what is needed to stave off an eventual disaster, Mount said.

The state spends $30 billion a year on areas related to supplying and storing its water. A fund needs to be created with $2 billion per year that can start upgrades on the state’s 1,500 dams — some of which are more than 100 years old.

“We don’t know how much it’s going to cost to modernize, but we know we have to. Some of these are upstream from major metropolitan areas,” Mount said. “There are 91 dams considered critical.”

During a 1986 storm,
Folsom Dam
was within minutes of overflowing because its spillway wasn’t upgraded to allow enough water to exit. Half a million people lived in its path. Then in 1995, a spillway gate broke causing a five-story wall of water to come crashing down.

As for the aqueduct, the disastrous depressed area continues to sink 2 feet a year. The concrete channel has formed cracks and has caved in on itself in spots. And it no longer slopes downhill, so the 6 cubic feet of water per second that used to flow there has been more than cut in half, the scientist said.

It’s not clear when state or federal officials will fix the problem since the area encompasses hundreds of miles. About $100 million has been spent on various repairs since the 1960s, JPL said.

The state also has 1,700 miles of levees, mostly in the Central Valley farm belt. Cities and counties have allowed houses and commercial structures to be built in farmland flood plains, and when storms like January’s bomb cyclone happen, communities find themselves underwater.

Former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) recognized this problem and pushed for upgrades to a levee in Sacramento, which has become the gold standard. Billions were pumped into the project, and the area did not flood during recent storms.

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But attention to levees dried up when Schwarzenegger left office.

“Nobody wants to talk about it because nobody knows how to pay for it,” Mount said of repairs needed to water infrastructure. “The feds are less interested in making major investments into California after [President Ronald] Reagan. He set a policy of pay-as-you-go. California is the fourth largest economy in the world and should be paying for it because it benefits California and no other states.”