WATSONVILLE, Calif. — Officials have known for decades that the Pajaro River levee that failed this weekend — flooding an entire migrant town and trapping scores of residents — was vulnerable but never prioritized repairs in part because they believed it did not make financial sense to protect the low-income area, interviews and records show.
“It was pretty much recognized by the early ‘60s that the levees were probably not adequate for the water that that system gets,” Edwin Townsley, U.S. Army Corps of Engineer’s Deputy District Engineer for Project Management for the San Francisco region, told the Los Angeles Times on Sunday.
And despite having studied it on and off for years, in terms of “benefit-cost ratios,” it never penciled out, he said.
