In the last few years, California has experienced extreme wildfires, heat waves and the ever-present COVID-19 pandemic. What has become abundantly clear, particularly from the ravages of the pandemic on low-income communities of color, is that disaster risk is not an equal-opportunity affair.
The latest evidence of this came this month as the Pajaro River levee failed and flooded a small town populated mainly by migrant workers and their families. In an eerie coincidence, the levee failure occurred on March 12, 95 years to the day the St. Francis Dam catastrophically failed because of a defective foundation and other design flaws.
The dam collapse triggered a massive flood in Los Angeles and Ventura counties that claimed the lives of nearly 500 people, many of them undocumented migrant farmworkers. It represents the second-greatest loss of life in California’s history, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, and is still considered one of the worst civil engineering disasters in U.S. history.
