Marin’s king tide preparations worked — until they didn’t

The first in a series of five stories examining the major tidal flooding this month in Marin.

Elected officials from Marin communities inundated by flooding this month said they were prepared, coordinated and largely successful — until tidal surges exceeded 8 feet above sea level and raced inland, overwhelming infrastructure and all their efforts.

“One of the questions we keep being asked is sort of, why weren’t we ready for this?” said Dan Schwarz, the city manager in Larkspur. “What I’d like folks to understand is we program ahead of time. We monitor those predictions.”

“Everyone, not just Larkspur, but all the Marin agencies, were affected,” he said.

Larkspur was just one of the communities caught off guard last week as atmospheric river storms teamed up with king tides and southerly winds. The forces sent sea water surging into homes, schools and businesses, swallowed up parking lots and streets and clogged county transportation corridors.

Schwarz, appearing before the Larkspur City Council on Wednesday, described the events that unfolded as the first disaster-level response in which the county’s Office of Emergency Management “took charge and guided us.”

“It was very impressive,” he said.

He then turned to Public Works Director Julian Skinner, who recounted how residential and commercial areas lining the mouth of Corte Madera Creek were swamped four days in a row.

At its worst, the bay water breached levees, thwarted pumps and drainage, flooded homes and businesses and created a new foot-deep body of water and shoreline.

The reckoning came on Jan. 3, when Highway 101 was closed in both directions in Larkspur and Corte Madera, bringing traffic to a halt on the highway. Rerouted traffic jammed Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, the area around Interstate 580 and the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, and surrounding streets.

Skinner said tidal predictions were blown out of the water.

“The preliminary data is the tide elevation was 8.7 feet,” he said. “So for reference, it was projected to be about 7.2.”

Marin County public works crews and Ghilotti Construction brought in 6-inch pumps to complement the city’s 6-inch pump and try to lower the water level.

“It was pretty disheartening at the high tide the next day when all the water came right back,” Skinner said. “But we kept them going because we couldn’t anticipate what the next high tide was going to be.”

From Sausalito to San Rafael, east to Tiburon Peninsula and into western Marin, the story was the same. They prepared. They coordinated. They handed out sandbags. They set up pumps. They closed streets. They sent emergency alerts. Nobody died.

It mostly worked — until it didn’t, when the water inundated low-lying areas.

Many officials this week said the tidal surge marked the arrival of an era of sea-level rise in Marin.

“How do we now, and long term, try to find some resiliency to try to prevent these events from happening again?” Central Marin Fire Department Chief Ruben Martin said. “Because we know they are going to continue to happen. They’re probably going to get worse.”

Sausalito/Marin City

“The projections are that in the year 2050, king tides will not just be a winter event, but could be a monthly event,” Sausalito Mayor Steven Woodside said at a council meeting on Tuesday.

“It’s a conservative one, as I understand it, and we need to be prepared,” he said.

Like Larkspur, preparations in Sausalito were layered. Drains were cleared. The Southern Marin Fire Protection District sent warnings, distributed sandbags to businesses and residents, and pre-positioned fire crews.

“We were able to provide immediate assistance to our businesses and residents,” Southern Marin fire Deputy Chief of Operations Matt Barnes said. “Unfortunately, our community did result in damage to some businesses and residents … but I do believe that we minimized that.”

Sausalito crews set up a 4-inch pump near Gate 5 Road in the city’s northernmost neighborhood, where the grounds have been subsiding.

“It worked fairly well until we got to a 6.1 tide,” Sausalito Public Works Director Kevin McGowan told the council. “At that point we had drainage water coming down the hill as well as a 6.1 tide. We couldn’t do anything with it. Everything just went over the side, filled the whole road.”

“This was a good test, even though it failed,” he said.

“Our response and emergency teams worked really hard throughout the weekend,” Vice Mayor Melissa Blaustein said after the meeting. “When I think of what we can do more of, I would like to see us have a flood hotline so residents can immediately reach out and be connected to Southern Marin fire crews. And I think we need to talk to the residents of Gate 5 Road about what types of pumps and infrastructure they need in the short term.”

Blaustein said Sausalito has extensively studied sea-level rise impacts and has a range of potential shoreline adaptation plans and infrastructure upgrades.

“The problem we’re really dealing with here is that these systems were designed in World War II,” she said. “The way our flood levels have changed, the way our sea levels have changed, just the way the general infrastructure has aged, they’re not sufficient for the times we’re living in.”

Much of Marin’s shoreline infrastructure was built in the middle 20th century by local, county or federal agencies.

Other local officials had similar reactions, whether their communities were flooded or not.

In Marin City, Terrie Green, chair of the Marin City Community Services District, said she was grateful a pump system installed by the county two years ago minimized tidal flooding at the Highway 101 entrance to the community.

But she said that project and others didn’t get started until she and others sought funding outside the county.

“The water issues that Marin City has been suffering with for years can be mitigated,” Green said. “But it has taken folks from the outside to come in.”

Belvedere

Mayor Sally Wilkinson said bay waters came within a foot of breaching Beach Road, which could have flooded a third of Belvedere’s homes.

“We just got very lucky,” she said. “The pummeling rain halted about two hours before the king tide hit its peak. … We could have flooded.”

Belvedere was in line for a $15.6 million federal grant to rebuild and raise Beach Road, which sits atop a nearly century-old levee. The Trump administration canceled that program. The city will spend $4 million in local funds to fortify several sections of that sea wall until funding can be found for the larger project.

“But the bigger question is the bigger project,” Wilkinson said. “We are never going to be able to raise enough money internally to fund that.”

Corte Madera

Town Manager Adam Wolff said officials were “caught off guard.” The scenes there were stark: workers at a local gym piling sandbags as water poured in; residents paddling kayaks and paddleboards through the streets; families carrying their children through thigh-high water.

“This was an extreme event,” Wolff said. “This event did expose our vulnerabilities that we’ve been talking about for a long time.”

Councilmember Eli Beckman said that in years past residents have resisted conversations about sea-level rise, which slowed the town’s creation of a climate adaptation plan.

Recently, he said, sentiments have shifted. He said the issue now is finding funding for long-needed measures, such as reengineering the town’s berms, which residents said did little to stop the water as it poured over the barriers and into neighborhoods.

“When we’re looking at a $200 million to $300 million climate adaptation plan, the obvious reality is that funding has to come from the state and the federal government,” Beckman said.

“And what we see at the federal level is we’ve got a Trump administration that rather than helping communities protect themselves and prepare for climate change would rather pretend climate change isn’t happening,” he said.

Tiburon

Councilmember Jack Ryan said the town was left relatively unscathed and was as prepared as it could be. The town had flooding in two main areas along Tiburon Boulevard, as well as some water incursion downtown.

Ryan and Councilmember Alice Fredericks noted that one area of consistent flooding occurred at the intersection of Tiburon Boulevard and Greenwood Cove Drive. It’s a multi-jurisdictional area, which limits the town’s ability to intervene.

In other spots along the boulevard, including at the intersection of Beach Road, flooding is an ongoing threat the town hopes to address in upcoming budget cycles, Fredericks said.

“The town will continue to search for opportunities to collaborate with the County and Caltrans as opportunities for projects and funding are identified,” Fredericks wrote in an email.

The town is collaborating with the county to build a living shoreline at Greenwood Beach to minimize coastal erosion.

The town also has been working to upgrade its storm drain system, which Vice Mayor Isaac Nikfar said resulted in “significant improvements with little to no disruptions downtown, especially given the massive surge of king tides.”

He said there is still much work to be done.

“What we have been uncovering for the past few years is that Marin County as a collective unfortunately deferred many crucial maintenance projects and improvements over the past 20-30 years and we are feeling those effects now,” he said in an email. “It’s incredibly important that local leadership roll up their sleeves and ensure that these challenges are being addressed.”

San Rafael

Flooding at an AT&T communications hub led to disruption of 911 services across Marin County.

Mayor Kate Colin said the floods “were the highest we’ve seen in more than 30 years and a clear reminder of how complex and interconnected our flooding challenges are.”

She said the city is working on a shoreline adaptation plan to prepare for flooding.

Assistant City Manager John Stefanski said the city’s response to the flooding was “overall successful,” but pointed to similar long-term funding challenges experienced by other cities and towns.

“Meaningful flood protection in the Canal neighborhood and across San Rafael will require substantial upgrades to pump stations and other critical infrastructure, with costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said in an email. “Larger regional solutions, such as shoreline or seawall projects, would require comparable investments.”

“At the most basic level, the flooding this weekend was due to the land being lower than the Bay during the highest tides, and we cannot control the tides,” Stefanski said. “Minimizing the impacts of sea level rise will require the support and funding from regional agencies, state, and federal partners. ”

The city is working on a feasibility study in collaboration with local organizations, the county and the University of California at Berkeley to plan for sea-level rise in the Canal and other neighborhoods. A project update is planned Jan. 26.

Stefanski said the city is also working to maintain infrastructure and identify interim flooding solutions. He said all pumping stations in the city were operating properly, but said they could only pump so much water out and could not prevent the bulk of the flooding.

Unincorporated area

County supervisors, who, like local leaders, praised public safety and public works teams, acknowledged more funding is needed for overdue upgrades of infrastructure.

Much discussed long-term solutions to address sea-level rise will come at a price, county planners noted.

“Projects that protect from the high tides will likely change the waterfront and we need to consider the trade-offs carefully,” Chris Choo, assistant director of the Marin County Community Development Agency, said in an email. “Water is a powerful force and the solutions to keep us dry will shift the look of our shorelines.”

As for the near future, county leaders suggested that the best they could do was share more of its resources as needed by localities.

“In general, our crews had a good response,” said Supervisor Dennis Rodoni, whose District 4 includes Larkspur and San Rafael’s Canal neighborhood, which also took on water.

“We got surprised by the flood levels and need better data from the weather agencies and perhaps some built-in alarms to notify our OEM when the levels predicted are being exceeded,” he said, referring to the Office of Emergency Management.