Can we handle a big flood?

A year after the haunting images of Hurricane Katrina, Sacramento remains at serious risk for a similar disaster.
It is hard to fathom, especially on summer days like these when Sacramento's two rivers, the American and the Sacramento, appear as sparkling ribbons flowing between levees covered in grasses and cottonwood trees. But the dangers are grave, and solutions elusive.

With the one-year anniversary of Katrina approaching, The Bee asked state and federal hydrologists last week to describe what the water flows and river heights would be if floods of certain magnitudes arrived in Sacramento. It was a departure from the more common practice of talking about floods in terms of their likelihood, such as 100-year events (those with a 1-in-100 chance of happening in any given year.) The estimates, which engineers dug out of recent and complex hydrological models by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, are chilling.

from the Sacramento Bee