The State : U.S. Proposes Smaller Dam

The Army Corps of Engineers has proposed scaling down the massive Auburn Dam project to a modest “dry dam” designed only to protect Sacramento from floods. The corps’ district engineer, Col. Wayne Scholl, said a flood-control structure storing 570,000 acre-feet of water could be built at the site of the unfinished Auburn Dam for about $290 million. Scholl said it would protect the Sacramento area in a so-called “200-year flood,” the worst possible storm that could be expected in two centuries. The flood-control dam was one of several strategies Scholl offered to a panel of federal and state legislators seeking a solution to the flood threat to California’s capital city. Sacramento barely escaped a flood disaster in February, 1986.