THE CALIFORNIA DELUGE : Last Line of Defense : Flooding: Prison camp inmates help strengthen the only levee protecting a small Northern California town.

On the front lines in the battle to save this Northern California orchard town, Roy Geer is running an impromptu school in levee patching, and right now the professor is up to his waist in muck and mud.

“You got a breach over here!” Geer shouts to his charges, young inmates from a nearby state prison camp. “You got to work ‘em! Can’t be sittin’ around! Bring some sandbags!”

Geer, a fire captain with the California Department of Forestry, and his men have been making like beavers since before dawn, struggling to contain the raging floodwaters that spilled over the banks of the Sacramento River and threatened to submerge Hamilton City, a town of about 1,800 people in the fertile plain about 100 miles north of the state capital.

The forestry department came in as reinforcements for Glenn County Sheriff Kevin Donnelley, who was on the job for only eight days when he had to declare the county a disaster area.

“This is it,” Donnelley said Tuesday morning, gesturing at the low, ill-kept levee that is the only barrier between Hamilton City and a miles-wide flood lake forming across the orchards to the north. “This is the last defense. We’re trying to buy some time.”

With more than 15 inches of rain pelting the upper Sacramento Valley since the weekend, the banks could no longer contain the state’s great river. It rose a foot and a half past flood stage early Tuesday, inundating a wide area north of town and flooding a handful of houses in this region that is home to thousands of acres of walnut, almond and prune orchards and a Holly Sugar plant.

“Probably two-thirds of our roads are under water,” said Donnelley, a burly man with a walrus mustache. “We’ve run out of ‘Road Flooded’ signs.”

Now Donnelley is standing on Road 203, next to the privately owned levee that stopped the river’s flow. The sheriff arrived on Road 203 at midnight. With one other county official, the sheriff filled dozens of sandbags and laid them across a 300-foot section of the levee’s edge to keep the water contained.

A sign nearby reads: “This community protected by Smith-Wesson.” But for now, the gun owners are getting a little help from Geer and the armed robbers, burglars and petty thieves among the 17-man work crews that he supervises from the Valley View Conservation Camp.

The inmates under Geer’s direction are trying to shore up the levee. Rancher Gus Henning, his son and a few other volunteers shuttle sandbags to Geer aboard four-wheel-drive, all-terrain vehicles.

Donnelley, a third-generation rancher born in nearby Willows and raised just down the road, says he is frustrated because the levee has not been well maintained and is riddled with rodent holes.

“If you get a hole and you don’t fix it, it just keeps eroding,” he said. “Pretty soon it will work a hole 30 feet across and you’ll have water everywhere.”

At midmorning, a deputy handed Donnelley a shopping list scrawled on a tiny piece of notebook paper.

Geer needs two 150-foot ropes, four life jackets, two rolls of black plastic tarp, 500 feet of nylon rope, a knife, a small sledgehammer, three bundles of four-foot stakes, a hacksaw and three 10-foot-long pieces of plastic pipe.

Using sandbags and plastic pipe, Geer is building several small, horseshoe-shaped dams that have the look of artillery gun placements, the white plastic pipe protruding like cannons.

If they work as designed, the structures will slowly drain water through the holes in the levee until the area inside the ring of sandbags fills with silt, sealing the gaps.

On the other side of the levee, where the floodwater is lapping against the slope, Geer has dropped the plastic sheeting into the water and weighed it down with sandbags. The plastic will press against the levee and form a seal, he said.

As Geer and his convicts slosh through the chilly waters, not everyone in the nearby town knows of their efforts or cares.

Clem Kreneck, 68, stayed behind when most of the town evacuated Monday night. The utility company shut off his gas overnight, but he turned it back on the next morning.

Kreneck, a retired contractor, has lived here 40 years and remembers floods in ‘57, ‘70, ’83 and ’86. Even if the levee broke, he says, at worst he might see a foot of water in town. Unless Shasta Dam upstream overflows, he sniffs, Hamilton City will be fine.

“I’m not worried,” he said.

Others who did leave when the evacuation was ordered tried to return, but California Highway Patrol officers and sheriff’s deputies would not let them back in. In an angry moment, one man cursed the sheriff, arguing that with the skies clear, at least for the moment, the danger was minimal.

By midafternoon, Geer’s team completes its grimy chore. The holes are plugged and the river is receding for now. Now the men are filling extra sandbags and stacking them on the levee so they will be on hand if the water rises again.

“We’ve got to be ready for the second wave,” he said. “The next storm is supposed to be a real doozy.”