Hydrologists Take Controls in Flood Room

When the rain and rivers rage, Hassan H. Kasraie’s favorite place to take shelter is the snug, dry inner sanctum of the Flood Room.

In this tiny space, about the size of a walk-in closet, a handful of officials at the county government center try to “control” a flood.

“It’s where the action is,” says Kasraie, the county hydrology manager.

Out in the rain, it is possible to view only one flooded plain or rushing creek at a time. Inside the Flood Room, “you see the whole picture,” Kasraie says.

The picture is drawn on three computers, which were the center of attention during Tuesday’s flooding. Beeping insistently and flashing “alarm” in red capital letters, the machines display information gathered by radio signals from 72 monitoring stations across the county.

Dolores Taylor, in her 25th year as a flood control worker, makes the monitor jump from one chart to another.

One screen shows the rainfall, in inches, at some 20 sites from Piru to Oxnard. Another shows the flow rates, in cubic feet per second, at gauges stuck in a dozen creeks and rivers. These are the numbers that flash red, with messages reading “over maximum capacity.”

Despite the high level of automation, officials say the systems would be useless without such workers as Taylor and Kasraie.

“It takes an experienced engineer to make some sense out of it,” says hydrologist John G. Weikel, who has worked the flood room in other storms. “You have to have a human intelligence to interpret, to separate false alarms from the real thing.”

The phone, meanwhile, does not stop ringing, with a new call the moment Taylor finishes with an old one.

A landowner wants to report that a flash flood has lodged two BMWs and a Honda against a bridge on his property. The Army Corps of Engineers wants technical assistance.

The Navy asks if its base at Point Mugu is going to flood. The National Weather Service predicts three more inches of rain in the next three hours. A Simi Valley man does not like the looks of the creek outside his house.

Taylor knows most of the people on the other end of the line. She remembers them from the floods in 1992 and 1978, and from the dry years in between, when they sued the county or tried to cut the flood control budget or tried to build houses in flood plains.

Flood control, while glamorous and fast-paced during a flood, can be thankless work when it isn’t raining.

“People forget. They forget days like this,” Taylor said Tuesday. “People come in and we say you can’t build there, we know that spot is dangerous. And they say oh, but it’s such a pretty spot.”

The ones who build there anyway do not get much sympathy from flood control officials.

While sympathy is in short supply, there is a bumper crop of anxiety. The mood inside the Flood Room is frantic, a cross between a college library on the night before final exams and Mission Control a few minutes before a space shuttle launch.

People pull 12-hour shifts. Coffee mugs and empty fast-food packages collect on the desks. An armed sheriff’s deputy is stationed in the Flood Room with the water engineers for most of the morning.

Officials explain their anxiety by tersely noting what all the numbers on their computers mean. “Death. Destruction. Property damage,” Taylor says.

The hydrologists say their jobs require a high degree of accuracy; their forecasts are used to plan evacuations and to guide emergency responses.

“There’s not a lot of margin for error,” Weikel says. “People don’t like false alarms, but when there’s a real threat, they’ve got to know that, too.”

If there is an error, the flood control engineers do not leave each other much room for passing the buck. When Calleguas Creek threatened the newly built Casa Pacifica facility for abused and neglected children, Taylor mentions it to another hydrologist who had approved the plans to locate the building there. “We know who made those calculations,” she says.

Once the worst of the deluge passes, there is glee in the Flood Room, or at least a sense of relief.

“We’re going to make it. We’re going to make it. We’re home free,” Taylor tells one caller late Tuesday afternoon, as though the shuttle had entered orbit or the last final exam had ended.

The happiness that then fills the room is tinged with pride. “I think our flood warning system was very effective at saving lives and property,” Weikel says.

Some of the officials inside the flood room even gloat, joking about the increased “job security” they say comes with each flood. After all, they say, if there were never any floods there would not be much use for flood control officials.

But, like a well-built levee keeping a river from running over, Taylor keeps the egos of the hydrologists from swelling out of control. And she cautions against taking pleasure in the misery of a flood.

“No one needs this much job security,” she says, eyeing the flashing red numbers on her computer screen.