Flooded Farmers Blame State Policies on Wildlife

As the prickly heads of artichokes emerge from the flooded fields of Central California, farmers don’t blame the heavens for their plight but what they see as an ill-conceived government effort to protect local wildlife.

Shaggy cottonwood trees and accumulated debris, which have been left in place over the years along the banks of the Pajaro River as part of government environmental policy, caused breaches in two levees that were responsible for most of the damage in the region, the farmers bitterly say.

A dispute between farmers and government officials that simmered for years has boiled over after last week’s torrential rains and destructive flooding. As the damage to California’s “salad bowl” has mounted, farmers are loudly blaming bureaucrats while bureaucrats at all levels are blaming one another.

“We’ve been crying about this for years,” said an angry Ed Kelly, chairman of the California Strawberry Commission as well as the local flood-control district, who saved his strawberry crop by trucking in clean water to his farm and having workers clean the fruit by hand.

The feud has focused on a 13-mile section of the Pajaro River channel that cuts through the lush fields between Watsonville and Pajaro. The channel has not been thoroughly cleared out for about 20 years, leaving the surrounding fields, farmers say, vulnerable to flooding in order to preserve the habitat of an obscure and endangered amphibian--the Santa Cruz long-toed salamander.

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But state officials say the farmers are directing their wrath at the wrong target. Protecting the salamander is not the problem, officials say, because the creature never lived along this part of the river. But they acknowledge that preserving the river habitat for the survival of other wildlife--such as steelhead trout--is the reason for the policy.

The farmers want to cut all the trees along the inside of the levees, while environmentalists, state officials and many local people would like to clean the channel bed but preserve many of the trees on the levee slopes.

Keeping the trees does not “preclude flood-control activity,” said Keith R. Anderson, senior fisheries biologist in the Monterey office of the state Department of Fish and Game. Anderson said that the Santa Cruz Board of Public Works, which is primarily responsible for flood control, had the necessary permits from his department to clear more of the channel than they did, particularly sand and gravel bars. Clearing out the channel would help prevent debris and water from backing up and threatening the levees.

Indeed, Brian Turpen, assistant director of public works for Santa Cruz County, said Thursday that the county had set aside $300,000 for sand and gravel bar removal. But Turpen blamed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for twice refusing permission to remove the sand and gravel on grounds that the situation wasn’t an emergency.

“Nobody knows if the flooding would have happened if we’d been able to do the work,” Turpen said. “But we know it would have been better. . . . We still haven’t got (the permit.)”

But the corps says it is not to blame either. “There was no delay,” said Lt. Col. Michael J. Walsh, San Francisco district commander for the corps. “We had been warning the county for a number of years.”

Walsh said the county only submitted its permit request last October, some of the information was missing, and the corps and the county were discussing the need for an environmental review of the riverbed as recently as February.

The corps built the levees to control flooding along this lowlands section of the Pajaro, completing the work in 1949. “This is not a natural habitat--it’s used to control floods, not like a normal river would be,” Kelly said.

Agricultural damage in the Watsonville-Pajaro area--currently estimated at as much as $46 million--would have been one-tenth as much had the levees not broken, Kelly said Thursday as he grimaced at the sight of a neighbor’s mud-clogged strawberry field.

“Bureaucrats!” he exclaimed in frustration.

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For the lucky ones, however, Thursday was a gorgeous day in much of the flooded region--sunny and in the 70s. Many farmers on higher ground escaped damage, said Bill Scurich, who with his brother raises long rows of raspberry bushes.

The fruit is fine, Scurich said, “although growers are concerned about the potential for root rot” because of the damp soil.

The town of Pajaro, on the other side of the river from Watsonville, remained a mess, however.

Early last Saturday, the town was flooded in some places with water more than four feet high after the levees broke. Electricity was still out Thursday.

Farm tractors and construction equipment ground up and down muddy Salinas Road, the town’s main drag, as merchants hauled soggy goods and equipment out onto the sidewalks to dry. Health authorities have advised people to get tetanus shots while state environmental officials slogged door-to-door in rubber boots, warning residents and store owners not to place hazardous wastes in the dumpsters on street corners around town.

Steve Tsuda, sales manager for the Watsonville Berry Co-op, said that the 23-grower cooperative had planned to start storing strawberries in its cooling facilities at Pajaro last week. Now, he was scraping mud out the co-op’s offices.

Tsuda, shaking his head, said: “Our main priority is to get our office operational, get the power back up and our computers running.”

Parrish reported from Watsonville and Sanchez from Los Angeles.