If this doesn’t seem like a tenable long-term solution to you, you’re not alone. ![]() If it were to be inundated by a levee breach, salinity would increase so much that “we’d have to shut down the pumps” carrying water south, said an engineer from Ducks Unlimited ( no, really) as he showed us around the site. Sherman Island, and its levees, keep the brackish Bay water out of what’s sent south by the California State Water Project. Of course what really worries Californians is earthquakes. On Sherman Island, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin meet, we stood in those depths, looking what felt like way up to the riverbanks, jokingly advised to look for cracks in the levees. The descendants of those levees wall the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers today - and the peaty land of the islands behind them has subsided to a depth which in places hits 26ft/8m below sea level. Chinese laborers built the first delta megaproject a colossal array of levees to (aspirationally) hold back floods. Meanwhile, settlers began to cultivate the Delta. Miners upstream in the Sierra washed away entire rock faces with high-pressure water, creating a gargantuan “pulse” of sediment that filtered downstream, its traces still visible in the San Francisco Bay today. Once it was a huge wetland carved by a network of intertwined, constantly shifting waterways. The entire Delta is, basically, a lot of dredge. “Wow,” an awed student breathes in reply, “that’s a lot of dredge.” “Slurry it up to 15% … pump the sediment 4 miles at 20,000 gallons a minute … last year we took in about a million yards … probably half of all the dredging in the bay.” “We own the only high-rate offloader west of the Mississippi,” Jim Levine says at our first stop, the massive megaproject called the Montezuma Wetlands, with some justified smugness in his voice. ![]() This year it was a tour of that vast artificial hyperreality just upstream of San Francisco and the Valley - the California Delta. This wonderfully obsessive and obscure group of infrastructure aficionados, guided by Wired writer and Rhode Island School of Design professor Tim Maly, has held an annual “DredgeFest” event every year since 2013. So last weekend I boarded a bus hired by the Dredge Research Collaborative. It has occurred to me that perhaps TechCrunch pays insufficient attention to slurry, sediment, silt, sludge, mud, and muck to canals, earthworks, levees, dikes, dredges, and the Army Corps of Engineers to the vast engineering works, with lifespans measured in decades, that literally reshape our world. ![]()
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