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Watershed, Flood-Risk, and Infrastructure Assessment Coordination - Deputy Director Riske-Gomez
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Requested Action(s)
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Informational presentation on TCTC's ongoing coordination with Public Works - Flood Administration, the Resource Conservation District (RCD), and State and federal partners regarding watershed-driven transportation impacts and the development of a countywide infrastructure risk assessment.
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Financial Impact:
None.
Background Information:
Over the past several years, Tehama County has experienced increasingly severe transportation impacts tied to storm events, altered watershed behavior, and accelerated geomorphic change. These impacts are no longer isolated maintenance issues; they reflect a systemic shift in how water, sediment, and debris move through our landscapes, influenced by post-fire conditions, invasive vegetation, agricultural grading, and over a century of controlled irrigation and flood manipulation.
Transportation impacts in Tehama County are no longer driven solely by storm intensity. Increasingly, they reflect the interaction between anthropogenic modification and modern flooding dynamics, the combined influence of altered floodplains, agricultural grading, regulated river systems, vegetation shifts, and post-fire watershed response. These factors shape how water and sediment move through the county today, producing failures that exceed the design expectations of legacy infrastructure.
The Reeds Creek Road Emergency Repair Project represented a turning point in our understanding of these risks. Repeated channel migration, debris loading, and sediment deposition led to major roadway failures and long-duration access disruptions. Reeds Creek made clear that watershed-scale processes, not local culvert conditions, now dictate the reliability of key transportation corridors.
Since then, multiple storm-driven failures across the county have confirmed that this is a countywide pattern, not a single-...
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