Benicia Proclaims Local Emergency; Announces Testing of Bypass Line for Damaged Water Transmission Pipeline
The City of Benicia proclaimed a local emergency following the break in its water transmission line when a hillside in Fairfield collapsed during recent rain storms.
The declaration of a local emergency will enable the city to use all resources necessary to repair the damaged water transmission pipeline. “It’s important for us to take this action so that the city can receive funding through the California Disaster Assistance Act and any other State and Federal funding that may be available,” said Mario Giuliani, interim city manager.
Benicia Public Works and various contractors are working on a temporary bypass line to regain access to the city’s primary water sources which are delivered via the damaged line. Designing the bypass began last week upon notification of the damage. Construction for the bypass line began on Tuesday, April 4, 2023 and is expected to be ready for testing on Friday, April 7. If testing is successful, then water transmission from Cordelia to the City of Benicia will be partially restored. While testing is scheduled to begin on Friday, it could take several days to fully assess the viability of the temporary system. Construction is now underway 24-hours a day until testing is complete.
“This is a highly complex project,” said Public Works Director Kyle Ochenduszko. “The bypass line is unique to the pipeline system and ever evolving circumstances. While we are confident that the bypass line will be successful, this is a situation with many variables,” he explained.
The bypass line is a temporary solution that will provide the community water while the primary pipeline is being repaired.
The bypass line will deliver water at a lower capacity than the main line. Benicia’s water source will still be coming from Lake Herman until the bypass line has been successfully tested. Benicia residents and businesses are still under 40 percent mandatory water conservation until further notice.
A special webpage has been established to provide a one-stop source for information about this incident. The site can be found at www.ci.benicia.ca.us/WaterTransmissionLine.
Social media posts, email notifications and other communications materials are being regularly distributed to residents and businesses as information becomes available. To sign up for emergency alerts, visit AlertSolano.com. To sign up for email notifications, visit www.ci.benicia.ca.us/announcements.
By Elizabeth Patterson, Benicia Mayor 2007-2020, March 19, 2023
Seeno owned property (Google Earth, 2008) with inset of Benicia’s “North Study Area” (2022) – click to enlarge
Hats off to Steve Golub providing residents and businesses news and information in “Benicia and Beyond”. His first stab at this is a recent interview of Mayor Young.
Council member Tom Campbell has expressed concern about how many years someone needs to live here to fully understand Benicia. He, I believe, is right. For instance, what is the status of the Class I landfill and plume of really bad stuff moving down Paddy Creek? Paddy Creek drains toward Lake Herman watershed. This closed landfill is why in the 80s the City Council adopted a resolution prohibiting residential development on Lake Herman road and East Second street (Seeno). Or what about the 90s when the General Plan was updated and the Benicia Industrial Park Association (BIPA) advocated in large red and black lettering on a poster board “no residential” development – same place. Or in the 2000s when there were two organized groups advocating for denial of Seeno project because there was too much grading, six waterways filled, and traffic was going to be ugly adding to our greenhouse gas emissions. City Council denied the project and then adopted a resolution for specific conditions for any future project.
The Benicia Army’s Arsenal Reservation closure was before there was the federal Base Realignment and Closure Act https://wikipedia.org/wiki/2005. Benicia was on its own. Benicia got zero redevelopment planning help, and there was removal of chemical war weapons and nuclear material, but left unexploded ordinance to be found, lead, tetrachloroethylene, and used infrastructure – in some cases hastily built for the war effort. What part of the Seeno site was used?
Context matters. Historic issues and context is not always easy to find.
The General Plan provides some of this history (at least up to 2000). The General Plan process is explained at the end of the General Plan. We were appointed. We did authentic public engagement. We adopted decisions by consensus. We started with common vision and shared values. We were a committee of citizens representing all sectors of the community (the General Plan Oversight Committee). Until that vision and its goals are changed, it is the law of the land.
And this gets me to the main point which is the following:
At the beginning of this piece I acknowledged Steve Golub’s “Benicia and Beyond”. Steve came to Benicia in 2019 and has the right skills for learning about places and people. His inaugural column addressed questions to Mayor Young, including as follows:
SG: What are your thoughts on whether and how [Seeno property or North Study Area] that should ever be developed for housing? Do you see alternative uses for it.
SY: “I would like to withhold my specific preferences on that in deference to the [North Study] planning/visioning process that is currently underway, and that may eventually come to Council for decision. But I can say, that, as one member of the community, I would hope to see a mixed use development including multifamily and single family housing, in addition to some localized commercial development. Ideally, we would have direct micro transit options to downtown and a few locations in Vallejo. And perhaps some office or R/D uses along the East 2nd St. frontage.”
What is the North Study planning/visioning process? The consultants working for the city and paid for by Seeno conducted an in-person open house at Northgate church and virtual sessions and an online survey. None of these sessions have provided the sixty (60+) relevant goals and policies of the General Plan. Not on a poster board. Not linked to the virtual meetings and nothing in the online survey. Opinions are sought without context or consistency to existing policies in the General Plan.
The 1996 Urban Design Background Report by Mogavero Notestine says this about expanding residential use toward Lake Herman:
“[There] is a lack of connectivity to the rest of the community. Southampton has a sense of isolation from the older parts of Benicia. The sense of isolation [Lake Herman] would be more substantial.
In addition, the sense [of isolation nearer Lake Herman Road] would create a substantially higher demand for automobile trips than, for example, infill.
The present value of the full range of [city] capital and operating public costs created by the development could be $57,000 to $75,000 [adjusted for 2023] per dwelling unit . . .”
World renowned urban economist Joe Minicozzi provided information at the Vets Hall before the Pandemic. We learned that the city would prosper by increasing value of the existing urban footprint. If you are in a hole, stop digging. Benicia is a small town, with limited staff and resources. Smart development avoids a deeper hole– meaning the cost of future maintenance of new infrastructure.
Will the consultants evaluate the economic implications for individual households and broader economic impacts for the community? Computer models should be utilized to comprehensively evaluate the broad fiscal and economic implications of various growth alternatives for the Seeno site, including the impacts for individual households.
The cost to the public depends upon, among other things, the location. Residential infill projects do not require the construction or future maintenance of new infrastructure. It can sometimes provide the resources to repair or replace dilapidated infrastructure. Thus infill provides revenue flow where there was none before without creating new infrastructure cost.
The General Plan goals and policies address the overarching goal of the General Plan. Are you comfortable with the process where staff has the final word on the visioning report that goes to the City Council? Would a seat at the table with stakeholders representing all sectors of Benicia to oversee a report to the City Council be a good idea? Better to be at the table than on the menu, right? Where is the table?
End of Patterson article… More below provided by the BenIndy and City of Benicia
Over the last three weeks, communities everywhere have watched in horror and solidarity with the people of East Palestine, Ohio. Few of those communities have experienced the depth of concern and understanding as here in Benicia, California.
Here’s my 1-minute video commentary.
Backstory, and looking ahead…
In 2013, the Benicia Valero Refinery proposed bringing in two 50-car bomb trains every day, filled with Canadian tar sands crude oil. It took 3 years, but a staunch group of citizens and an incredible army of allies eventually overcame Valero’s slick campaign. On September 20, 2016, with backing from the Benicia Planning Commission, the California Attorney General and the U.S. Surface Transportation Board, Benicia’s City Council voted to deny Valero’s proposal. The City breathed a sigh of relief. And we continue to marvel at our good fortune, and the good fortune of communities uprail from here.
Our collective breath of relief, however, must be challenged by the everyday passage of trains carrying multiple hazardous cargos through our town and across the bridge to other San Francisco Bay Area cities. Stricter regulations are needed from federal and state authorities. Regulations on the trains and the profit-seeking companies that run them, on the rails, and on public preparations for potential disasters. As I said in the video, This is NOT Benicia, but WHO WILL BE NEXT?
Brendan Riley’s Solano Chronicles: Vallejo’s shoreline threatened by zombie ice
Flooding around the old Times-Herald and News-Chronicle building in 1967 on what’s now Curtola Parkway could occur again there and elsewhere in Vallejo without safeguards against predicted sea rise. (Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum files)
Efforts to extend the shorelines of Vallejo and now-closed Mare Island Naval Shipyard, just across the Napa River, transformed bay and river waters into thousands of acres of low-lying land. But those efforts that spanned more than a century are threatened by “zombie ice” and other effects of global warming.
A new study, published Aug. 29 in the journal Nature Climate Change, describes part of Greenland’s rapidly shrinking ice sheet as zombie ice because it’s doomed to melt. The study says that by 2100 the melting ice sheet, no longer being replenished by glaciers getting less snow, will raise global sea levels a minimum of 10 inches and possibly as much as 2 ½ feet.
The sea rise from the Greenland ice sheet would be in addition to other Arctic and Antarctic ice melting due to global warming. Other documents, including a National Academy of Sciences report and a current State Sea-Level Rise Action Plan, warn that ice melt from all sources could cause two or more feet of sea rise on the West Coast as early as 2050 and five to six feet of rise by 2100.
Vallejo was part of a 2018 sea-rise study by a group called Resilient by Design. The study included an interactive risk-zone map on the Internet at sealevel.climatecentral.org/maps that shows the impact of rising levels. That easy-to-use link is available to anyone interested in seeing how our area would be impacted by varying amounts of sea rise.
The Resilient by Design link indicates that a foot of sea rise, without new levees, seawalls or other barriers, would flood a large strip of Vallejo’s Riverfront Park, along Wilson Avenue north of Tennessee Street. On Mare Island, part of its southwest tip would be underwater. Flooding also would occur on marshy land to the north, adjacent to State Route 37 and Dutchman Slough; and on SR37 near Black Point, several miles west of Vallejo.
Without protective barriers, a five-foot rise in the tideline would cause temporary or permanent flooding on most of SR37 (Sears Point Road) between Vallejo and Novato to the west. Much of the Mare Island fill land would be affected, including parts of Nimitz Avenue in the shipyard’s historic core.
In Vallejo, a long stretch of Mare Island Way and part of Curtola Parkway could flood. That would affect the municipal marina, Vallejo Yacht Club, a former State Farm Insurance building proposed as a new Police Department, the Ferry Building, Independence Park and the city boat launch area. Many locations to the south also could flood, including the city’s sewage treatment plant, Kiewit Pacific and the old Sperry Mill site.
Those projected flood zones would affect most, if not all, of the Vallejo and Mare Island shorelines that were expanded starting in the 1850s. Old navigation charts show the Navy, which opened its first West Coast shipyard in 1854, quickly filled in a strip of marshland along the river and constructed a seawall or quay where ships could tie up.
Expansion of Mare Island continued for decades, resulting in the shipyard increasing from less than 1,000 acres to its estimated 5,600 acres today. The new land was formed all the way around the island mainly by dredged mud from Mare Island Strait, the renamed stretch of the Napa River between the island and Vallejo, and by fill that was imported or obtained by digging into original higher ground on the island. Some of the new land is designated as marsh or tideland, but at least half of the new acreage has streets and roads and was used for all types of Navy shipyard activity.
On the Vallejo side, expansion into the Mare Island Strait added nearly 500 acres along the waterfront. The projects included one in the early 1900s that filled in a wide section of river that once separated Vallejo from South Vallejo.
The new land was formed by establishing a barrier that ran straight from the city boat ramp area almost to Lemon Street in South Vallejo. Mud dredged from the river on the west side of the barrier, or bulwark, was then pumped into what once had been navigable water and tideland on the other side.
The dredge-and-fill process that began on a large scale in 1913 took several years, creating more land and more direct road links between the two communities. Present-day Sonoma Boulevard between Curtola Parkway and Lemon Street would not exist without this project. The same goes for the sewage plant, Kiewit and many other businesses.
Without all the fill, you could anchor a boat at the present-day location of Anchor Self Storage on Sonoma Boulevard. The river reached what’s now Curtola Parkway on the north, and spread as far east as Fifth Street, where it turned into a marshy connection to Lake Dalwigk. On the south side, the railroad tracks that cross Fifth Street near Solano Avenue once ran along the water’s edge to the old Sperry Mill area.
More acreage was added to Vallejo’s shoreline in the 1940s near the Mare Island causeway, and in the 1960s as part of a massive redevelopment project that resulted in Vallejo’s entire Lower Georgia Street business district being bulldozed. Many longtime Vallejoans can remember walking out on a pier over tideland to board ferries that ran to Mare Island. That tideland is now the seawall area where people can park cars, take a ferryboat to San Francisco, have a drink or dine out, or go for a stroll.
Before redevelopment, the original Vallejo Yacht Club building stood in the same location as the current building – but on pilings over tideland. Much of the fill dirt for this waterfront extension came from Vallejo’s historic York Street Hill – the site of California’s Capitol in 1852 and 1853. The hill was scraped flat and trucked to the nearby riverfront.
In addition to the shoreline work, nearly 500 acres of usable land were formed by levees and fill in a marshy area where Larwin Plaza, now Vallejo Plaza, was built in 1960, along Sonoma Boulevard on the north side of Vallejo. White Slough, which flows into the Napa River, is on the edge of this shopping center. Traces of the marsh once extended nearly to Tennessee Street, several blocks to the south.
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