Mayor Young: City Staff worked through the night to save Benicia from even more drastic flood impacts
Nextdoor and Facebook, by Benicia Mayor Steve Young, October 25, 2021
Benicia Mayor Steve Young
The historic storm yesterday saw the City staff make a number of critical decisions that saved the possible failure of an aging lift station in the Industrial Park. Had that station failed, significant amounts of raw sewage would have been released into the Strait and the City would likely have faced very large fines. Besides the quick and decisive action by the Public Works Utility staff, a huge thank you to Ponder Environmental for loaning the City some large tanks to help out when most needed.
In addition, the huge amount of water flowing into Lake Herman threatened to reach the spillway in an uncontrolled release, which could have caused flooding into the Industrial Park and elsewhere. The decision was made to fully open the release valve and divert the water into Sulphur Springs creek. By doing so, we were able to release water as fast as it was coming in.
We all owe our gratitude to the City workers, including Fire and Police, who worked through the night to protect our community.
Some Flooding reported in Benicia, power outages in Vallejo
The City of Benicia has a weather page that is updated every five minutes. At 6pm today, the Benicia Water Treatment Plant chart showed that we have received over 3 inches of rain since midnight this morning. My phone says it will continue raining all evening and through the night.
East E Street Benicia about midway between East 2nd and East 5th St. There’s severe flooding as I write this and the city has warned and blocked off the street where the flooding exists. However, people insist on coming through and driving rather quickly which causes the water to splash up onto our neighbors across the street at Solano Benicia (where all the mobile homes are at) causing even more flooding. If you read this and you’re coming down this way please just drive through slowly, extremely slowly, or go a different route. that would help a lot thank you.
POWER OUTAGES NEARBY – As of 6:30p.m., PGE reports that Benicia is not experiencing any power outages, but several exist in neighboring Vallejo.
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