Schellville: Sonoma Valley’s most flooded neighborhood

Rain over the past week repeatedly flooded Schellville thoroughfares – not to mention the car engines of drivers who entered the waist-high water – in what has long been regular part of the rainy season in Sonoma Valley.

Flooding has been a pernicious issue for Schellville nearly since its inception, when farmers were inundated with the overflows of Sonoma Creek in their fields. But inadequate infrastructure and the rapid influence of climate change has created the potential for more intense impacts from atmospheric rivers that could further disrupt residents and businesses in the flood-prone Valley neighborhood.

"Over the next 10 days, Sonoma can expect more than 6 inches of rain with the potential to receive as much as 8 inches,“ said National Weather Service Meterologist Ryan Walbrun on Monday.

A flood warning was issued to Schellville from Dec. 28 through the evening of Dec. 31, then expanded to Jan. 4 and 5, because strong Pacific storms’ “increased runoff will result in rapid rises and flooding of area rivers, streams and creeks,” including artificial lakes like the one at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art along Sonoma Highway.

Schell or high water

“It's never seen a rise so quickly as it's seen in the last couple of weeks,” Kate Eilertsen, executive director and chief curator of the di Rosa, said Friday, Dec. 30. “In the last two weeks, that lake has risen by 2 feet.”

One gallery, which is built into the earth and is called “the Tunnel,” flooded overnight on Friday, Dec. 30. Visitors would, under normal conditions, enter the gallery to observe an exhibit that replicates the stained glass windows from Chartres Cathedral in France.

“It's a cool piece because (the stained glass windows) are all on television monitors, the replication of the stained glasses,” Eilertsen said. “And in 6-minutes time, it goes from sunrise to sunset in the stained glass windows.”

An electrical box powers the monitors, so when water inundated the floor, Eilertsen had to close the gallery until the flooding cleared.

Eilertsen’s is not the only business who was besieged by recent major rainfalls.

When the owner of Kivelstadt Cellars, Jordan Kivelstadt, began working with a new lender this year, they came with a new set of terms and conditions.

“I am required by our lender to carry flood insurance and it's ridiculously expensive,” Kivelstadt said.

He pays $11,000 a year for $500,000 of coverage for flood damage, but that’s not the most difficult challenge rising waters pose to Kivelstadt Cellars.

“The hardest part is trying to look at the rain and decide whether or not to call up my staff,” Kivelstadt said. The wet weather can close the business, but it’s hard to know when to pull the open sign.

Flooding at the intersection of Highway 12 and State Route 121 often causes local authorities to shut down the water-logged roads to traffic, as seen last week.

“Because the intersection floods, which happens sometimes here... CHP closes off the road, just north of our property, just east of our property and just west of our property,” Kivelstadt said. “So if it's a flooding day like that, we're closed.”

When flooding funding runs dry

Flooding is as much a part of Schellville’s history as the farming communities that live there today. As a floodplain of Sonoma Creek, officials had to engineer flood dikes to control the flow of storm runoff around the creek, thus making Schellville suitable for farming.

“Much of Schellville is built on the margins of a large tidal wetlands complex at the north end of San Francisco Bay that was diked and drained to create farmland in the late 1800s,” said Richard Dale, the executive director of the Sonoma Ecology Center. “The farmed area was in part used to grow grain for San Francisco's transportation system of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — horses.”

But in the second half of the 20th century, investments and upkeep of flood infrastructure began to dry up, former Index-Tribune publisher and editor Bill Lynch wrote in 2016.

“When the dredging and levee maintenance got too expensive and was stopped, the creek began to revert to its annual and natural way of overflowing into the surrounding land,” he wrote.

After landowners and farmers complained about the flooding, the Army Corps of Engineers created an $11.5 million flood control project for Sonoma Creek in the years after WWII, Lynch wrote.

But the plan – a heavy development project to create a concrete channel that straightened the creek through Boyes Boulevard – was rejected by the public of the 1960s, who questioned the environmental impact of such a proposal, Lynch wrote.

In recent days, Sonoma Valley has been pummeled by one atmospheric river after another, dropping 5 to 6 inches of rain as of Monday afternoon. Schellville is at the mercy of the rising San Pablo Bay, which can spark additional flooding especially during high tide.

“The capacity of stormwater systems and local streams to handle the already increased demand for their conveyance will be stretched,” Dale said. “There will be more flooding, and without increased planning efforts and implementation of good plans, flooding will be more intense in low lying areas where the water flows to.”

Contact Chase Hunter at chase.hunter@sonomanews.com and follow @Chase_HunterB on Twitter.