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Across the river from the Pocket and a bit north. It's now a neighborhood of West Sacramento, a decade ago it was farmland that still flooded once in a while until the levees were upgraded. Now it's the suburb south of the Port of Sacramento locks along Jefferson Boulevard.
The forces of nature weren't ignored or forgotten, more along the lines of actively defied and battled over the course of 150 years. We raised the streets of downtown Sacramento to bring them above flood waters, built levees to push back the waters, rerouted the American River to keep it away from downtown (the Amtrak depot is built on top of what used to be a small lake called Sutter Lake or China Slough) and built dams to regulate winter flooding. Long-time local residents tend to be pretty aware of the forces of nature--we haven't had a real soaking in a while, but they still happen.
Thanks. I'm trying to remain aware of the forces of nature too - regardless of the levees and other work done, it's not like a really bad event couldn't happen again, and if it did then the areas that used to be the marshes and lakes would be those most apt to be affected first. I was thinking about moving to North Natomas which is why I was looking for old photos and maps, actually found one dating to the 1850's or 1860's that showed it like a lake with an island in the middle. I wonder if out of all North Natomas, if right where the Arco Arena stands isn't really the top of a little hill and would have been the island I saw in that old photo. Thanks for letting me know where some of these other areas are located you were talking about too, like Southport. Someone told me that Pocket isn't really bad for floods and maybe it isn't, because of the levees, but it's also where there's a bend in the river and I thought bends were where all the weakest points are, but maybe that's only if they are on the outside, not the inside of the bends. North Natomas looks like it would be coming in on the outside of a bend from the river north of it where-as Pocket looks like it would be on the inside of a bend that pushes outward to the west of it. So maybe that makes a difference too. Thanks for your recollections on all these different areas.
The Pocket isn't bad for floods ONLY because of the levees. It flooded plenty before they were built--there was a brickworks there, and some farms. Take a walk on the levee from the Pocket to downtown sometime--in the winter, when the water level is high, you will often note that the level of the river on one side is higher than the level of the land on the other.
In bad flood years, Arden-Arcade and North Sacramento also flood. According to a historian who wrote her thesis on downtown's street raising, we are overdue for the kind of storm that inundated downtown Sacramento in 1861 when a levee along the American River gave way, and the railroad levee at R Street prevented the flood waters from escaping.
I think that is an excellent idea and one day when it's been raining a lot and the river's running high I should go to the levees and see what it looks like. That would give me a good idea of what to expect in the event of a break.
I did look at some places in Arden-Arcade but they were saying it was outside the main flood area, but only toward the north, in the area I was looking, which was upper Fulton above Marconi. I did notice how Fulton tends to keep dropping down in height the closer one approaches the American River. So I was thinking the main flood area was closer to the river, but higher up was mostly nuisance flooding from tiny creeks that wouldn't be so catastrophic.
I know everyone says just get flood insurance and that's what it's for. But it's still a major mess cleaning up and if you lose anything irreplaceable, like photographs, pets or your own life, then insurance doesn't really matter much at that point. In South Natomas they are saying the water can rise 1 foot in depth every 6 minutes, so in a scenario like that there's not even enough time to evacuate and one may as well keep a boat or inflatable rubber raft on hand and hope it doesn't happen in the middle of the night while one is sleeping.
So the floods, that's the one feature of Sacramento I tend to be looking at in all these neighborhoods where I've looked to move.
Of course someone also told me that in the event that Folsom Dam collapsed, then everyone is in danger, not just the lowlands but everywhere. So I guess there's no place entirely free from some flood danger, it's just a matter of degree depending on how low lying you are when it happens.
Thanks again for your suggestions and help. I'm going to continue researching online for old photos of Sacramento over the ages and see if they show what it used to look like and areas of the last flooding as that will give me a clue too.
One would think for being the state capital they'd have built extremely strong cement reinforced super levees by now and have turned them into some kind of regional park and trailway system, the kind that would have gotten international attention and maybe even become a tourist mecca in addition to providing flood protection. It sounds like living in Natomas and some other areas might be similar to living in Holland, where but for the grace of God stands thee on one side and the raging waters on the other. Thanks for your recollections and suggestions.
If you want to get an idea of how development and profit motivated draining wetlands, along with some local history, the following book has a few good paragraphs:
Thanks, excellent source of material. It looks like land development even back then was set to take advantage of people as fast as they could get them to move into the newly drained areas. But they may have done so in haste with the Natomas situation, considering the levees have now been downgraded into less than adequate. I hope state and federal budget deficits don't result in the levee projects around Sacramento being put on hold.
The Bryte map is interesting. That is such a sharp abrupt bend in the river that I wonder if that isn't part of why it would be naturally flood prone, since high rushing water would have a lot of erosion force behind it coming in at a direct angle then being forced to take nearly a U-turn back in the other direction. I hope these days the levees there are adequate and it's not so much of a threat.
I kept associating Sacramento, Natomas in particular, with that of Holland, but according to that one old book, maybe it's more nearly like what it would be living next to the Volga in Russia, if one were to try comparing the countryside and topography of Sacramento with another part of the world.
Where it says Sacramento Bypass Wildlife Area on the map, I assume that means if it overflows, then it's channeled to try directing it all into there instead of into the populated areas.
Still, there is risk living in any area that was at one time marsh land permanently flooded and below the water level.
I will try finding that one old map I found on Sacramento showing what I believe to be North Natomas looking like a lake with an island in the middle and if I find it, I will post the link here - and if you take a look, if you're familiar with that area, then you might be able to discern if that is indeed Natomas and if it indeed would have been a lake with an island in the middle, I'm guessing, somewhere around where Arco arena might be today.
I relocated those maps online I was talking about.
One is from the 1890's, exact date not known. It is a hand drawn aerial presentation of Sacramento laid out and I believe it is showing the Sacramento River on the left side coming in from the northern direction.
If you look out beyond the main downtown area of Sacramento at the time and follow the Sacramento River northward, then you come to a place where you will see the river goes around an island and forms a lake around the island.
This area, to me, looks almost like where the Natomas Basin is currently.
The other map is a more conventionally drawn map showing the entire region from San Francisco Bay on the left to the Sierra Mountains on the right and the river systems dated to 1854.
On this map they have a huge, huge area west of the Sacramento River and the entire thing is labeled Tule Marsh. The area is huge, very huge.
There is also another Tule Marsh region showing down south in what is called Mariposa County.
On this same website was a map of lower Central Valley showing Bakersfield area and for that map, also drawn over a century and a half earlier, they call it the Land Of Lakes - and it shows that part of Central Valley being not marshland, but actual water filled lakes. So there may have been some persistently flooded areas down around Fresno to Bakersfield that was eventually pumped out to create buildable and farmable land.
My only concern of course is just with the flood areas around Sacramento and Natomas in particular, where I looked at some places to move. The historical maps just give a good idea of what to expect in the event levees collapsed and mother nature took over, returning things back to their normal water levels spread over the same areas as in the past, may have been either marsh, or in the case of Natomas Basin, a lake.
I wonder if that is Natomas, on the first map, where the river forms a lake around the little island, then what part of Natomas Basin would constitute the high point that was at one time the island.
Could it be the Arco Arena maybe, since that seems to stick up higher on the landscape looking from the freeway than anything else surrounding it?
Reclamation of flood lands was in some ways motivated by profit, but it was also motivated by population pressure. Until 1910, the city of Sacramento was completely surrounded by levees, and a population of 40,000 lived in four square miles--at the time, a higher population density than San Francisco. People stayed because Sacramento was an extremely good place for a transportation and trade center, and because the agricultural land surrounding it was exceptionally fertile (an after-effect of being flooded by mountain runoff on a regular basis is a thick layer of very rich topsoil.)
I'm not sure what you're talking about on the first map--the southern edge of South Natomas would be on the far left of the picture, and North Natomas completely out of the map. The perspective faces east--the river trailing off into the horizon is the American, not the Sacramento, and the land area in the background is what is now East Sacramento, Arden/Arcade, Carmichael etcetera.
One interesting thing about it is that it shows clearly that Oak Park was developed before Newton Booth/Richmond Grove(the SouthEast side of the grid) even though it is farther from the center. Meaning we had "leapfrog development" even back in 1890.
Yes, last night after I got offline I sat here trying to compare the modern area wide road map to that older hand drawn aerial map and started realizing it must be facing to the east, not to the north, that being the American, not the Sacramento river coming in from the distance, thus that little lake and island nothing to do with Natomas but with East Sacramento locations.
I was too tired to log back onto the computer by then but also decided it better to let the map and question remain - because it was important someone else look at that map to determine the direction it was facing, which yes, I believe it is east too, not north as I originally thought. But bear in mind, I am a ditzy old blonde - I do the best I can with my old ditzy brain.
So darn then. I don't have any old maps showing Natomas to the north from a hundred years ago to see what it looked like. I'll have to keep looking.
The top soil coming in from the floods is what also made the yearly Nile flooding so welcome in Egypt and I'm certain that's why Sacramento and all of Cental Valley near the rivers system make for excellent agriculture, as long as water is plentiful during the drier months to keep that rich soil irrigated.
Maybe gold dust and nuggets still slurry past downtown Sacramento every day coming in from the mountains, there for the taking. If there's a state budget crisis going on, maybe all the politicians could crawl down to the river front and pan for gold thus saving the day. I'd like to see that one on the news, politicians pan the river in Oldtown Sacramento for gold to pay the bills, up to their waists in rubber suits, a look of worry and frenzy gleams in their eyes.
I shouldn't poke fun. State budget crisis might be worse than any potential flooding and could hurt the budget for levee rehab too, another important consideration if I were to move into Natomas.
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I found the maps !!
