ROMAN MARS: This is Episode Five of Not Built For This: The Little Levee That Could. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The year I moved to California, it barely rained at all. It was 2015, and the local news was doing lots of stories about taking shorter showers and how much water it takes to grow a single almond. For most of my time in the state, California has been hovering somewhere between “extreme” and “exceptional” drought conditions. But then came the winter of 2023.

The rains started on New Year’s Eve. At first, it was relieving—exciting even—to see the dry creek beds spring to life and the sun-baked hills behind my house get a good soak. But then the water just kept coming. The storms went on for weeks on end, until we had too much of a good thing. Many rivers in Northern California flooded that winter, inundating communities that only a few months earlier had been praying for rain.

The new scientific consensus is that California needs to prepare for both drought and deluge as the climate changes. Meteorologists have settled on the phrase “weather whiplash” to describe the bewildering snap from one extreme to the other. Many of the towns that felt the sting of the weather whip were low-income, agricultural communities—towns like Planada and Allensworth and Pajaro, where a river broke through an old levee and displaced over 3,000 people. Following those floods, there were a lot of questions about the capacity of the state’s aging water infrastructure to handle supercharged storms and about who pays the price when that infrastructure fails.

But our story today is about another flood-prone farmworker town in California—one that actually managed to stay safe and dry during the big storms of 2023. It’s called Hamilton City, and it’s a small, unincorporated community built along the Sacramento River in California’s Central Valley. For decades, the only thing protecting Hamilton City from the river was one of the worst levees in the entire state. This crumbling mound of dirt was built right up against the bank, and it was full of holes.

RYAN LUSTER: It was literally like somebody had put a big block of Swiss cheese along the river because it was so full of—you know—squirrels and other ground animals that just were always burrowing, and that’s why it was always problematic. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This is Ryan Luster, an ecologist with the Nature Conservancy, who has worked along the Sacramento River for decades. He says the Hamilton City levee was slapped together on the fly by a sugar beet company in the early 20th century.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: What was it made out of?

RYAN LUSTER: The worst soil that they could find. You know, this is like sandy, loamy soil. They didn’t know that they needed to put clay and all that kind of stuff to make it more solid. You just had guys out there with steam shovels and horse-drawn whatever, piling up dirt, just doing what they could with what they had.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: With only this crappy, swiss cheese levee to protect them, Hamilton City was constantly at risk of getting wiped out in a flood. And that might well have been the town’s fate, were it not for the Herculean efforts of two of its residents: a fire chief and a farmer’s daughter.

When they set out to get a new levee for Hamilton City, they had no idea what they were getting into—no idea how much of their lives would be spent trying to build a better, less hole-ridden pile of dirt. But as it turned out, they were up against powerful economic formulas that have long determined which communities are worth spending federal dollars on—formulas that make it very hard for a small, working-class town like Hamilton City to get the protective infrastructure it needs. But over the course of decades, our heroes navigated a game of bureaucratic Mouse Trap, overcame the economic rules that were stacked against their little town, and forced Hamilton City to the front of the levee line.

Most of the stories in this series have been about places that are ill-prepared for the extreme weather that is coming their way. But this week, we have a story about a place that actually managed to get the kind of infrastructure that will help it survive climate change. 

Because, against all odds, Hamilton City—after a lot of work—actually was built for this. I’m Emmett FitzGerald.

[rolling water, steps]

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Wow, look at that river. Oh, man, it’s moving.

JOSÉ PUENTE: It’s moving!

EMMETT FITZGERALD: I’m standing along the bank of the Sacramento with José Puente. He is the former Fire Chief of Hamilton City. And he is also one half of our dynamic duo. The muddy, brown water is stampeding past us, and it’s incredibly high, or at least I thought it was. 

JOSÉ PUENTE: I’ve seen it higher. [laughs] I’ve seen it higher. This is no biggie. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: He pulls out his phone and checks a website that tells him just how much water is pumping through the channel.

JOSÉ PUENTE: So, you have 9,000 cubic feet per second. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Is that a lot? 

JOSÉ PUENTE: That’s a lot of water. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Sounds like a lot.

JOSÉ PUENTE: Yeah, but I’ve seen it where you have 150,000 cubic feet per second.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: José scrolls through a chart that lists the strongest flows from the past. It goes back decades—to days when José was a young man and the river was running so high that it threatened to break through the old levee and flood the town. And it seems like he was here for pretty much all of those high-water days, down by the river, fighting to prevent a flood.

JOSÉ PUENTE: I was in that flood fight. And I was in that flood fight. And I remember that one, too. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: 1970?

JOSÉ PUENTE: 1970.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: In the days of the old levee, “flood fighting,” as José calls it, was a local tradition in Hamilton City. And José was a legendary fighter. Ever since he was in high school, whenever there was a big storm, he’d be out here, desperately trying to plug up gopher holes and reinforce the levee. José points down the river to the site of one of his more memorable battles.

JOSÉ PUENTE: It was kind of scary, that particular night. We were told just to get away from here, that the river’s going so high.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: In the middle of the night, José and a couple friends headed down to the levee to see the angry river for themselves.

JOSÉ PUENTE: So, we started walking from the bridge all the way out here. Okay. Midnight. Three idiots walking the levee. So, by the time we got over here, we met the sheriff at that time, and we told him. He says, “Well, what do you think?” I says, “We can stop it here.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: All through the windy night, they piled sandbag after sandbag on top of the dirt to try and stop the river from breaking through. Somehow, they held the water back. And Hamilton City survived the night. But even though they were victorious in that battle, José knew they’d never win this war—at least not with that swiss cheese levee.

In the ’70s and ’80s, local leaders in Hamilton City started to get fed up. They shouldn’t have to evacuate the town every time there was a big storm and rely on volunteers with sandbags to keep everybody safe. So, they started asking the government for help.

JOSÉ PUENTE: For a long time, people kept asking our local congressman, “Hey, we need to address this issue of the levee.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And eventually, the Army Corps of Engineers—the group that builds much of the water infrastructure in the U.S.—conducted a series of reconnaissance studies on the old levee. 

JOSÉ PUENTE: And those reconnaissance studies always came back saying, “Yes, there is a problem, but you do not meet the one-to-one benefit ratio.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The one-to-one benefit-cost ratio. José is referring to the all-important formula that for many years has determined how the federal government spends money on stuff like levees and seawalls.

ROB YOUNG: Well, in order to spend the federal money, the Corps of Engineers has to do an economic analysis that shows that there are going to be more benefits in damage averted from the flooding or from storms than the cost of the project. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This is Rob Young. He’s a professor of geology at Western Carolina University and an expert in federal flood infrastructure. Rob says that basically before the Army Corps can go build an expensive levee with taxpayer money, they have to show that the value of the property it would protect is at least as much as the cost of the project.

ROB YOUNG: Which, you know, on the surface sort of makes sense, right? I mean, you don’t want to spend $5 billion of federal money for $10 of benefits. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But there’s a pretty massive problem with making decisions about who gets a levee based on property value. 

ROB YOUNG: The richer you are, the more likely you are to get federal flood protection. It biases our flood protection projects to expensive infrastructure and away from those who probably need the help the most. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Rob is particularly critical of the Corps for funding projects that protect the beachfront second homes of wealthy people—wealthy people who could probably afford to pay for their own flood protection.

ROB YOUNG: And the reason for that is not that the Corps is evil or they’re just mean, but it’s this ingrained system of the economic analysis.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Ultimately, that ingrained economic analysis means that if you’re a small, working-class town along, say, the Sacramento river in California, for example, and you really need a new levee, you’re pretty much screwed.

ROB YOUNG: The way the system works right now…If you don’t have high-value property, then you’re much less likely to get federal protection. Just as simple as that. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: For decades in Hamilton City, it really was just as simple as that. The town kept asking the government for help. But every time the Army Corps ran the numbers, help was not cost effective. Here’s José Puente again. 

JOSÉ PUENTE: I think that the federal government kind of figured that it’s a lot cheaper if we pay for the damage versus doing an investment on the construction of the levee. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But even though the math was stacked against them, José was determined. By the ’90s, he had become the head of the Hamilton City Fire Department. And he’d been fighting floods for literally half his life; he was tired of it. And so José decided he was going to make it his mission to get Hamilton City the new levee it deserved. 

He didn’t know anything about federal infrastructure policy, but how hard could it really be? 

JOSÉ PUENTE: We had no idea. We didn’t understand what we were getting into. I mean, for us, when we started, it was a shot to the moon, okay? It was a dream.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: José started rallying people in town together in pursuit of that moon shot. They formed an official organization. And they wanted an official-sounding name—something that people would have to take seriously. They went with Hamilton City Citizens in Action, which they shortened to the CIA.

JOSÉ PUENTE: We put CIA…Our first event that we did, people really thought it was the CIA. [laughs]

EMMETT FITZGERALD: In order to recruit people to the CIA, José would go around town, giving a little spiel about the need for a new levee to anyone who would listen.

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: I would see him at all of our nonprofit meetings—the Lions Club, the women’s club, that type of thing…Him coming everywhere, to church… I would see him all the time coming, giving his speech, “I need help. We need help. We have an issue.” And, you know, “the more people that get involved, the better off we are.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This is Lee Ann Grigsby Puente. 

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: And I was like, “What? What is he talking about?” 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Lee Ann didn’t know that much about the levee or the Army Corps of Engineers and its benefit-cost ratio. She also didn’t really know that much about José, but she understood his sense of urgency.

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: I was raised in agriculture. We know what it’s like to have to protect the land and the power of water. And that’s what a lot of people don’t understand. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And she thought she might have something to offer. 

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: I mean, I can take notes. I can make an agenda. You know, I can answer the phone, I can make phone calls—you know, those types of things—I can do that. So I asked him, I said, “I want to help. What can I do?” And next thing I knew, I was coming to big meetings. And I was like, “Oh, what did I get into?” 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Pretty soon Lee Ann was a fixture at these meetings. And she and José became partners in crime. Lee Ann was the talker, the mouthpiece for the organization, while José was quietly getting stuff done behind the scenes. They started spending so much time together working on the levee project that they became really close. A few years after founding the CIA, they got married.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: So, your whole relationship is based on… 

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: Based on the levee [laughs]. And an eroding levee, so can you even imagine? 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But Hamilton City’s new power couple was facing an uphill battle, because even if they could somehow get the Army Corps of Engineers to agree that it was worth it to build them a new levee, it turns out Hamilton City would actually need to pay for part of it. With big infrastructure projects like this, the local people have to make a significant contribution to the cost—usually 25% to 35% or so—which, for a big city can be fine. But for a tiny, unincorporated community like Hamilton City, was pretty much impossible.

JOSÉ PUENTE: Well, there was no way the locals could meet the 25%.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: It wasn’t exactly clear how much that would be, but it was certainly in the millions and potentially in the tens of millions of dollars. They weren’t gonna raise that money all at once, but they needed to start somewhere. And Lee Ann and José came up with an idea. They would throw a levee festival in downtown Hamilton City and ask all the best cooks in town to volunteer.

JOSÉ PUENTE: And to our surprise, everybody said yes. 

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: So if your family was good at making tamales, then that family did tamales. If your family was good at making carnitas, then that’s who made the carnitas. Carne asadas, tacos, corn on the cob… 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Citizens in Action started hosting one or two levee festivals a year. They were fundraisers but also acts of political theater, to show the powers that be how badly this little community wanted a new levee. They would invite local politicians and nonprofits and people from the Army Corps. And they knew they wouldn’t have any problem getting the people of Hamilton City to show up.

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: We’re lucky José is probably related to half the town [laughs]. Not so lucky for our children and our grandchildren [laughs].

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Is that true, José? Are you related to half the town? 

JOSÉ PUENTE: Um…About a quarter of it. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: These levee festivals were always well attended, although Lee Ann admits that a lot of people were probably just coming for the tamales.

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: It was our biggest moneymaker. But by the end of the levees, when we stopped doing the festivals, we were up to 60 dozen an event. We sold out in two hours.

JOSÉ PUENTE: If you wanted tamales, you had to get there first, okay, because within two hours, they were sold. Politicians that came would say, “We’re just in here for tamales.” And it’s like, hey, you’re late. They’re gone.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The levee festivals were really successful fundraisers. They made it possible for the town to hire a lawyer who knew his way around federal infrastructure policy. But Lee Ann and José were nowhere near the millions of dollars they needed for the local contribution to the cost. They needed help. And in the year 2000, help arrived in the unlikely form of an ecologist.

RYAN LUSTER: So how does a community of 2,000 people that’s severely economically disadvantaged come up with millions of dollars? They’re not gonna do that selling tamales.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This is Ryan Luster from the Nature Conservancy. And he would end up being a key part of the solution to the two seemingly insurmountable obstacles facing Hamilton City: how to raise millions of dollars and how to get around the all important benefit-cost ratio. Ryan was working along the river doing habitat restoration when the federal government made a key tweak in how they calculated the ratio. Basically, they said that if you could design a levee that also restored habitat, they would take that into account when they were calculating whether the project was worth spending money on.

RYAN LUSTER: They said you can now include ecosystem benefits in your calculations.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And when the folks in Hamilton City heard about this, they thought, “That could be the solution to our benefit-cost problem.”

RYAN LUSTER: So, that’s how the community came to us and said, “Hey, will you guys partner with us and help us with the restoration side of this?” And we said, “Absolutely.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And when you say “the community,” how much was that José and Lee Ann?

RYAN LUSTER: It was pretty much them, yeah.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And so, Ryan and José and Lee Ann and a bunch of local farmers started working together. And I really can’t stress enough what a surprising collaboration this was. In this part of California, farmers and conservationists are often on the opposite sides of disputes about how to use land and water. Lee Ann grew up in an old farming family where “environmentalist” was a dirty word.

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: I was an adult in my 30s when I came and worked on this project, and all I could think of is, “If my grandfather knew what I was doing right now, he’d be so upset.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And for his part, Ryan certainly never thought he was ever going to be a part of an effort to build a levee. In fact, Ryan had spent most of his career trying to undo the damage that levees had caused.

RYAN LUSTER: Because you look at a levee and it’s like, “That’s bad for the ecosystem, right?”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: In order to better understand why levees have traditionally been so bad for the rivers of the Central Valley, I took a trip to the newest state park in California. It’s called Dos Rios. And it’s the site of one of the largest floodplain restoration projects in the state.

AUSTIN STEVENOT: Welcome to the next California state park! 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Yeah! Let’s check it out. [door slam] 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: My guide for the day is Austin Stevenot, a field manager with the organization River Partners and a member of the Northern Sierra Miwok tribe. We’re walking through a shady grove of oak trees along the San Joaquin River. 

AUSTIN STEVENOT: These trees are probably a hundred years old and, for whatever reason, weren’t cleared. But this is—right in front of you—is kind of a glimpse of what it might have actually looked like. And that’s why I brought you here.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Austin says that, hundreds of years ago, the Central Valley looked completely different than it does today. It was covered with a vast mosaic of riparian forests and wetlands that were tended by different indigenous groups. There were tule elk roaming through the marshlands and grizzly bears feeding on the massive salmon runs.

AUSTIN STEVENOT: They talk about the salmon run was so immense that, at night, you could hardly sleep sometimes ‘cause there’s so many salmon coming up the river you could just hear them.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This region doesn’t get a lot of rain, but the wetlands were irrigated naturally by the rivers that meandered across the valley floor. During winter storms and the spring snowmelt, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin would fan out across the landscape. Occasionally, during really big floods, the entire Central Valley was transformed into a vast inland sea.

AUSTIN STEVENOT: It turned the valley into a giant lake, essentially. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But in the 19th and 20th century, farmers took over the valley and settled in little towns like Hamilton City. And for them, these erratic seasonal floods were deeply inconvenient.

AUSTIN STEVENOT: The idea became that we needed to control the rivers, right? Because you don’t want the river jumping up and flooding out your field that you had just planted in the springtime. So, they started building levees.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: They dammed the rivers and built levees right up against the banks to prevent the floods, effectively cutting off the wetlands from their water source. Today, the valley is mostly dry, dusty farmland. The marshes and the forests are almost entirely gone. 

AUSTIN STEVENOT: We’ve lost 95% of this ecosystem up and down the state in the last hundred years. So, it’s…A lot of people don’t know about it or understand it.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Levees enabled much of the 20th century development in the Central Valley. But that came at an enormous ecological cost. And it also hasn’t guaranteed safety, because when levees are built right up against the banks of the river, the water has nowhere to go. It can’t spread out like it once did. And if there’s a big storm, like the ones we should expect with climate change, the river just gushes through the channel with increasing ferocity. And if it gets high enough and angry enough, it can overtop or bust through a levee and flood the towns and fields that were supposed to be protected. 

But our unlikely team of farmers and conservationists had an idea for a different kind of levee at Hamilton City—a levee that would be good for both the town and for the river. 

JOSÉ PUENTE: And we all came together. We all had a common purpose, okay? For the community and the farmers, the interest was flood protection. For the environmental community, they had the interest in restoring the land back to its natural habitat. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The idea was that, instead of building a new levee right along the bank of the river, they would set it back a mile or so inland, closer to the edge of the town. And then—and here’s the part that Ryan was particularly into—they would tear down the old one.

RYAN LUSTER: We need to remove the levee that’s along the river so that the river now has room to spread out—room for the river.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: The technique of making “room for the river” comes from the Dutch, and the logic is pretty simple. Instead of trying to tightly control the river in this narrow channel, you want to give it more room to spread out across the floodplain. This is not only good for the ecology of the river, but it’s safer for people because it slows the water down and makes it less dangerous. And when the river floods, it’s not really a problem because the water just flows onto a floodplain that was designed to get wet.

RYAN LUSTER: So, instead of fighting nature, let’s use nature to our own advantage. I mean, you’re using nature and, in this sense, the floodplain. The floodplain is what we’re using. It’s a storage facility, plain and simple.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: They drew up a plan for this new setback levee. And as part of the proposal, the Nature Conservancy agreed to buy the 1,400 acres of farmland between the river and the new levee and donate it to the project. That land value would count as Hamilton’s City’s local contribution to the cost of the project. Then Ryan and his colleagues would do all of the landscape design work to transform that floodplain into the kind of rich ecosystem that might have been there hundreds of years ago. In 2004, the team got the Army Corps of Engineers to do a feasibility study of their new setback levee plan. And they said, “Hey, this time it’s different. This time you have to consider all of these habitat benefits when you calculate the benefit-cost ratio.” The Army Corps ran the numbers…

RYAN LUSTER: And when you added that dollar value of the habitat plus the dollar value of the flood risk reduction, that’s where we get the total benefits. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And this time, the benefits were greater than the costs. Hamilton City passed the test, and the Corps gave the project their seal of approval. The new levee was deemed worth it all because of the habitat restoration. And you might be thinking, “Great. Problem solved. Story over. Hamilton City gets the protection it deserves!” But, not so fast. Because it turns out that even if the Army Corps of Engineers approves a plan, that doesn’t mean it has the money to actually go through with it. And to get the federal government to pay for its portion of a levee, you have to go convince them. And I don’t mean send a really compelling email. I mean, you actually have to go convince Congress in person.

JOSÉ PUENTE: What they don’t tell you is you gotta get the funding from Congress. You have to go to Washington seeking those funds.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Coming up after the break. José and Lee Ann go to Washington. 

[AD BREAK]

EMMETT FITZGERALD: When we left off, it was 2004. José and Lee Ann and Ryan had just managed to get approval for a feasibility study for their setback levee. But Congress controls the purse strings for federal infrastructure projects, and getting them to actually pay for things is a whole other process that itself can take years. And it’s a process that is also biased against small, working-class communities like Hamilton City.

Before working on this story, a thing that I didn’t really appreciate about big infrastructure projects like this is that you’re competing against every other project across the country for funding. And it’s not like there is some super fair and reasonable process to decide who needs that money the most. Here’s Rob Young again, our flood infrastructure expert.

ROB YOUNG: So much of the resilience spending that’s available today relies on that community having the capacity to go after that money. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: He says that if you want that money, you have to put together a proposal and go lobby against every other city and town over who gets included in the federal budget.

ROB YOUNG: And you’re up against other communities that have lobbyists and attorneys and full-time planners and GIS staff that can put together a hell of a nice-looking, shiny proposal. So, that tends to be where most of the funding goes. Small communities or communities that are not incorporated, they tend to fall by the wayside because they just don’t have the ability to even step up to the table to get some of that funding. And they tend to be the ones who need the help the most.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Hamilton City didn’t have a planning department or a GIS specialist or a team full of lobbyists. But they did have the Nature Conservancy and the CIA. And so, José and Lee Ann and Ryan and their lawyers went all the way to Washington D.C. to try and convince a bunch of suits on Capitol Hill that little old Hamilton City deserved a levee more than all of the other cities and towns in the country. 

When the team first arrived in Washington, they got a little boost when they learned that legend of the Hamilton City levee festivals preceded them.

JOSÉ PUENTE: When we went back to Washington, D.C., we were at the Pentagon, the first thing that came out was, “You got any tamales?” [laughs]

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: We did not bring your tamales to the Pentagon. Sorry.

JOSÉ PUENTE: “We didn’t think that they would allow them to come in here.” And they go, like, “Hey. Trust me. We got them in.” You know, that was tamale diplomacy. [laughs]

EMMETT FITZGERALD: On these visits, our tamale diplomats would meet with the Army Corps and members of Congress and their staffs. José and Lee Ann would try to do the trip in just two or three days to save money.

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: So, sometimes we were taking red-eyes, landing, and going directly to work. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: I’ve done that. It’s terrible. 

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: Yeah, it’s horrible. And on the last day, you work all the way up until 6 o’clock. And then you get to the airport as fast as you can and try to get out of there so you don’t have to pay for another hotel room. It was not cheap. It was not easy.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And it was intimidating, even for Ryan Luster. He had more experience lobbying than Lee Ann and José, but even he felt a little out of his depth

RYAN LUSTER: You know, sitting in the Pentagon talking about habitat restoration, it’s like, “Am I in the right place? This is kind of odd.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Who were you pitching in those moments in the Pentagon? 

RYAN LUSTER: The Army. You’re sitting there with people in uniform, telling them about elderberry beetles and least Bell’s vireo birds and why we should plant more oak trees. And they’re looking at you like, “What are you talking about?”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: José, for his part, never thought that he would be in Washington D.C. meeting with senators and generals, but he also figured out pretty quickly that it was all a game and that he could play it as well as anyone.

JOSÉ PUENTE: When you get there, it’s like you’re actually in charge. You know what you’re gonna talk about. They don’t. So, you have to sell yourself within the first five minutes.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: José and Lee Ann went to D.C. more times than they could count in the 2000s. Year after year, they made the trip. And year after year, they got turned down. I’m not sure why they kept at it. Maybe at a certain point it just felt like they had invested too much to give up now. Or maybe they just really understood that the existence of their town was at stake. 

But whatever it was, their persistence caught the attention of some high powered people in Washington—Lee Ann’s in particular.

JOHN GARAMENDI: She was relentless. And what was really different with Lee Ann was that she took the time to understand the process, which is not common.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This is Congressman John Garamendi, who represented the Sacramento Valley at the time. He says that it felt like Lee Ann knew every inch of what seemed to him like a very complicated project. Talking to her was like talking to a hydrologist, a farmer, and a floodplain ecologist all rolled into one bundle of energy. And on top of that, she knew her way around a labyrinth of government agencies. 

JOHN GARAMENDI: She knew what the Army Corps of Engineers needed, Fish and Wildlife, the federal agencies…

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Congress Garamendi got to know both Lee Ann and José very well over the years. He says they became fixtures around the Capitol.

JOHN GARAMENDI: They were back here at least every three to four months. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Did you ever get tired of them?

JOHN GARAMENDI: Oh, God, no. No. No, they were just…The energy that they brought to the discussion was such that, you never get tired of that kind of energy. You would simply feed on that energy, and you’d want to work whatever was necessary to complete their dream.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But the dream just wasn’t coming to fruition. And the years just kept piling up. The 2000s bled into the 2010s. And back in Hamilton City, people were starting to get impatient. It had been over a decade since the levee festivals first got going—years of supporting this project with basically nothing to show for it.

RYAN LUSTER: So, we’d have to go back to the community every three years and say, “Okay, well—you know—the last time we were here and we told you it was just going to be one more year… I mean, one more year, one more year, one more year, one more year, one more year… I mean, it just kept going on and on. And people were starting to be like, “Uh…”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: And if the community was getting tired of this saga, imagine how Lee Ann and José were feeling. They were devoting hours and hours of their time, week after week, year after year. The levee project had become one of the central tentpoles of their life. 

JOSÉ PUENTE: Originally we were told oh, you know, this project is gonna take four, five years. Oh, four, five years? That’s not bad. So then the next thing is, you know, those five years, six years, eight years, ten years, 15 years, and you go like, what the hell’s going on?

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Did you ever, like, almost give up? Or were there moments in this process where you were like, “I don’t know if we can keep doing this?”

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: There were frustrating moments when we were just like, I’m done, I’m cooked. And then something—it happened almost every single time—something big and exciting would happen. Just that little bit of movement that got us back into where we were, “Okay! We can do this. We can do this.”

EMMETT FITZGERALD: I think part of the reason they were able to keep the faith was that the project just felt like it made too much sense not to happen. Farmers liked it. Environmentalists liked it. The Army Corps liked it! And so Lee Ann and José and Ryan just kept making the case that this was a win-win, no-brainer of a project.

And eventually, in 2014, close to 20 years since they threw that first levee festival, the government finally agreed. The Hamilton City setback levee was included in that year’s federal budget.

RYAN LUSTER: We were chosen. There are hundreds of projects that we were competing with and this was one of them. That was a really big deal.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: For Lee Ann and José, they couldn’t admit that it was really happening until they saw the clouds of dust from all the construction equipment arriving in town.

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: I literally stood out in my front yard and watched the first dump truck leave the project. I seen him go in, and I seen him come out.

JOSÉ PUENTE: I think when we saw the equipment, that’s when it was like, “Okay. We’re done.” 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Did you go celebrate? 

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: People think, “Oh, did you have a big party?” We did not. We literally went out on the levee, had a cocktail, and said, “Thank you, Lord Jesus.” [laughs] It just took so long.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: You may have noticed that there hasn’t been a whole lot of talk about climate change in the story up until this point. That’s mostly because when José and Lee Ann were getting started with all this, climate change was a distant threat in people’s imaginations. But it’s not a distant threat anymore. And as people in California struggle to cope with drought and deluge, the Hamilton City setback levee is starting to look like money very well spent. Because, it turns out, one of the best tools to prepare for extreme rainstorms and big flooding events is a setback levee just like the one in Hamilton City.

RYAN LUSTER: This was not designed to be a climate-based, you know, adaptation project, but it turns out that it is. This is exactly what you need to deal with future climate scenarios. And we…I don’t know if I want to say we were lucky that the project can fit that new need, but it does.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Ryan thinks that Hamilton City should be a model for the Army Corps of Engineers or really anyone trying to keep people safe in an era of supercharged rain storms. 

RYAN LUSTER: Not just in California but the entire country. And what’s frustrating about that is that you would think because it checks all the boxes, well why isn’t it being replicated? 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Some aspects of the project are being replicated. The Army Corps of Engineers recently built a brand new setback levee downriver from Hamilton City in West Sacramento. And all throughout the country, from Northern California to my hometown in Vermont, people are coming around to the idea that making room for the river is one of the best ways to prepare for extreme rainstorms. But whether Hamilton City can provide a workable blueprint for other small, working-class towns that desperately need protective infrastructure…I’m not so sure.

ROB YOUNG: I mean, it’s wonderful that you can point to an example where, with a tremendous amount of perseverance and maybe a little bit of luck and outside assistance, we have a community that proved it could be done. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Again, here’s Rob Young. 

ROB YOUNG: But, you know, I loved playing baseball. And no matter how hard I work, I’m not gonna be Shohei Ohtani. And so we can’t expect all of these communities to be able to pull it off in the same way.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: For one thing, not every little town has a José and Lee Ann, the Shohei Otanis of levee-building. What happened in Hamilton City is a cool story, but it doesn’t change Rob Young’s assessment of the overall problem. Any way you cut it, the deck is stacked against these small, poor communities. And Rob’s not naive. He knows as well as anyone that we just won’t be able to protect every community in the years ahead.

ROB YOUNG: That’s just not possible. I mean, we have thousands of miles of coast. We have probably tens of thousands of miles of floodplain along rivers in the U.S. You know, the idea that we can guarantee protection to everybody, it’s just not feasible.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But if we can’t build everyone a levee, we have to think long and hard about who is going to get the levees that we do build.

Rob says that we need to have a national triage conversation about how we want to use our resources, about which communities should get priority and why.

ROB YOUNG: And, you know, again, it all comes down to what we value as a nation. These are our funds. These are public tax dollars. Certainly, one would hope that the only calculus isn’t gonna be property value when we’re talking about providing flood protection. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: In recent years, the Army Corps actually has started to rethink the benefit-cost ratio. There is rule-making in the works right now that could transform how the Corps makes decisions about who gets protection.

ROB YOUNG: You know, there are a wide variety of reasons why you might choose to invest those federal dollars beyond simply protecting high-value real estate.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: But even if we do change the values that drive how these decisions are made, I think the Hamilton City story points to another massive problem, as we try to adapt our infrastructure to climate change…which is speed. As disasters pile up all around the country, people need protection, and they need it fast. And this whole process just takes so much time. Here’s Lee Ann Grigsby Puente again. 

LEE ANN GRIGSBY PUENTE: We’ve had people from out of the area ask us, “How do you do this?” And we always tell them, “Are you willing to put 25 years of your life in this to make sure it gets done? Because that’s what we did.” And that’s what we tell them. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: I kind of couldn’t believe it when I heard Lee Ann say that. Like, if I was one of those people trying to build a levee and I got that advice, I would give up right there on the spot. And as proud as José is of what they accomplished, even he is not sure it was worth two decades of his life.

JOSÉ PUENTE: I mean, if somebody was asking me today, “Hey, would you commit to this again?” I don’t know. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: On the one hand, I think this is a hopeful story of a small town overcoming the odds to get the kind of forward-thinking infrastructure it deserves. But on the other hand, it feels like they never should have had to work this hard. And the thing is they’re still not done! Ryan Luster says they need a couple more years to finish the habitat restoration.

RYAN LUSTER: My goal is December of 2026. Probably is gonna bleed into 2027. 27 years. Who’s going to spend 27 years on a project? I mean, I guess it’s kind of a rhetorical question because I almost did. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: I guess just, like, when we’re thinking about all the work that needs to be done to adapt our infrastructure and adapt the way we’re living to the challenges that are coming our way, you know, it’s a hopeful story and it’s also a sobering story.

RYAN LUSTER: Exactly. It’s very sobering. Yeah, it’s very sobering. But it shows that it’s not impossible.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This past winter, 2024, California got hit with more big storms. I wanted to see the new levee in action. And so, on a rainy weekend, I drove up to Hamilton City to meet with José.

JOSÉ PUENTE: So, we’re on the Mazda today. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Okay, cool. Oh, yeah. The old truck. 

JOSÉ PUENTE: The old truck. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: It looks good.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: It’s an old beige pickup—one of those perfect, tiny trucks they don’t make anymore.

JOSÉ PUENTE: Yeah, my baby’s showing his age. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: [laughs] How many miles?

JOSÉ PUENTE: Oh, I got 300,000.

 EMMETT FITZGERALD: 300,000! That’s pretty good.

JOSÉ PUENTE: Yeah.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: We take the old truck up onto the new levee. It honestly isn’t much to look at, just a big wall of dirt. It’s hard to believe how much time and money it took to get this built, but it makes all the difference in the world. On the other side is the floodplain—a giant space that’s designed to fill right up with water so that the town stays dry. José says there was a moment the night before when it was really raining quite hard. But instead of heading down to the levee with a bunch of sandbags, he went to bed.

JOSÉ PUENTE: Yeah, I know, it’s…After many years, it’s a comfort to know that you can sleep better.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Towards the end of our tour, we get to a spot where the river has flowed over the bank and onto the floodplain. It’s not a lot of water, but it’s enough that you can appreciate the way this landscape might have looked before, when this whole valley was a wetland.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Oh, wow. Look at all the birds.

JOSÉ PUENTE: Yeah. Ducks.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Yeah. They go where the water goes.

JOSÉ PUENTE: Uh-huh. This gives you a different perspective, doesn’t it?

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Yeah. Totally.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: It’s a beautiful scene. It almost makes you want to tear down all the levees and bring back the inland sea. Of course, that is a terrible idea. There are millions of people living in this valley, and the food grown here supports millions more. You can’t let the rivers run wild, but you also can’t just keep patching holes in crumbling old levees built right up against the river bank and hope for the best.

The setback levee at Hamilton City may not be a perfect model for every vulnerable rivertown, but I think it offers a hopeful vision of compromise. Proof that we can design for people and for nature at the same time. That we can choose to loosen our grip, relinquish some control, and give the river a little more room to breathe. 

When we got back to the lot where my car was parked, the winds had died down. The storm was just about over.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Where you headed now?

JOSÉ PUENTE: Going home. 

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Nice.

JOSÉ PUENTE: Going home. Maybe take a nap, I don’t know. [laughs]

EMMETT FITZGERALD: [laughs] You’ve earned it. Alright, José. 

JOSÉ PUENTE: Take care.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Take care. Have a good one.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: Next time on Not Built For This…So far, this series has been all about the way climate change is impacting how and where we live. It’s been about things like housing and infrastructure and insurance. But coming up, on our final episode, we have a story about the impact of climate change on our bodies. We’re going to Phoenix, Arizona, to see how extreme heat is revealing the biological limits of adaptation.

109. GEOFFREY COMP: Our thermometers top out at 109. And personally, I’ve had multiple patients that have come in that have maxed out our thermometers.

BUNNY: All we can do is try to find a shady place to sit. Most times we’re stuck out in the sun. It really sucks. It’s hot, nasty, muggy, dirty, filthy…just all around bad news.

EMMETT FITZGERALD: This episode of Not Built For This was reported and produced by me, Emmett FitzGerald, along with producers Jayson De Leon and Sofie Kodner, and managing editor Delaney Hall. Further invaluable editing from Christopher Johnson, Joe Rosenberg, Kelly Prime, and our standard bearer, Roman Mars. Mix and sound design by Martín Gonzalez. Theme and original music by George Langford from Actual Magic, with additional music by Swan Real. Fact-checking by Sona Avakian. Series art by Aaron Nestor.

Special thanks this week to everyone we spoke with in Hamilton City, as well as Alicia Kircher, from the Army Corps of Engineers, and Bill Paris, who was a lawyer for the community. I also wanted to shout out the organization River Partners, which is doing a lot of the remaining restoration work at the Hamilton City site.

Not Built For This is a six-part series from 99% Invisible. Our final episode will be out on Friday, wherever you get your podcasts. Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the 99PI team includes Chris Berube, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Gabriella Gladney, Jeyca Maldonado-Medina, and Neena Pathak. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are a part of the Stitcher and SiriusXM Podcast Family. You can find 99% Invisible on all of the usual social media sites, as well as our new Discord server. There’s a link to that and every episode of 99PI and Not Built For This at 99pi.org.