This aired in July 14, 2025 episode of Crosscurrents.
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California is known for its beautiful beaches, and awe-inspiring coastline. But in the last 50 years, sea levels have risen at an exponential rate.
Today, we’re kicking off a seven part series looking at sea level rise in California. From the San Diego, Tijuana Border all the way up to Humboldt Bay, we have seven original stories about some of the people and places that are dealing with flooding, coastal erosion, and pollution… all made worse by rising tides.
Wren Farrell is KALW’s Emergency and Disaster Preparedness reporter and the lead producer on this series. He spoke with KALW's Crosscurrents host Hana Baba to introduce the first episode in the series.
HANA BABA: Hi Wren.
WREN FARRELL: Hi Hana
HANA: So what got you interested in this subject?
WREN: I was born and raised in California, and have lived on the coast my whole life. I grew up in San Diego, went to UC Santa Cruz for college, and then moved to the Bay Area. It’s kind of unimaginable to me to not live near water. So, among all the existential threats I am constantly thinking about, sea level rise is definitely near the top of the list. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. The whole country has its eyes on Texas where that horrible flash flood killed so many people.
HANA: I hear the phrase ‘sea level rise’ thrown around a lot, but it’s kind of a vague term. How exactly does the ‘sea rise’?
WREN: It’s very, very gradual. In the last hundred years, it’s risen about six to eight inches, and that rate of change is increasing exponentially. By 2050, which is only 25 years away, it’s expected to rise by at least another foot. By 2100, it could rise between two to four feet… or even higher. The impacts of this will be different throughout the Bay, depending on an area's elevation and other factors. But in San Francisco for example, low lying areas, like the Embarcadero, Fisherman’s Wharf, and parts of Mission Bay, are extremely likely to flood. In the East Bay, the flood risk is even higher. Parts of Oakland and Alameda, especially areas near the airport, are extremely vulnerable. And it’s not just the coast, water is all connected, and so the water can get funnelled inland. With two feet of sea level rise, a big stretch of the five freeway, just north of Stockton, would be underwater.
HANA: And what is causing the ocean to rise?
WREN: Two things: One, melting land ice, and glaciers. The ice in Greenland and West Antarctica in particular are melting at increasing rates. AND TWO — the atmosphere and the ocean are getting warmer. As the water gets warmer it expands, and the ocean rises. And all of this is caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
HANA: *React*
WREN: Yeah, and just to be clear: these events aren’t natural. They’re caused by human activities. Our use of fossil fuels, emissions from meat and dairy industries, etc. We’ve released so many greenhouse gasses in the last sixty years that even if we stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow the ocean would continue rising. But that doesn’t mean we should just give up. The difference between two to four feet of sea level rise is drastic. It’s the difference, for example, of Oakland International Airport being underwater… or not.
HANA: And what are some of the costs of that?
WREN: Coastal counties generate about 10 TRILLION dollars in goods and services a year. Almost 40 percent of people in the U.S. live in a ‘coastal county’. 27 million just in California. So mass displacement and disruption of coastal regions would completely change the U.S. and the world.
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Story Transcript:
There’s a small community in Napa County – about 130 homes along a two-mile road, surrounded by water. On one side there’s the Napa River, on the other side there are marshes. And the only thing holding back that water is a very old levee. A 1977 article in the Napa Valley Register said modern-day zoning and flood control measures — even back then — would have prevented this community from being built.
Our climate reporter Mary Catherine O’Connor went to Milton Road to learn how this riverside community has spent years trying to navigate rising waters — as well as differences of opinion about how to take care of the levee.
REPORTER: Sir, hi. Can I ask you a question?
MILMAN: Sure.
REPORTER: Do you live on Milton Road?
MILMAN: I do.
REPORTER: Can I say hi?
MILMAN: Yeah.
REPORTER: Hi friend. What's your name?
MILMAN: Joey.
REPORTER: I meet local Darren Milman, and his dog Joey, and explain that I'm looking for folks who live on Milton Road to talk about the water.
MILMAN: Okay. Why don't we walk on the levee if you want? We won't get run over by cars.
REPORTER: So we walk out to the levee — which doubles as a trail. It's part of a wildlife area made up of wetlands and marshes. As we gaze out at a beautiful vista, Darren tells me he and his wife bought their house in 2010. He says the Napa River was a big draw.
REPORTER to Milman: So, when you bought your house, was sea level rise on your radar?
MILMAN: Uh, yeah, it was. I had to do a lot of research to kind of figure out what this neighborhood was all about and how it all worked. And, so, yeah, so we moved here. We knew that there was… the levees situation, um, was, um, important.
REPORTER: The levee situation. The levee we're standing on is a century old. It surrounds the road, which is actually on an island. The levee is in constant need of repair, and it's not ready for the three feet of sea level rise that Milton Road could see by the end of the century. The few hundred people who live here have known it for a long time.
But attempts to fix the problem have failed. Some residents fought for a solution for years before moving away. But other folks like Jim Winters can't imagine leaving Milton Road. His grandpa was one of the first homeowners. And back in the early 1900s he'd take a ferry and train up from San Francisco.
WINTERS: He had an ark out in the marsh that he took over. I guess an old moonshiner died and he knew it and so he took it over. He used to duck hunt up here.
REPORTER: Around that time, a Napa County farmer built the levee but he did a slap-dash job. And then in the mid 1940s, the land was subdivided. Folks like Jim's grandpa built simple fishing cabins.
But by the seventies, many people were living here year round. Each home was built at sea level, and the aging levee meant flooding became a common problem.
Reporter goes down the road to meet another resident.
RICHARD NEWMAN: You know, this is just like a little man cave down here.
REPORTER: I'm visiting Richard and Linda Newman. They live in what used to be Linda's parent's weekend house
RICHARD NEWMAN: Yeah, here you can see … it's right here. So there was about a foot of water in here.
REPORTER: Downstairs in the rec room, there's still a faint stain on the wall, indicating the high water mark from a flood decades ago.
The Napa River is tidal, so the height can swing really high during king tides. If that coincides with a heavy rain and strong winds, it's bad news.
People were just getting, you know, not violent, but they were pretty abusive to us...Richard Newman
LINDA NEWMAN: Nice waves out here, I mean, it looks like the ocean. And, and it's so much pressure, you know, on the levees. And that's why a lot of people, this last winter, had seepage that they had never had before.
REPORTER: So that's one problem with living on Milton Road. You spend every winter on flood watch. But the bigger problem is that back when those lots were sold off, the section of levee behind each lot was sold, too. So Richard and Linda are the only ones in charge of keeping their slice of the levee future-proof, and their neighbors are in charge of their own slices.
LINDA NEWMAN: That's the sad part because all it takes is one weak link and the levee breaks and we're all underwater.
REPORTER: In fact, there's a weak link right next door. I can see where the levee is crumbling.
RICHARD NEWMAN: The owner lives in Colorado and he just rents it out.
REPORTER: So when heavy rains come, the Newmans and other neighbors sandbag the levee, here and in other weak spots, and then cross their fingers.
LINDA NEWMAN: That’s the problem. There's no way that anybody can enforce them to fix it. So we all, as a community, try and get involved when there is damage.
REPORTER: It wasn't supposed to be like this. In 1974, Napa County created a reclamation district for this community.
That's a board of locals who make sure water systems are up to snuff. But — for complicated reasons — this board was never given the rights it needed. Richard knows that all too well. He's a longtime board member.
RICHARD NEWMAN: It's a misnomer that, you know, it's a reclamation district. In the Delta, reclamation districts do this all the time. They're always in charge of the levees all the time. It's false advertising.
REPORTER: The board's dysfunction came to a head back in 2001 when it lost a lawsuit against a resident who wasn't maintaining their levee. The court said the board didn't have legal authority to sue.
RICHARD NEWMAN: And it's so frustrating for us board members because we have no say.
REPORTER: It frustrates folks outside the community, too. Under pressure from the county, the board paid for a study to learn just what they'd need to do to protect themselves from sea level rise... It found that making substantial levee improvements would cost each property owner more than $20,000. A sea wall would be far more resilient — and more costly — from a quarter to a half million dollars, per property, depending on the design.
Deliberating over the right course, it got ugly, as Richard told me when we first talked, on the phone.
RICHARD NEWMAN: People were just getting, you know, not violent, but they were, you know…they were pretty abusive to us, and here we're just volunteering our time.
REPORTER: So the community held meeting after meeting, they did not go well.
RICHARD NEWMAN: It wasn't pretty.
REPORTER: With no community-wide decision made, residents can only take individual action — or not — and live with the lingering tension over the future.
RICHARD NEWMAN: And if somebody's levee fails, it could basically red-tag the whole island because if it failed bad enough that the street flooded, it would take our sewer system out and that would red-tag the neighborhood. And it could actually, at some point it could actually condemn the whole area too, if it was a catastrophic flood.
REPORTER: And just a handful of houses down from Richard and Linda are two homes that are divided by a fence — and a fundamentally different take on what to do.
On one side of that fence is Erica Neubauer. She grew up on Milton Road and recently moved into a completely renovated house. The first floor of living space sits above a very tall garage. And along the foundation are openings covered by flaps.
NEUBAUER: So the mud flaps, here's one of them.
REPORTER: Think of dog doors...except, this is meant for flood waters.
NEUBAUER: So that the water comes in and then has a chance to recede as well.
REPORTER: And there are other details — some I can't see.
I have four kids and I have to think about it, for their sake. And they're going to have to think about it.Erica Neubauer
NEUBAUER: The whole ground floor uses this pressure-treated lumber, all the stud work on the inside — which, you know, normally a house is built with non pressure treated lumber — but they did that so that if it does flood, it won't rot.
REPORTER: Erica wants the community to invest in a sea wall. She's motivated by her kids.
NEUBAUER: Some people who are resistant to the change will, you know, will not be alive at that point because of their age that they are now. So it's something that future generations, I have four kids and, you know, I have to think about it for their sake. And they're going to have to think about it.
REPORTER: On the other side of that fence is Jim Winters
WINTERS: Come on in....
REPORTER: He lives in the weekend cabin his grandfather built -- though they actually moved the entire house back from the river, decades ago.
WINTERS: The front door came right to the edge of the levee.
REPORTER: Jim, like Richard, is on the reclamation district board. But he thinks the status quo, it works well enough.
WINTERS: I kinda like the way we've got it now where everybody takes care of their own levee.
REPORTER: He knows the river has been slowly but surely reclaiming the levee, pulling it toward the water. Proof is in a flag pole he shows me.
Every few years you have to raise your levee. These levees sink about three or four inches every two or three years.Jim Winters
WINTERS: I remember it going up, but I couldn't have been more than two or three.
REPORTER: That was around 1960. It was installed on top of the levee. Now it's down by his dock, a good 10 feet away.
WINTERS: The whole thing's sliding down and out.
REPORTER: He figures constantly fortifying the levee is the cost of living in this beautiful place like this. He says he's spent more than $30,000 in maintaining his slice over the years. But that's on the low end. Some of his neighbors have spent far more. And remember, the study said owners would spend around $20,000 for a community-wide levee improvement.
WINTERS: Every few years you have to raise your levee. These levees sink about three or four inches every two or three years. So yeah, about every 10 years you gotta put another foot on top.
REPORTER: I ask if that's his long-term plan.
WINTERS: Yeah, well, in 20 years I'll be dead. [laughs]
REPORTER: Jim says that, sure, the reclamation district can't sue residents who don't maintain the levee — but residents could sue each other. And he thinks the specter of a lawsuit is a pretty strong motivator.
WINTERS: If somebody doesn't keep it up and it floods on their property and it causes anybody any damage there isn't gonna be enough lawyers in the world to save them.
REPORTER: But Richard disagrees. He figures if people can't afford to keep up their levees, they can't afford to be sued. But they also can't be made to act.
RICHARD NEWMAN: That's a problem. There's some homeowners out here that are older and, and they've lived there for a long time and they don't have the resources to repair their levees.
REPORTER: And once those folks do leave, the houses are fixed up. Some sell for a ton of money.
RICHARD NEWMAN: There's a house for sale down here for $2.2 million. I mean, that's ridiculous. I mean, come on. That's, you know…
REPORTER to RICHARD NEWMAN: Do you worry that eventually if there's no solution, it's gonna have to change the demographics of who lives here?
RICHARD NEWMAN: It is, yeah. And it slowly has, I mean it just keeps going up and up and up. Yeah. And they move in here knowing that it's, you know, it's, you sign a waiver that you're in a flood zone. They know what they're getting.
REPORTER: But he thinks that even if — or when — this community changes, and is willing to make a massive investment in a sea wall, they won't want it either.
RICHARD NEWMAN: It would come up here, it would block your view. It's ugly. I mean, it's, you know, and yeah, and most people out here would, would not like that because, I mean, this is what you have, you have the views and you want to sit out and you don't want this ugly sheet wall, you know, that's right there.
REPORTER: As for Richard and Linda who just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, they're gonna stick around until they can't anymore, and then they'll pass the house on to their son. But Richard thinks his son will sell it ... he just doesn't want the headache.
