Emergency infrastructure repairs are slowly transitioning into permanent upgrades in the unincorporated Monterey County community of Pajaro, where two years ago a series of torrential storms caused a pipe to fail and a road to collapse.

In March 2023, a 300-foot breach opened in the Pajaro River levee, sending flood water through the Pajaro community. More than 2,000 residents were forced to evacuate and emergency personnel conducted more than 90 rescues.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.