‘This will make our town uninhabitable’: The long-awaited Delta tunnel puts fear in locals

CHANGE TENDS TO come at a creeping pace, if at all, in the Sacramento River community of Hood. Families that settled in this Delta outpost generations ago remain today, and pear orchards planted decades ago are still the region’s signature crop.

Now Hood, population 271, is facing a formidable transformation that residents fear will shatter their sleepy agricultural community. One of the smallest towns in the region, Hood lies at ground zero of the main construction site for the Newsom administration’s proposed Delta water tunnel project.