MARIN COUNTY GOT A TASTE of its climate future this weekend: a combination of king tides, winter storms and high winds closed parts of U.S. Highway 101, flooded homes and vehicles, and left whole neighborhoods islanded.
Congressman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, visited some of the hardest-hit areas with county officials on Monday at a series of rain-soaked press briefings.
“One of the things that strikes me about the last 48 to 72 hours is we seem to have been caught off guard by the scale of this,” said Huffman standing with the mayors of Larkspur and Corte Madera. They gathered near an area where flood waters had climbed 3 feet up the sandbagged wall around a local fitness center over the weekend.
Huffman said modeling from the National Weather Service and the county about tide levels and storm surge was not totally accurate.
“It went places where they didn’t think it was going to go,” he said. “And this community kind of ground to a halt.”
Brian Garcia, the National Weather Service Bay Area Warning Coordination Meteorologist, answered by explaining that modeling is based on patterns of the past. Those patterns are no longer reliable because the climate is changing.
“Sea level rise is increasing in our area on an average of about 1.98 millimeters per year,” Garcia said. “These storms came in a little bit stronger than expected. When we get these stronger storms and these stronger winds, they can add a storm surge component that wasn’t quite expected. We had the strong winds off the coast, and it just shoved the water right into the bay. With the rainfall on top of it coming down creeks and streams, it doesn’t allow it to effectively drain into the bay and drain out to sea.”
In Larkspur and Corte Madera over the weekend, access roads to neighborhoods built on subsiding infilled land remained inundated and closed to traffic through most of the weekend. Larkspur Mayor Stephanie Andre described low-lying areas as islands surrounded by water.
“I saw, about 2.5 feet of water on Highway 101 very, very quickly rise,” said Andre. “I think we’ve been very fortunate that there were no injuries that I have heard of.”
Huffman noted that Marin General Hospital was rendered inaccessible by flooding.
“You certainly wouldn’t want to have needed to go to the emergency room to have a kid or something else during any of those moments, because there was no way to get to the hospital,” he said.
Corta Madera Mayor Rosa Thomas said the town does have a climate action plan that includes shoring up some bulkheads. Then she described how the process slowed.
“It started out as a plan,” she said. “Then became an assessment when more people said they want to be involved before codifying it into a plan, and so we have gone a long way on that journey.”
The county is preparing an emergency declaration to the governor’s office for Corte Madera.
Outdated defenses strain town
Rising water along a muddy berm in Santa Venetia offered a stark, local snapshot of a national failure to keep pace with climate change. Residents watched water behave like a force of inevitability.
“The water goes underneath that house and comes out like a river,” homeowner Howard Lazar told Marin County Supervisor Mary Sackett. “Then it wraps around, hugs the sidewalk and then comes at us.”
Lazar has lived in the neighborhood since 1980 and recalled the devastating 1982 flood that buckled his floors for years.
“We had no money, and so we lived with buckled floors for about 15 years,” he said. This time, the water again rose to within inches of homes, held back only by an aging berm and improvised defenses.
Sackett told the congressman that this part of Marin County is less affluent than the county average, yet residents often face flood insurance premiums that can rival their mortgage payments.
They stood on a bridge over South Fork Gallinas Creek, where the view illustrated a broader national problem: infrastructure designed for a different climate is being overtaken by rising seas, land subsidence and more volatile weather.
The earthen berm protecting roughly 600 homes in the area was first built in the 1950s and hastily reinforced after major floods in the 1980s. Today, it is uneven, full of gopher holes and vulnerable. County leaders have a plan ready — a $25 million sheet-pile wall designed to go deeper into the ground, resist seepage and account for decades of subsidence.
“And you may recall, Congressman, we applied for the, BRIC and the FMA grants, for some federal dollars for this,” Sackett told Huffman from the bridge, referring to the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grants and Flood Mitigation Assistance grants, both offered under the Biden Administration specifically for climate infrastructure projects. “I think those plans were canceled in this administration. What would that funding have enabled? Do we have to wait until there’s a disaster, or can we prevent the disaster from happening?”
Investing in long-term protection
Huffman said it should be “very crosscutting” and added “I mean, this is the kind of thing that hits you whether you are in, you know, the Gulf Coast of Louisiana or Marin County.”
He said grants like the ones that Supervisor Sackett was describing are things that benefit his colleagues in red districts in California.
“You’re going to have to invest in infrastructure,” he said. “This is exhibit A behind us.”
In the southern part of the county, in Marin City, mobile pumps installed with a mix of state and federal funding has helped keep the roads around Donahue Road passable and homes dry during the same high tides. The road is lower and upstream from the raised Gateway Shopping Center, which sits between the neighborhood and the Bay, resulting in persistent flooding over years.
“Until we put the temporary pumps in, it was an annual event,” said Doreen Gounard, aide to Marin County Supervisor Stephanie Moulton-Peters of repeated flooding. “Now these pumps have really made a big difference in a short period of time.”
Still, pumps and sandbags are stopgaps, with a long-term fix still years away for Marin City.
Marin County executive Derek Johnson said they are now trying to move from studying climate impacts to acting on them, including hiring a dedicated climate team and coordinating shoreline adaptation across jurisdictions. The challenge, they say, is doing so fast enough — and with a reliable federal partnership.
Huffman confirmed that he collaborates with his republican colleagues in Congress all the time.
“I sit on committees with them,” he said.” Can I get them to push back against an administration that is off the rails, we’ll see.”