Suggested reading from The Bee's editorial board.

'California's Next Nightmare: How a failing levee system could turn Sacramento into a modern-day Atlantis'

New York Times Magazine, July 3

Having advanced my career by writing about the perils of floods and other natural disasters, I understand the desire of a journalist to grab readers by the collar and scream at them: Be scared. Be very scared!

Even so, I winced reading Alex Prud'homme's piece in the New York Times Magazine, with its alarming headline.

Atlantis? Really?

To begin with, Atlantis was an island, and it sank into the sea – a large body of saltwater – in a single day, according to Plato's account.

Secondly, scholars are unsure if this mythical island ever existed.

So could Sacramento become a modern-day Atlantis? Sure, and we could also become a modern-day Elysian Fields, final resting place of the heroic and virtuous.

Beyond that, there's the problem of how Prud'homme – and whoever edited his piece – handles the science of Sacramento's flood risk. In a paragraph that describes Sacramento as "the most flood-prone city in the nation," we see these sentences: "Experts warn that there are two events that could destroy the levees and set off a megaflood. One is an earthquake; the second is a violent Pacific superstorm."

This is about half right. Sacramento's big threat is a Pineapple Express that dumps massive volumes of precipitation simultaneously into the watersheds of the American and Feather rivers, the latter of which flows into the Sacramento River upstream of the city.

But earthquakes?

That is a serious threat only to levees far downstream of Sacramento, in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Quake-punctured levees could inundate hundreds of square miles of Delta farmland and disrupt the water system of much of California. But Sacramento is too far upstream to be affected.

Along those same lines, the article suggests a megaflood in the Delta could shut down water exports. "Saltwater would be sucked from the (San Francisco) Bay (in what is known as a big gulp) and impelled into the delta, contaminating drinking supplies for 25 million people."

Again, the science is a bit off. An earthquake in dry times could indeed destroy Delta levees and flood the land they protect, resulting in saltwater being sucked from the Bay. But a megaflood? It would break Delta levees but also bring behind it a continuous and large flow of freshwater, keeping saltwater at bay.

The basic point of Prud'homme's piece – that a megaflood in Sacramento may be inevitable – can't be disputed.

But why no mention of the mega-levee being built in Natomas? Or the new spillway on Folsom Dam? Is Sacramento really doing nothing to avoid becoming "a modern-day Atlantis?"

Given that Prud'homme just came out with a highly praised book on water – "The Ripple Effect" – and previously collaborated with Julia Child on her best-selling autobiography, "My Life in France," I had expected more.

But enough of this rant.

Given that the New York Times has now declared that Sacramento has no future, I need to go home and tie my canoe to a second-floor window.

– Stuart Leavenworth

'Yick Wo at 125: Four Simple Lessons for the Contemporary Supreme Court'

Michigan Journal of Race & Law, forthcoming

View at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id=1861225

Two years ago, the California Legislature passed Assembly Concurrent Resolution 76 designating Dec. 17 – the repeal date of the 1882-1943 Chinese Exclusion Acts – as a day to remember. The resolution singled out the landmark 1886 Yick Wo case, the first time the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a law could appear fair and impartial, but if applied "with an evil eye and an unjust hand" it is unconstitutional discrimination.

The 125th anniversary of the Yick Wo case, on a San Francisco ordinance attempting to drive the Chinese out of business, comes at a time when cities and states again are attempting to pass local ordinances and laws to deflect or deter foreigners from settling in.

Marie A. Failinger's article is worth reading to remind ourselves of the pitfalls of regulations and laws that target noncitizens for discriminatory treatment.

Yick Wo came from China in 1861 and set up a laundry business in San Francisco. After more than 20 years in business, he was imprisoned for violating a newly enacted San Francisco ordinance that prohibited laundries unless they were constructed of brick or stone.

At the time, Chinese owned 240 of the city's 320 laundries. As Failinger points out, in response to angry protests over the Chinese presence in the laundry industry, the mayor and the board of supervisors passed more than a dozen ordinances restricting laundries, ostensibly on the grounds of "safety." Yick Wo's laundry had never failed a safety inspection.

Today we have cities trying to prohibit day laborers from soliciting employment within city limits. Others seek to penalize landlords or employers who don't adequately determine the immigration status of potential tenants or workers. Others crack down in various ways on street vendors.

In "Yick Wo at 125," Failinger calls the Yick Wo case a "constitutional promise we make to minorities." She also urges, however, that we remember "the tragedy that brought Yick Wo to the United States Supreme Court" in the first place. In the end, this is less about the courts than about the impulse behind laws that target certain groups of people.

– Pia Lopez

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