Many of us believed that a re-design of Old Town Goleta
would be an ideal
location to practice some of the precepts of
True Urbanism, or Smart
Planning, that could aid in the design
for a new city. These were labels
attached to what is now a
worldwide movement.
Flooding was also a major concern, despite periodic
droughts. Santa
Barbara and the South Coast had suffered
several devastating floods during
the 1990s that ended a prior
8-year drought.
The flood that broke the drought was called the March
Miracle: in March
1991, 23 inches of rain fell, even flooding the
Santa Barbara Municipal
Airport and closing it for several days.
A second flood in 1995 caused another flooding of Old
Town Goleta’s main
street. A three-foot deep stream of water from a
torrential rainfall
overflowed San Jose creek at one end of Old
Town’s boundaries adjacent to a
Nissan car dealer’s lot.
More than 40 cars parked in the lot were swamped with several thrown into a culvert that diverted the flood waters onto Old Town’s main street.
A climate scientist later said that the creek
would no longer be adequate
for containing flooding because
the hard paved streets and roof surfaces in
the surrounding
neighborhoods had replaced the soil that had absorbed
excess
rainfall.
Now the creek carried almost all of the rain’s runoff.
Hence flood control
improvements, such as an enlarged
creek bed to carry the increased runoff,
were required in the
CEQA report as the first step in any redevelopment
effort.
The droughts and consequential flooding also made everyone
aware of the
limited water supplies in California, as well as the
potentially devastating
drought/flood cycle. In fact, California’s
latest six-year drought ended (in
2017) with the greatest rainfall totals for Northern California since the 1880s.
Harlan Green © 2023
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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