This is episode 5 of not built for this the little levy that could

The year I moved to California it barely rained at all. It was 2015 and the local news was doing lots of stories about

taking shorter showers and how much water it takes to grow a single almond.

For most of my time in the state, California has been hovering somewhere between extreme

and exceptional drought conditions. But then came the winter of 2023.

The rains started on New Year's Eve.

At first, it was relieving, exciting even,

to see the dry creek beds spring to life and the sun-baked hills behind my house get a good soak.

But then the water just kept coming.

The storms went on for weeks on end until we had too much of a good thing.

Many rivers in Northern California flooded that winter, inundating communities that only in The new scientific consensus is that California needs to prepare for both drought and deluge as the climate changes.

Meteorologists have settled on the phrase weather whiplash to describe the bewildering snap from one extreme to the other.

Many of the towns that felt the sting of the weather whip were low-income agricultural communities, towns like Planata and

Alansworth and Paharo, where a river broke through an old levy and displaced over 3,000 people.

Following those floods, there were a lot of questions

about the capacity of the state's aging water

infrastructure to handle supercharged storms, and about who pays the price when that infrastructure fails.

But our story today is about another flood-prone farm worker town in California,

one that actually managed to stay safe and dry during the big storms of 2023.

It's called Hamilton City, and it's a small unincorporated community built along the Sacramento

River in California's Central Valley.

For decades, the only thing protecting Hamilton City from the river was one of the worst levies in the entire state.

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