But the Santa Clara Valley Water District – which is responsible for, among other things, protecting people and property from flooding – knows better.

That’s why the water district spends eight months a year removing built-up sediment from creek channels, shoring up eroding creek banks and removing other impediments from the more than 700 miles of streams that crisscross the valley floor.

This year alone, district field operations crews removed almost 56,000 cubic yards of sediment from local creeks, strengthened a mile of creek bank, removed 1,700 acres of vegetation, and collected more than 8,2250 cubic yards of trash to help carry rain water to the bay without causing flooding.

The work is conducted every year between the end of March and mid-October – the only time of the year when Chinook salmon and steelhead trout are not either migrating from San Francisco and/or Monterey bays to spawning grounds, or rearing their young before they’re strong enough to swim back to the sea.

Once the rain season is upon us, typically in November, those same field operation crews go on patrol to visually inspect creeks and help thwart conditions that could cause flooding.

Flooding is as much a part of the county’s history as agriculture and, more recently, high-tech innovations. In 1777, for example, California’s first pueblo on the banks of the Guadalupe River was destroyed by flooding. Twenty years later, Father Junipero Serra founded Mission San Jose on the banks of the Guadalupe, and suffered the same fate.

More recently, massive flooding along the Guadalupe River closed Highway 87 – twice – in 1995. And flooding in 1997 devastated large portions of San Jose along Coyote Creek.

Santa Clara County’s most recent flood – along San Francisquito Creek in February 1998 – is on the record books as the costliest ever.

For more information, visit the district's Stream Maintenance Program page.