The creek under Temescal, and where your roof’s water goes

There’s a creek under Temescal. Most of us walk over it every day.

On Tuesday night someone on r/oakland asked whether a big El Niño flood would follow the old underground streams. Fair question, and this neighborhood has a story about it.

Temescal Creek runs from Lake Temescal in the hills down to the Bay. In 1868 Anthony Chabot dammed it to make the lake, Oakland’s first municipal water source. After a major flood in 1962, the county started putting the creek underground. The stretch from Lake Temescal to Hardy Park in Rockridge went into concrete as Highway 24 was built.

Then the flooding got worse. The old creek bed soaked up rain slowly, Bruce Douglas of Friends of Temescal Creek told Bay Nature, while the concrete tunnel “allowed rain to rush downstream at high speed.”

Neighbors in Temescal and Rockridge fought to keep the rest of the creek open. They didn’t win that, but they won a three-block strip of land above it. More than 1,300 volunteers turned it into the Rockridge-Temescal Greenbelt, with two playgrounds, native trees, and a “reconstituted creek” fed by water pumped up from the culvert below. At 51st and Telegraph, the creek runs 15 feet below ground.

Where floodwater goes on a big night, nobody can promise. Where your own roof’s water goes, you can: gutters that flow, and downspouts that carry it away from the house. If ladders aren’t your thing, that part’s ours.

Let’s make it flow…