A levee breach at a temporary water storage facility north of Bakersfield closed all lanes of northbound Highway 99 for about two hours Friday morning, forcing frustrated commuters onto 7th Standard Road while authorities cleared the roadway.
A Caltrans spokesman said the rupture drained water from the North Kern Water Storage District’s temporary groundwater recharge pond or ponds. He added that the release flooded some areas near the highway up to 3 feet deep in water.
“The shoulders were pretty bad,” spokesman Christian Lukens said. “Those were fully loaded with water.”
The California Highway Patrol reported at about 8 a.m. that all lanes of the highway’s northbound lanes were inundated at Lerdo Highway. It issued an update shortly after 10 a.m. that two of the leftmost lanes had been reopened but that the No. 3 lane was still closed as Caltrans workers removed debris.
A CHP spokesman in Bakersfield, Tomas Martinez, confirmed the levee had been created as a way of temporarily storing extra water. That water comes from the Kern River as authorities release elevated flows from Isabella Lake, which this year faces strain from a record-high snowpack in the southern Sierra Nevada.
The water storage district’s general manager, David “Dave” Hampton, said about 40 acre-feet of water spilled starting at about 7:30 a.m., when internal levees failed between a series of about five separate storage ponds.
“Water that was up in the higher ponds pushed water down to the south-end pond, the lower end pond, and so that was just too much water for that one pond, and so that perimeter levee breached,” he said, “and that’s what flooded the freeway.”
Hampton noted the spill spread across about 50 acres, adding at about 1:30 p.m. that “it’s all stopped.”
The temporary recharge facility was installed between the end of April and the start of May, he said, and water was stored there starting May 9.