Thumbnail photo courtesy of Del Norte County Del Norte County is seeking the public’s help in a $3 million planning effort aimed at identifying where its drainage trouble spots are. Thousands of assets from small culverts to large bridges are scattered throughout the county, Engineer Jon Olson told supervisors Tuesday. The Community Development Department is asking people to either fill out a survey or drop a pin on a map and describe their problems. The engineering division can also take the survey information over the phone if people would rather call instead, he said. “There’s a lot of uncertainty out there, so as we’re doing the modeling going into the future, we’re going to be looking at some extreme changes in rainfall and sea level rise,” Olson said. “If we see rainfall go up in the next 20 years, we’ll know where to expect our trouble spots. If we see sea level rise go up in the next 20 years, we’ll know what to predict.” Even if rainfall intensity doesn’t go up, Olson said, the county will still be able to identify potential problems associated with “today’s conditions.” “We’re also getting valuable information about culverts that are just full of soil and need maintenance,” he said. “There’s not one person who knows where every single culvert is. We’re going to have a GIS database that says this is where every culvert is.” The Del Norte Regional Drainage Study and Capital Improvement Plan is a partnership between the county and Elk Valley Rancheria. The study is being paid for with $3 million in Caltrans Sustainable Transportation Planning grant dollars. According to Olson’s staff report, about $2.6 million is coming from Caltrans Integrated Climate Adaptation and Resiliency Program. The Del Norte Local Transportation Commission also allocated about $344,100 in Regional Surface Transportation Program and Planning and Planning, Programming and Monitoring fund dollars. The consultant for the project is the global engineering firm GHD, Olson said. Workers have been in the field conducting a physical inventory of the county’s assets, he said. The plan will also focus on detailed lidar data collected through North Coast Resource Partnership. “It’s so big and the data is so intense that you can’t just look at it all at once,” Olson said. “You have to break it into smaller pieces for each drainage basin.” In addition to conducting a community survey, Olson said the county will hold public meetings in 2026 focusing on Klamath, Gasquet and Hiouchi and Smith River. District 1 Supervisor Darrin Short illustrated how valuable public input could be by addressing a commenter’s skepticism about whether rainfall is increasing and sea levels are rising. Short mentioned a house on Pacific Avenue that would be inundated with 5 to 6 inches of standing water very winter until the culprit was identified. “Come to find out a culvert that was a block and a half away from there was largely blocked,” he said. “The city came and removed that blockage and all of a sudden, we got a backyard again. If there’s somebody in the public out there that has standing water on their property and you think nothing of it, it’s just always been that way, maybe it can be fixed with some infrastructure improvements or getting that dirt out of the culvert.” To take the survey or drop a pin on the county’s map, click here.