Pájaro River Watershed Flood Protection Plan - The Pajaro River ...

Upper Watershed, San Benito and Santa Clara Counties: The upper watershed of the
Pájaro system is at least as complex as that of the portion west of the San Andreas Fault.
There is indirect geologic evidence that Santa Clara Valley from San Jose southward
through Morgan Hill and Gilroy may have been the course of a major river carrying coarse
gravels southward toward the present Pájaro River and that a lake in San Benito County
later spilled northward along Coyote Valley into San Francisco Bay (Iwamura, 1995). An
open and porous alluvial gravel characterizes the near surface substrate beneath both the
north-flowing Coyote Creek and the south-flowing Llagas and Uvas Creek valleys. A very
low gradient “watershed divide” near Morgan Hill has southward flow in a shallow
subsurface aquifer, presumably recharged by Santa Clara Water District facilities from
California Water Project sources (Anderson Reservoir) and from locally captured and
diverted watercourses. Where this shallow gravel aquifer is exposed in the bank of the
Pájaro River, along the westernmost Santa Clara -- San Benito County border, many
cubic feet per second of water flow continuously into the Pájaro River. These high water
tables were recognized long before the San Luis Project brought Mt. Shasta water into
southern Santa Clara and northern San Benito counties. The high groundwater levels are
recognized as a particular agricultural problem in San Benito County (Jones & Stokes,
1998) where some are saline.
The thick uniform silt deposits of Northern San Benito and Southern Santa Clara
counties are themselves enigmatic (see Fig 5 from Jenkins). Jenkins refers to them
as “Pleistocene” meaning of Pleistocene age (greater than 10,000 years ago) and
draws parallels with glacial age origin silts. Indeed, the surface deposits of lakebed
silts are remarkably uniform fine sandy silt similar to glacial origin rock flour in both
texture and lack of chemical weathering. But calling upon an ancestral San Joaquin
River system to deposit these silts from the Sierra Nevada is, at present, not
demonstrated. Jenkins hypothesizes that the silts may be derived locally from the
older Purisima Formation (locally now called the Etchegoin Formation east of the San
Andreas Fault). Subsurface deposits of northern San Benito County are characterized
by localized sands and gravels that appear to be river deposits embedded in silts
formed in shallow ephemeral lakes (Stanley, et al, 2002; Jones & Stokes, 1998).
These are then buried by the more uniform overlying silt lakebeds. It is these surface
lake silt unit(s) that have been transported downstream to blanket the lower Pájaro
River Valley. It is not clear that they are being eroded from agricultural fields
upstream, and may simply be carried in flood flows from upstream bank erosion.
DRAFT 7/22/03
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Pájaro Watershed Flood Management