It will take at least 45 days for work crews to repair a broken levee and pump out the water that is flooding miles of farmland near Stockton.
Workers are waiting for the floodwaters to completely fill a roughly six-mile-square island of low-lying farmland.
Crews are working to shore up the embankments of a levee after parts of it gave way early yesterday.
The area is sparsely populated, but about 270 people have been evacuated.
About eleven-thousand acres of alfalfa, wheat and tomatoes are under water.
Officials still have no reason why the privately-maintained levee failed.
This post was last modified on 01/31/2009 4:29 pm