Flooding has damaged homes, roads, and pastures in our neighborhood for years. We're asking Lake County and its partners to keep the restoration project moving toward a long-term solution for our neighborhood and Clear Lake hitch.
We're neighbors in Green Acres, Kelseyville, California. Many of us have lived here for decades. We've seen floodwater stay on our properties for months, damage roads and fences, and make everyday life difficult.
We're sharing photos, keeping track of conditions, and meeting with the agencies involved. We want the creek restored and the neighborhood able to drain properly when storms come.
Drone footage of Green Acres flooding, February 18, 2025. Filmed by Sam Euston.
Cole Creek was rerouted and straightened in the late 1950s. Sediment and debris have built up over the years, leaving less room for water to flow. Blocked outlets have also kept water from draining out of the neighborhood.
Clearing those blockages helps water flow. The larger restoration project needs to deal with the creek and the neighborhood's drainage for the long term.
Clear Lake hitch come into Cole Creek to spawn. When the creek floods nearby fields, fish can get trapped in pools that later dry out. Our photos show what has happened in past years.
We counted about 50 hitch in the creek during a community survey on March 10, 2026. It was good to see them. Restoring Cole Creek matters for these fish as well as the people who live here.
Lake County chose FlowWest in May 2026 to plan and design restoration of a 1.55-mile stretch of Cole Creek. That's a welcome step. We want to help keep the project moving until those plans become work on the ground that makes a lasting difference.
Through the Cole Creek Advisory Collaborative, neighbors and agencies meet to talk about the creek and what needs to happen next. We want the county and its partners to keep us informed:
Thank you to Lake County Water Resources, the California Conservation Corps, and CDFW for the creek work and coordination so far, including the county's September and October 2026 cleanups. We need that upkeep to continue while the larger project moves forward. Our main goal remains the long-term restoration of Cole Creek.
October 6, 2026
Lake County Water Resources crews returned to Cole Creek on Monday and Tuesday, October 5–6, to remove accumulated sediment ahead of the winter storms. Building on last year's cleanup, the team uncovered the drainage pipe and removed sediment from the creek upstream of it. It's great to see this hands-on maintenance continuing!
Read more →September 1, 2026
On September 1, Lake County Water Resources crews cleared two major accumulations of woody debris from Cole Creek along Clark Drive. At the first site, logs and branches had packed beneath a bridge in the channel. Crews pulled the material from under the span and loaded it into a dump trailer. Farther downstream, they cut apart a second dense blockage and hauled the debris out.
Read more →July 15, 2026
We now have hard numbers on what the creek work did. Since January 2025, sensors on a pasture at Pharo Place have been tracking standing water and groundwater every 15 minutes. The monitoring is run by O'Connor Environmental, working with the State Water Board and Big Valley Rancheria, and Matt O'Connor just shared the first full data set with us.
Read more →At one pasture on Pharo Place, sensors recorded at least 135 straight days of standing water in 2025, with a peak depth of 2.31 feet. In the early 2026 record, the peak was about 5 inches. It's encouraging to see less standing water after the creek work. These results cover one pasture during two different winters, so they don't tell us that the flooding problem is fixed across the neighborhood. See the monitoring results.
Do you have photos, flooding stories, or observations from along the creek? Please share them. They help show what our neighborhood has been dealing with and why the restoration needs to happen.
