The Upper Llagas Creek Flood Protection Project, a $176.2 million effort led by Valley Water in partnership with the City of Morgan Hill, is entering the home stretch of its final phase, with one of the summer’s most disruptive closures lifting this month.
Wright Avenue has reopened as of Aug. 18, offering some relief from the road closures that have snarled traffic around Morgan Hill this summer. Hale Avenue and Spring Avenue remain closed and are scheduled to reopen in October.
The closures were expected to cause heavy delays during the first week of the school year for families near Britton Middle School, P.A. Walsh Elementary and St. Catherine School—all of which sit close to the Phase 2B work zone.
The project aims to bring relief to a city that has long suffered from flooding in its downtown core. Streets including Watsonville Road, Main Avenue and Wright Avenue have flooded repeatedly during heavy rain events.
“This project will effectively eliminate all of that,” said Morgan Hill public services director Chris Ghione in an interview last spring. “This project is going to make a huge difference for people, so when it rains, we’re not going to have to worry about not being able to pass through roads, being stuck in our houses, things like that.”
The project has been decades in the making. What began as a federal effort led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stalled for years due to insufficient funding. Valley Water began pushing the project forward roughly a decade ago and has since secured the funding needed to move it to completion through a mix of federal grants and local property tax bonds.
The project spans 13.9 miles of channel and is being carried out in phases; Phase 1 and Phase 2A are both complete. The current and final phase, Phase 2B, began in October 2024 and is expected to run through spring 2027. Valley Water awarded the construction contract to Graniterock Company.
Phase 2B of the project includes extending the box culvert from Main Avenue and Hale Avenue to Wright Avenue, building a new weir structure—a small barrier or low-head dam built across a river or stream—at Wright and Hale avenues, widening Hale Avenue between Main and Wright avenues, relocating utilities and undergrounding overhead electrical lines along the west side of Hale Avenue, installing new streetlights, and adding a new traffic signal at Wright Avenue and Hale Road.
The project is also expected to remove a number of Morgan Hill neighborhoods from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s flood maps, Ghione said, which should help to relieve flood insurance costs for home and business owners in the area.
Does anyone know when we will be able to get out from underneath our very expensive blood insurance in San Martin?
Will a new flood plane map be drawn and will we get relief from flood insurance in Morgan Hill?