Thirty years ago, slaughterhouses, tanning factories, and sanitation districts all discharged their wastes directly into the Napa River. It was unsafe for people, unfit for the plants and animals that had depended on it, unclean, and ugly.

But the tide has changed for the Napa. A dedicated and diverse community of activists and agencies that has fought to resurrect it has not only improved its water quality and secured thousands of acres of wildlife habitat along its banks, but may also go down in history as having redefined America's approach to flood control.

These activists, business people, homeowners, and bureaucrats staged a revolution against the Corps of Engineers. But it was a non-violent revolution, one that eventually seduced the Corps into participating in a radical, ten-year, $220-million project that promises to do as much to restore and preserve the river's wildlife habitat as to protect property from frequent floods. The transformation of the Napa is important in itself, but ultimately its greatest impact may be as a model for dozens, or hundreds, of other rivers in similar situations around the world.

And for its part, despite initial chaffing, the Corps is relishing its new identity as environmental good guy. Such a huge bureaucracy will take a long time to reform, but planting the notion that a living river may be less dangerous than a dead one is a profound accomplishment.

In 1995, before the change of heart, the Corps proposed a project to line the Napa River with riprap for the seven or so miles that run through the city of Napa. The conservation community was not impressed. They had not worked for years to nurse the river back to life, just to bind it in a concrete straitjacket.

But something had to be done. As the valley surrounding the Napa River is converted into vineyards, paved, and otherwise developed, the soil's effectiveness at absorbing runoff diminishes, and floods get more frequent and intense. Twenty-seven floods have hit Napa since the 1850s, and, over the last 40 years, floods have cost more than $540 million. In 1995, and again in early 1997, the river overflowed, turning downtown streets into churning tributaries, and forcing hundreds of people to abandon their homes.

Flooding was already bad enough 30 years ago for Congress to allocate $80 million for flood control in the area. Since then, the Corps has presented three ways to spend the money. All of them would have deepened the river's channel, raised the levees on either side, lined those levees with concrete, and required frequent and disruptive dredging. The county rejected all three as environmentally and aesthetically unacceptable, preferring to weather the floods than drive a stake into the river's heart.

Despite the lessons learned after the Great Flood of 1993, old ways die hard, and when the Corps presented its third and final proposal for the Napa River in 1995, it was another dominatrix: enlarge the channel, raise the banks, and line them with immovable objects. But the Corps' resolve had been weakened, and when a coalition of state and local governments, resource agencies, businesses, and environmental organizations banded together and proposed a radically different approach, the Corps listened with more receptive ears.

It wasn't just humility, though. Alone, the Corps didn't have the political clout to get its project through the necessary hoops, and time had run out. Not only were the floods disastrous, and getting worse, but this was the local community's last chance to take advantage of the 30-year-old, $80-million congressional funding appropriation. Congress had grown weary of allocating funds to a project that never materialized. Give us a plan everybody can work with, Congress said in effect, or forget the whole thing.

After two years of relentless and intense research and negotiations, the Corps, 27 other government agencies, and 25 non-governmental organizations hammered out a revolutionary "living river" plan. Where the Corps had proposed floodwalls and levees, the coalition proposed terraced marshes and broad wetlands. Where the Corps had proposed dredging the river deeper to allow it to carry more water faster, the coalition wanted to make it wider, by returning much of its floodplain.

Winning the Corps' cooperation for the plan was a big accomplishment, and getting environmentalists, farmers, vintners, governments, and business owners to back the project is testament both to the tenacity of the participants and to their desperation. But agreement was only the first step. The coalition also needed about $110 million to supplement the money already allocated by the federal government. Hence, Measure A, on the ballot in Napa County in March 1998. Known as the "Living River Initiative," Measure A raised the county sales tax one half of a percent, amounting to about $6 million a year for the next 20 years.

Passing a sales-tax hike in California requires a two-thirds majority and is rarely pulled off, since many voters reflexively vote against any new tax. But the coalition won over even fiscal conservatives, arguing that if the flood-control project worked, sparing the town from costly floods, it would save the community about $20 million a year, including project maintenance costs. With virtually no organized opposition and wide community support, Measure A passed.

The living river plan's operating principle is to let the river be itself. Rather than dominating it with elaborate corsets, brassieres, and foot bindings, the Corps will dress this stretch of the Napa in a simple green camisole. New concrete will be limited to confining short sections of the river near historic downtown buildings and helping control the river's most perilous curves.

Soon, the levees insulating about 500 acres of grazing lands to the south of the city will be breached and restored to tidal marsh. Marsh restoration will require a lot of earth moving to create tidal terraces on each side of the river, but otherwise will be fairly passive. In addition to Mason's lilaeopsis, an endangered low-growing plant, and showy Indian clover, a plant proposed for the endangered species list, the restored marsh will also create new habitat for ailing aquatic species such as the Sacramento splittail, California steelhead, Delta smelt, and California red-legged frog.

Later, state officials will begin creating backup levees on the marshes. The lands on the far sides of the floodplains will still need flood protection, so in most places when a levee is removed, another one is built or reinforced, but further back from the river.

The plan also calls for reforesting some riparian areas with native cottonwoods, sycamores, box elders, Oregon ash, and a variety of oaks and other trees. This will create good wildlife habitat while reducing bank erosion, minimizing sedimentation, and preventing weed and brush encroachment in channels. "Meander belts," open areas along the river's curves, will also be cleared and replanted with native vegetation to help absorb extra water during floods.

In all, 16 houses, 25 mobile homes, 8 commercial buildings, and 13 warehouses will be removed from the river's banks and floodplains to give the river room to swell during floods. In addition, the project requires rebuilding seven bridges that will be higher and wider than existing bridges, and have streamlined profiles less affected by the high flows periodically rushing beneath them.

At the place where Napa Creek meets the Napa River, near downtown, one of the project's few major plumbing fixtures will be installed. Called the "dry bypass," it will formalize the course the river now takes through town when it floods.

Napa's founding fathers must have thought the little peninsula sticking into the river where it oxbows was both the beautiful and practical choice to settle, since it gave maximum exposure to the riverfront. But in its passion to get downstream, the flooding river can't be bothered with the detour and cuts right through town. The city and county will buy and remove the buildings, while the Corps will deepen the bypass channel and build bridges across it. Most of the time, when the river is not overflowing, the area will be dedicated to parks that can take an occasional swamping.

Continuous habitat is the trick to restoring a "living river.. New projects will create a continuity along the river from San Pablo Bay to the river's tributaries and headwaters. There will also be lateral continuity, connecting the river to surrounding shallow water mudflats, tidal marsh, emergent vegetation, and upland riparian habitats.

The environment will gain, but what about flood control? Well, the Corps' engineers think the flood-control portion of the project will work just fine. "There's no reason flood-control values have to compromise environmental values," says Rick Reinhardt, the Corps' technical manager for the project. "Restoring the river's natural water-absorption mechanisms is functional from a flood-control standpoint and there are really no extra costs."