Lost Streams of Los Angeles

this article deserves a Pulitzer! This is one of the most fascinating articles I've read about Los Angeles nature. Judith Lewis should be nominated for an award for the history, the relevance, the beauty of her story about LA rivers and community. I've excerpted bits and pieces here to capture a few of the facts I want to recall, but please READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE...you will be enlightened and touched!!!!

Please write her and the LA Weekly and tell them how much you appreciate learning about nature in our community...especially with such beauty and sensitivity!
Carolyn


Southern Californians hate moisture like cats.

Carey McWilliams, An Island on Land

Los Angeles is not only known for its beaches and Hollywood...but for concrete lined rivers and streams. Only in LALA Land!
Where the wild things are: Wilmington Slough
Throughout the world, engineers have tried to constrain rivers, freeze them in their paths and contain them in their banks, but no one disappeared creeks more efficiently than the people who built Los Angeles. In many other large cities, free-running creeks are something to construct a little paradise around -- the desirable "water features" touted in so many development brochures. Here in Southern California, streams are regarded as a nuisance -- ditches in the summertime that flood in heavy rains. We run them underground, pave them over and move them aside to install our pools or build our new housing and construct our retail developments.

"We are absolutely unique in that way," says Mark Gold, executive director of Heal the Bay. "The rest of the country laughs when they see what we’ve done. For Southern California, a stream seems to be a concrete trapezoidal channel."

"When I was growing up here, the idea that there was any nature at all around me wasn’t even on my mind," says Hall. "My father is from a rural part of Kentucky, so my childhood experience of nature was from there, or from New Mexico, where my mom was from. I had no experience of nature in Hawthorne, or even Los Angeles. It wasn’t part of my consciousness. How can you ask people to be good stewards of the environment when they have no concept of what’s around them?"

"...we stand over what most people would call a pond of storm-drain runoff, littered along its banks with lids from fast-food drink cups, Styrofoam to-go boxes, plastic grocery bags and silver birthday balloons. It is stinky with stagnant algae."

Hall views the unimpressive little swamp called North Atwater Creek as an opportunity to return a piece of Los Angeles turf, most of it rigorously engineered against every whim of nature, back to its native state. Here behind the fence, she sees a natural monument, a vestigial trace of something Los Angeles once had and lost: a vibrant network of free-flowing streams that ran through its basin -- and may again if Hall gets her way.

It takes a big imagination to think like this, maybe even a few loose screws.

Officially, Hall works for the state's Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission, coordinating efforts to restore the Ballona Creek Watershed. Less officially, she has appointed herself the keeper of Los Angeles County's small waterway legacy.

Hall stands apart. She spends nearly all her free time tracking streams -- vaulting over walls, sliding down embankments and squeezing through holes in the locked fortresses Los Angeles has constructed around its remaining inland water in search of natural trickles ample enough to deserve the label "creek."

Hall, who grew up in the South Bay city of Hawthorne and emerged from Princeton’s architecture program and Cal Poly Pomona’s graduate school as a landscape architect, has become extraordinarily sensitive to the signs of the city’s buried hydrologic pedigree: The dip in a roadway was once most likely a streambed; the long row of sycamores almost certainly lined a creek’s banks. Sometimes she even finds a remnant of a real, live perennial stream, like the one she calls Wonderland Creek, named by her for the street that runs parallel to it.

But here's the really crazy thing. Hall doesn’t just want to find the waterways. She wants nothing less than to unearth these buried urban creeks. In landscape-architect-speak, she wants to "daylight" L.A.'s streams. She wants to recharge the depleted aquifers and dried-up springs. She wants to see Los Angeles once again trickling with water.

"The biggest source of water pollution in California is urban runoff," says David Beckman of the Natural Resources Defense Council, which regularly sues the federal government to enforce its own water-quality laws established under the Clean Water Act. But when it passed in 1972, the Clean Water Act had nothing to say about pollution coursing through the circulatory systems of urban aquifers; it only regulated the water discharged from "point sources" -- refineries, sewage-treatment facilities and factories. It was a little like making laws about air pollution and excluding cars.

"The Clean Water Act didn’t bring urban runoff into its gamut until the early 1990s," says Beckman, when Congress updated the law to include storm-water and dry-season runoff pollution. "So the focus of environmental advocates and regulators on the number-one source of the problem is only about 12 years old."

WE NEED A TIMELINE OF HOW WE GOT IN THIS CONDITION!

"Believe it or not," Beckman says, "for the first 10 years there was no requirement that said storm water was actually responsible for water quality -- it was only procedural." Authorities might have recommended that you stencil all your storm drains to remind people that what goes in them ends up in the ocean, for instance, but they didn’t hold you accountable if everyone ignored them.

Eventually, however, the EPA came up with its Total Maximum Daily Load program, developed in the days of the Clinton administration. Beckman calls it a "pollution budget," an agreed-upon limit imposed on certain quantifiable pollutants, such as E. Coli, nitrogen and certain toxic salts. "They gave us an overall macro blueprint for what we were trying to achieve," Beckman says, just a hint of exultation in his otherwise lawyerly voice. "The groundwork has been laid; the structure is now in place."

Results, however, are still lagging, in part because the Bush-era EPA has been loath to enforce its own rules until some organization -- the NRDC, Santa Monica Baykeeper, Heal the Bay-- takes it to court.


And here we get to the principal reason Southern Californians hate water: Back when the Los Angeles River was lined with willows, Watts and Compton were marshland and Inglewood was “coastal prairie” (the reason a major thoroughfare bisecting the city from north to south is called "Prairie"), homes, farms and even people were regularly lost to the water.

Los Angeles used to be a land of catastrophic floods. One of the most devastating was the big flood of 1938, after which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers stepped in to turn the Los Angeles River into the concrete channel it is today. Most Angelenos who complain about the concrete don't know how often floods happened here, and not just along the big river's banks: In 1811, 1815, 1822, 1825, 1832, 1842, 1852, 1858 and 1859, Los Angeles County flooded in various places from its southern reaches to the Santa Monica Mountains; in the winters of 1861-62, 1867-68, 1888-89 and 1914, those floods were disastrous. They ripped up buildings and swept away crops and cattle. They made it possible to sail from San Pedro to Compton, and impossible to travel over ground from Compton to Los Angeles.

Twenty dams have been built in Los Angeles County to contain floodwaters and recharge local aquifers, including the Hansen Dam and the Sepulveda Basin Dam, both finished in 1941. But even with all floodwater captured and every stream restored, there would never be enough natural water to sustain the new Los Angeles.

On his recent Asian tour, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa saw how the government of Seoul, South Korea, transformed the Cheonggye­cheon stream, which flows through the city's skyscrapers, from an urban eyesore into a recreation attraction. He even signed a river-revitalization pact with Seoul’s city leaders. "This agreement will provide us the tools to share environmental knowledge and technology, as we work to restore the Los Angeles River," said Villaraigosa at the signing. "The Cheonggyecheon River has shown that 'Yes, we can unpave paradise.' "

Few know better how hard it is to unpave paradise than Rex Frankel. As director of the Ballona Ecosystem Education Project, he has long fought -- futilely, in some respects -- to preserve the Ballona Wetlands, 90 percent of which has been compromised by development. He has come to realize that the Ballona Wetlands' health would improve if the county and city could fix the urban-runoff problem. And so he has also worked hard to put together the numbers to demonstrate that daylighting creeks and restoring wetlands may actually make financial, as well as environmental, sense.

The way Frankel sees it, Los Angeles has three options available to it for cleaning up pollution caused by urban runoff. It can install small-scale systems that capture as much pollution as possible close to its source -- filtration devices that either stop garbage from flowing downstream or divert water to existing parks where it can percolate into the ground.

The second option, also proposed in the city of Los Angeles' Integrated Resource Plan, is to divert the water to regional treatment plants, facilities that will treat urban runoff like sewage, and cleanse it of nutrients before it hits the beach. "And the third way," he says, "is to unpave our rivers as much as possible, acquire any potential vacant land along the rivers and use them as part of an expanded green-space network."

The first option is based on the city's proposal to use some 30 publicly owned sites to reclaim water and use it for landscape irrigation around the region of Los Angeles known as the Santa Monica Bay Watershed -- Venice, the Los Angeles Airport area, Pacific Palisades and El Segundo, from which all runoff drains into the ocean. It's a nice idea, says Frankel, but according to his calculations, "They were only capturing about 2 percent of the runoff that the city says it needs cleaned up to meet Clean Water Act standards. The number of days they’d violate health regulations wouldn’t decrease at all."

The only thing stopping developers from going crazy is that Los Angeles doesn’t have enough water to accommodate all their plans.

Daylighting streams and restoring wetlands would mean buying huge tracts of private property, ripping out its impervious surfaces and making sure those waterways have room to flood. "But once you've spent the money to acquire the land," Frankel points out, "it's self-maintaining. Unlike a treatment plant, it doesn't require power and tens of millions of dollars to maintain. If you're just worrying about your taxes, this is the best deal. Even the Coalition for Practical Regulation people, if they saw the viability of the river-restoration approach, they wouldn't oppose it. And think of all the parkland we'd create!"

And even with the current concrete-channeled water, City Councilman Labonge does worry about floods: LaBonge remembers watching a rush of water carry a cement mixer down the Los Angeles River on Martin Luther King Jr. Day a few years ago. "It went from Sixth to Seventh Street in nothing flat," he recalls. But even LaBonge acknowledges that restoring rivers could transform Los Angles. "In Europe, they’re doing it all over the place," he says. "I just returned from Berlin, our sister city, and I understood from them that when the wall was there, the river was not loved. And now it is.

"You see," he says, "cities can change."