Santa Monica’s Green Street Explored

Santa Monica's Bicknell Avenue Green Street, looking southwest toward the Santa Monica Bay

Los Angeles Creek Freak headed west today for an all-bloggers lunch with Siel (Green L.A. Girl) and Damien (L.A. StreetsBlog.) I took the opportunity to go and visit the city of Santa Monica’s new green street project. Creek Freak mentioned this project briefly in an earlier entry, referring readers to Heal the Bay’s Mark Gold’s account of the street’s opening festivities. There’s also coverage of its July 14th 2009 opening at L.A. Frog, LAist, the Santa Monica Mirror, and video footage posted by Global Green. The project was funded by state water bond Proposition 50, the state Water Resources Control Board, the local Regional Water Quality Control Board, the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission, and the city’s water quality parcel tax Measure V.

The green street features are located on both sides of the 100 block of Bicknell Avenue, extending from Ocean Avenue to Neilson Way – just a block from the beach, not far from the Santa Monica Pier:

View Larger Map

The overall design is pretty smart! It’s reminiscent of some simpler curb-cut water harvesting tree wells (click link for excellent photo worth easily a thousand words) that Brad Lancaster has done in Tucson. The concept is the same: street runoff in the gutter flows into the parkway (landscaped area between the sidewalk and the curb) and soaks into the ground there, watering trees and other plants. In large storms, excess water overflows back into the gutter.

I actually prefer Lancaster’s design, which is simpler and perhaps more elegant; it merely subtracts some concrete, and utilizes the same gap for inflow and outflow of water. The Santa Monica green street is a little more engineered. It has rainwater flowing in a gap inlet, then through a depressed area (a swale), and then any excess that hasn’t soaked in will flow out a second opening (outlet) at the downstream end.

There are many reasons that is all really really good. (Regular readers who have already read L.A. Creek Freak’s multi-benefit watershed management tirade can skip ahead to the next paragraph.) Our local waterways have big problems with pollution (water quality) and flooding (water quantity.) Additionally, we don’t have enough local water (water supply) so we import plenty of it at great monetary and environmental cost. We’ve designed most of our urbanized basin to usher rainwater out to the ocean as quickly as possible. Rain hits a roof, heads down a pipe onto a concrete driveway into a concrete gutter, into a concrete pipe (a storm drain,) into a concrete-lined creek, and into the ocean. We flush that rainwater out as fast as possible, in order to prevent flooding. Another approach, which this street represents, is to (in the words of Brad Lancaster) treat rainwater as a welcome guest: invite her to not be in such a hurry, to slow down and hang out with us for a while. When we slow rainwater down, pollutants it’s carrying settle out. When it runs across earth, the water soaks in and micro-organisms break down the pollutants. This results in cleaner water, less severe peak flooding, and more water stored underground… not to mention greener neighborhoods, more habitat, less air pollution, and lots more good stuff.

Here’s a detailed explanation showing step-wise how the street works: (I’ve shown only one swale area here – there are about ten of these in the whole project.)

Curb-Cut Water Inlet

Water in the gutter flows in this inlet. The inlet is a gap in the curb that has been covered with a metal lid forming a little tunnel.

Depressed Landscaped Parkway

From there the water flows through the parkway in what we creek freaks call a “bio-swale.” It’s basically a mini-creekbed – a depressed, landscaped area between the sidewalk and the curb. The inlet above is shown at the bottom of this photo. The water flows in there and upward (photo-wise) toward the outlet in the upper right.

Curb-Cut Water Outlet

Much of the water that enters the parkway soaks into the ground. In a large storm, water will reach the end of the bio-swale and will overflow back out into the gutter.

Porous Pavement Parking

In addition to the curbside bio-swales, the parking lane has been paved with porous (or permeable) concrete. In the above photo, the regular black asphalt shows on the right, and the porous pavement beneath the car is slightly lighter in color. In working with the city of Los Angeles on a shared street project in my neighborhood, neighbors pushed for permeable pavement in our street, but the city hadn’t used permeable pavement enough to be familiar with it. They expressed concern that it wouldn’t be strong enough to support the weight of large vehicles, so they only used it for the sidewalk on our street project. Santa Monica has used conventional asphalt for the center of the road, which needs to bear the most weight, and has put the porous pavement in the parking lane, which bears less weight.

Explanatory sign

There are signs at each end that explain how and why the street does what it does. Oddly, they’re posted so high that even our 6’3″ tall L.A. Creek Freak correspondent had a hard time viewing and reading them. For a little more detail, there’s a decent almost-readable photo of one of these signs posted online by L.A. Frog. Perhaps the city of Santa Monica could lower these? and perhaps post one of them online somewhere?

Before I launch into some critique, I want to emphasize that this is an excellent project! Yaaaayyyy! It should serve as a prototype for how streets should work all over. I really like that it’s actually pretty “readable” – one can look around the site and fairly easily understand how rainwater flows through it. I think it’s very important that we reveal water flows, so that the public can better understand and value our natural water cycles.

I do want to mention a few additional criticisms:

- To me, the project appears somewhat over-built. There’s quite a bit of impermeable concrete – a swath along the curb, and a few concrete pathways leading from the sidewalk to the curb. Could this have been permeable pavement? or maybe stepping stones? (with wheelchair access to the street at the driveways and at the corners)
Also in the over-built category, there seem to be a lot of extraneous drainage systems. At the end of the street there’s already a couple of good-sized storm drain inlets… but the project has included more than half a dozen seemingly-unnecessary additional drains. There are little green ones inside some of the bio-swales:

Some kind of filter?

and some sort of extra storm drain grates (with some kind of filter devices inside?) at some of the outlets:

Extra storm drain inlet?

Perhaps the project designers could explain what additional functionality (capacity? functionality?) these features contribute. They perhaps add some additional capacity for those once-in-a-lifetime hurricane-force storms. Even if this is true, they appear to be unneeded extra expenses. I suspect that they may make the project more prone to high tech failure… How long do you think it will it take for someone to step on and break those green plastic filter hood thingies?
For my preference, I think that it’s better for us to trust nature to do the cleaning here. Nature does a great job on day one, and only gets better more effective as time progresses. This extra gray filter technology works as well as it ever will on day one and gets worse from there (unless we spend plenty of maintenance resources keeping it clear.) My preference would be to install more basic landscaped bio-swale on more streets, than to add excess thingamabobs and get to fewer streets. I am open to an explanation of what these do… I could be wrong. Also, this is a pilot, so it may be a good place to throw in the kitchen sink and monitor what works and what doesn’t… but it feels to me like someone wanted to spend more more money on gizmos, and less on green.

- I didn’t see any trash grates, which I would have expected on the inlets. Grates would help to keep trash out of the bio-swales.

- Overall the project is designed to keep the existing configuration of the street… which favors cars. If we are to achieve real sustainability in our cities, I think that we need to achieve more modal balance in our streets – which is to say that our streets should foster alternative modes of transportation, including bicycles, pedestrians, and transit. A greener design here could have included traffic calming features, such as bulbouts, which make it safer for pedestrians to cross the street, and which can make for even more permeable green space areas to filter and infiltrate rainwater. The city of Santa Monica has done traffic-calming bulbouts in other areas; similar features here could have made this project street even greener.

Despite some aspects that I question, the Bicknell Avenue Street Greening Project is wonderful. As far as I know, it’s the first place in Southern California where we’ve actually broken the curb to allow rainwater to get out of the gutter and into the soil. It was definitely worth my time to bike and bus across town to check it out, and I am looking forward to observing it function during an actual rainstorm. Congratulations to the city of Santa Monica and all the folks involved in funding, designing and implementing the project!

Another Photo of the Green Street!

Greywater Fame!

 

Joe Linton, Greywater Guerilla appearing at about 1:30 in this 2:11 minute long video from KABC TV

Los Angeles Creek Freak’s washing machine greywater system (shown and explained at length in this earlier blog entry) gets its fifteen minutes of fame – appearing on KABC TV network news yesterday. How many of you have seen your laundry circling on the six o’clock news?!?

The state of California is changing its greywater law, and I plan to do a more thorough blog entry updating our readers about that news soon… but for now, I’ll send readers to Mark Haefele’s excellent recent opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. “Nothing is cuter than two kids bathing in a tub, but once you pull the plug, they say you have toxic waste.” 

If you’re thinking about setting up your own greywater system (which is actually fairly cheap and fairly easy and fairly wonderful) see the Greywater Guerillas’ website (their workshops are excellent) and Art Ludwig’s excellent book  Creating an Oasis with Greywater: Choosing, Building and Using Greywater Systems. I recently read Ludwig’s book and found it very clear, well-written, and even laugh-out-loud funny in places.  Read his common mistakes section before you install!

Daylighting for more than streams

Last night I had the pleasure of speaking – if briefly – to a gathering of kids and their parents, up at the Audubon Center at Debs Park.  My friend Mary Loquvam, director of Los Angeles Audubon, had asked me to make some comments to introduce the short film, Stream Spirit Rising, as part of LA Audubon’s summer film series.  The courtyard of the Audubon Center was a lovely place to be on a summer night – if you have the opportunity, I recommend you attend one of her offerings.

________________________

The North Branch - now Storm Drain 5202 - coursing through Highland Park. Source LAPL, photo #00019854.

I had balked at Mary’s request.  Stream Spirit Rising was a community outreach project I organized while at North East Trees, a small, wonderful nonprofit that primarily serves North East Los Angeles, innovating in urban forestry & watershed management while engaging youth.  In this project (YouTube link here, segment 1, segment 2), we hosted a “Tales of the Arroyo Night” in which old-timers told their stories of the Arroyo Seco and the North Branch stream, a tributary that flowed through the heart of Highland Park, outletting into the Arroyo Seco at Sycamore Grove Park.  Then, over three weeks we were led by artist Jennifer Murphy in the making of stream spirit masks, creatures of all kinds (swamp monsters, turtles, bear, dragons) that represented the beings dependent upon streams.  And finally we walked the old path of the stream (sort of) in a celebratory parade with the masks, the stream spirits rising through the community.  Our goal was to inspire the daylighting of the old North Branch, aka Stormdrain 5202.

This act of community gathering and celebration was beautiful in and of itself.  What has been so difficult for me to forgive, however, was the political dimension.  We had taken our interest in daylighting the North Branch to city government.  We had heard that there was interest on the County government side to re-establish a low flow stream where the creek had been, if not completely daylight it.  But city government had other ideas, and other interests, to play to.  Through back channels, I had heard that the proponents of daylighting (that would be me) were perceived as white and therefore not really representing the interests of the “community.”  Over the course of several years in different situations, including ones unrelated to the North Branch, I was hearing that a conservation and restoration approach to environmentalism was out of touch with “the community,”  that it was streams vs. soccer, that we were canyon-dwelling elitists, etc.

Interesting assessment given that I’m half Mexican-American living in what a friend calls a “charming hovel.”

But proof that no one has a monopoly on judging by one’s looks rather than one’s life experiences.  That, after all, takes effort, it takes getting beyond your own stuff.

If the stuff of others is their short-sighted perceptions, mine is often ethnic rejection. I don’t “look” latina.  I have often wanted to fit in.  Very badly.  And then, I have wanted to turn the stereotypes upside down, wreak havoc with the sacred cows of the chicano movement.  I cringe when a latino/a gives me the “my people do X – you wouldn’t understand” lecture at the same time that I identify with the experience of being different, of wanting or needing to explain something or feel heard.

But what if I weren’t half Mexican-American?  Why did I play into the belief that this should buy me the right to be heard?  I would hope that we reach for inclusivity, and that we teach our children to be open to the input and wisdom of all people.  But I have heard a latino adult in an environmental context tell latino children that they need people who look like them as mentors in order to believe they can succeed.  So if a white or black or Asian or say, a half-Mexican white-looking person believes in a latino kid, it doesn’t count?  C’mon.  The kids need to know that successful people (of all races) believe in them and their abilities.  It is a disservice to tell kids to limit their self-concept to the exclusive opinions and examples of people “who look like them.”  They have enough obstacles as it is.  We need to look at our own projections.  I’m not saying there aren’t reasons why the projections exist, that the amount of trust it takes to go beyond them must feel unreachable, the wounding, deep.  But we must get there.  Our children deserve to know their potential, and loving people of all races have something to contribute.  This is true when talking about mentors, as well as at the political level.

A couple of my aunts, doing what kids do best. Santa Fe River, 1948. Photo by my mom.

But there is more.  For as cultural identity and environmental justice have been wound more tightly around each other, the political leadership turned to community leaders with culturally iconic associations to define the movement.  In a word, soccer.  I don’t question the cultural significance of the game, the need for playing fields, the powerful role soccer teams and organizations play in stabilizing community and giving youth meaningful outlets.   But when we took that nose-dive into soccer vs. streams on the North Branch (repeated at North Atwater Park, if briefly) I got really angry.  Hanging in the air was this idea that latino kids didn’t need, or even like, nature.  Cultural pride started to feel like a noose, a limiting self-concept that was going to trump common sense (kids of all races LOVE to play in streams), science (hydrology and ecology) and watershed planning (multi-benefit and multi-functional uses of common lands for stormwater management, water supply, and habitat).  Recently, the concept of Nature Deficit Disorder has raised our awareness of the value of nature experiences in play.  Exploration, observation, challenging one’s environment – things that happen playing in nature – enhance reasoning, discernment, confidence, self-esteem, and strength.  Neurons fire and facilitate brain development.  Was it going to take someone who “looked” latino to prove to our political leadership that latino children could enjoy and benefit from nature?  I couldn’t take it.  I have seen the photos of my grandfather with his friends on burro-laden camping trips, of my grandmother jauntily perched in a tree, tales of my mother and her sisters playing in the Santa Fe River.  I had my own experiences as a kid, the best times were spent goofing around in nature, around streams.  What’s more, I have seen the countless latino families flocking up the the San Gabriel River’s East Fork to frolic in the river on a hot summer day.  And then I circled back to the ethnic exclusivism of the argument.  Uncomfortable to argue that my background entitled me to be heard, and knowing that it wouldn’t matter anyway, I took myself out of the fight.

Every environmental project has a story about the human dimension that goes beyond the piece of land itself.  This is just one layer of the human story of the North Branch.  These are old battles now.  Today, organizations -including soccer clubs –  in North East Los Angeles have expanded programs that reach out to youth and provide exposure to the LA River, our water system, the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains.  I think we’ve gotten beyond soccer vs. streams – as to the larger questions of the interplay of ethnicity, race, and politics with environmentalism and our long term planning, I have no idea.  But whenever I am asked about Stream Spirit Rising, this is the story that pings around endlessly in my head.  As an event, Stream Spirit Rising had a successful sequence of events, yet I felt it as a failure – we didn’t daylight the North Branch and I was personally stung by the power of superficial perceptions feeding political prerogatives.  It revealed to me that our stagnant human relationships need to be healed more than the stream itself.

________________________

At Debs last night, I went up to the microphone, I looked out on all these expectant, joyful, mostly brown, children’s faces.  I asked them if they’d gone on the night hike.  A lot of hands went up in the air.  I asked how many of them liked creeks.  More hands went up in the air.  I briefly introduced the movie, and mentioned how maybe one day we can see that stream flow again.  Looking out on the kids, it was suddenly so easy to be hopeful and positive.

A little latina girl came up to me afterwards.  She said she liked the movie.  I asked her if she liked creeks.  ”Oh yes,” she said. “me and my friend were in one.  My friend was on a rock and she slipped and got muddy.” She smiled impishly,  ”I like creeks because you can go and get muddy.”

The kids, they get it.  Let’s hope the adults hear them.

L.A. City Rainwater Program Looking for Westside Owners

City Rainwater Harvest Brochure Cover (click image for brochure)

The city of Los Angeles is looking for homes and businesses to help harvest rainwater! This is an exciting program for me for a number of reasons.

First off, I am happy just semantically. Agencies usually write “stormwater” – implying: perilous, foreboding, dangerous. We creek freaks, taking a lead from Brad Lancaster, usually write and say “rainwater” – implying more natural maybe even pleasant, romantic. I’m really happy to see that word rainwater in a city document, whether it’s from the city or their PR consultants (who forwarded L.A. Creek Freak a press release about the excellent program.) The language and the collaborative way the program is described signal a positive approach which bodes well.

Another promising aspect is that the program is decentralized and upstream. Often cities look at huge centralized end-of-pipe solutions: collect lots of tainted water, then pump it through an energy-intensive factory to clean it all. This innovative program aims to enlist 600 property owners to harvest rainwater on-site, before it becomes a problem downstream. Monitoring the outflow at a centralized site can be effective, and is perhaps a little more controllable, but it fosters that out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitude that has gotten us in trouble on many environmental fronts. It’s sort of like saying “pollute all you want and we’ll clean up after you.” The city’s new rainwater program involves residents collaboratively; it connects them with natural cycles. It has multiple benefits. It reduces run-off, which prevents polluted waters from impacting human and eco-system health. That reduced run-off incrementally reduces risks of flooding (that flood risk is what lead to the paving of much of local waterways.) Capturing rainwater also reduces local reliance on imported water… hence lessening the huge negative environmental impacts of pumping all that water; those impacts include global warming and ecosystem degradation to the point of species extinction.

So… what does this program actually do? The city will install free rain barrels, and will redirect downspouts so that they direct water into landscaping, instead of into a stormdrain. (Maybe the city will actually make these activities legal in the city’s building codes, someday, too? A guy can dream, no? Sorry, we now return to what I am trying to make a gushingly positive post.) It’s all made available free to the property owner, though she’ll need to sign-off on maintenance and liability agreements.

Map of Eligible Neighborhoods for LA Rainwater Program - from city brochure

Right now the program is only a pilot in parts of the Ballona Creek / Santa Monica Bay Watersheds. Here are maps of neighborhoods which are eligible to participate in the initial program. They include the Jefferson Area (bounded by Jefferson, La Brea, Adams, and La Cienega/Fairfax) and the Sawtelle / Mar Vista Area (bounded by Sawtelle Pico, Bundy/Centinela and Venice.) If you own property in the pilot area, contact the city right away to sign-up!

Hopefully this program will be a tremendous success and will expand to other parts of the city and of Southern California. L.A. Creek Freak looks forward to blogging more about the success stories that will come out of the program.

San Rafael Creek

More explorations of Pasadena’s creeks.  This one is known to many Arroyophiles.  San Rafael creek still flows through backyards and beneath homes that are dramatically perched over the steep canyon walls of Laguna Road on Pasadena’s west side.  A look at the photo below tells us how it got that name.

The creek drains the San Rafael Hills, extending up to the Annandale Country Club, and draining down at the Arroyo Seco.  The creek connects via a steep concrete “slide” structure that should warm the heart of any skate-brat.

The stream was dammed to provide a pond, probably for pasture, and other agricultural uses.  This photo shows sheep in the distance, and a horseman in the middle ground.  As you can also see, the old San Rafael winery was located here as well.  Today the pond, called Mirror Lake back then, is fenced from view with homes protected by guard-gate entry.

So, a pastoral tale of sweetness and light (and guard gate suburbanism).  Is there more?  Probably.  In 1906, Charles Holder’s entertaining but very blue-blood hunting exploits include a snippet about a hunt up a steep ravine about a mile from Garvanza:

“The arroyo was from fifty to one hundred feet deep here, its sides precipitous, filled with underbrush and large trees; sycamores and black oaks growing on the banks, cottonwoods, alders, and others in the centre and on the sides, with little meadows here and there above the stream. The wild grape had climbed many of the trees and interlaced them in a radiant drapery of green, forming a natural jungle for the wildcat, raccoon, and fox. The hounds presently caught a scent, and after a short run treed a large lynx, a process that was repeated half a score of times before she was finally captured, proving a most gamy animal.”

My best guesses are that this encounter was up San Rafael creek or one of its tributaries, or up “Eagle Rock” creek – subject of another day’s Creekfreak entry. And as always, if you go in search of this delightful little creek, please respect the privacy of the people who live there.

News and Events – 17 July 2009

Some Recent News of Interest to us Creek Freaks:

Alternet: Rainwater harvesting genius Brad Lancaster on rainwater dryland farming in Tucson. See also this article about Tucson’s new rainwater harvesting law.

EGP News: Hazard Park wetlands get shocking and unfortunate extreme brush clearance.

Legal Planet: More on the nexus and navigability stuff, Legal Planet thinks that stretches of the river cannot be deemed non-navigable simply because the Corps refuses to let people boat on it.

Los Angeles Eco-Village: L.A. Creek Freak’s neighbor had a good time  at Cornerstone Theater Company’s Touch the Water – A River Play and blogged about it here.

Long Beach Post: How to keep trash out of the Los Angeles River

Charley Harper killdeer artwork (from LASHP blog)

Los Angeles State Historic Park: Nearly twitterly details of the saga of a killdeer couple and their nest, and eggs turning into baby killdeerlings, here1, here2, here3, here4,  here5 and pretty much missing from here6.  My favorite part was the cool artwork they ran by Charley Harper.

Men’s Journal: More coverage on George Wolfe‘s kantakerous kayak.

Pasadena Now: Maybe for L.A. Creek Freak’s one-year birthday, someone could give a couple of copies of the city of Pasadena’s new map of the Arroyo Seco.

Santa Monica Baykeeper: Students, teachers and volunteers are stewarding Stone Canyon Creek, which runs along UCLA Lab School.

Spouting Off: The Santa Monica Bay Watershed is one block healthier with the opening of the city of Santa Monica’s new green street: Bicknell Avenue between Barnard and Nielson.

Events, too: [updated 7/17 1pm]

On Friday July 24th, the Audubon Center at Debs Park will host a river film night.  It includes two shorts about the Arroyo Seco, Stream Spirit Rising (Featuring the Arroyo Seco’s North Branch Creek tributary and L.A. Creek Freak’s very own Jessica Hall)  and A River’s Journey to Rebirth (about the  reintroduction of Arroyo Chub in the Arroyo Seco,) followed by FLOW.

The city of Los Angeles is hosting a couple of meetings to update the public on river plans and projects: Tuesday July 28th at 1pm and 5:30pm at the Los Angeles River Center.

Daylighting gets a national perspective

How fun it is, to find your blog included as a link to the likes of the New York Times in this Dot Earth blog A River Runs Under It!

Ego-boost aside, this is a great story covering the issues and locales of stream and river daylighting.  Angelenos  who may be accustomed to singling our city out for its environmentally destructive water practices will be surprised or perhaps perversely relieved to learn that in fact, stream culverting (piping) is an age-old practice.  Case in point (not mentioned in the story), Alfred Foord’s 1911 Springs, Streams and Spas of London noted that its rivers and streams were covered there starting in the Middle Ages.

And if it has taken Londoners a few centuries to move from culverting to daylighting, then I guess a little patience with LA is warranted.  Although the Dot Earth piece shows that other cities are actually daylighting and restoring their rivers.  And for the price of policing the Michael Jackson memorial service we could have restored a stream. So get on with it already.  We’ve got plenty of waterways to work on.

Hmmm, did I just pledge a little patience?

Of Nexus and Navigability: Part 5 – USACE: no ifs ands or boats!

Here’s an internal email that was forwarded to one of my friends over at the Friends of the Los Angeles River.  The email is from a high level staff person at the Los Angeles District of the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE.)  I’m including it verbatim, other than omitting names and contact information.

From: [name 1]
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 10:39 AM
To: DLL-CESPL-AM; DLL-CESPL-AM-A; DLL-CESPL-AM-A-AZ; DLL-CESPL-AM-AF; DLL-CESPL-AM-AF-AT; DLL-CESPL-AM-AF-FRP; DLL-CESPL-AM-A-NV; DLL-CESPL-AM-CW; DLL-CESPL-AM-CW-PA; DLL-CESPL-AM-CW-PR; DLL-CESPL-AM-DOD; DLL-CESPL-AM-DOD-IS; DLL-CESPL-AM-DOD-R; DLL-CESPL-AM-DOD-R; DLL-CESPL-AM-OM; DLL-CESPL-AM-OM-EE; DLL-CESPL-AM-OM-OM; DLL-CESPL-AM-OM-OM-AZ; DLL-CESPL-AM-OM-OM-CA; DLL-CESPL-AM-OM-OM-M
Subject: Film Permits and the Los Angeles River
Importance: High

Ladies and Gentlemen:

This is to provide specific guidance to all of you who currently participate in the review and approval of film permit requests and/or who monitor filming pursuant to an approved Permit — or who might have occasion to perform these tasks in the future.

It is the policy of this District that boating of any sort is NOT PERMITTED in the river — no ifs, no ands, no buts — no boats/boating, kayaks/kayaking, canoes/canoeing — no floatable vessels of any sort.  No swimming either.

ANY request for an exception must be made in writing to the Commander, through the Chief, Asset Management Division and must be accompanied by written justification.

Film Permits are to be executed on behalf of the Government by ME or [name 2] — such authority is not delegated below the level of the Deputy Chief.

[name 3] will be amending the language of our film permits to include standard, specific language regarding these prohibitions.

If you are in any way unclear regarding this instruction — generally or with respect to a specific situation– please bring your questions to me or [name 2].

Thank you

[name 1]
[title, name of division]
“The Mighty” Los Angeles District
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
[phone number]
[fax number]
[email address]

It could almost go without comment, but, as I am prone to expatiation, I will add some of my own reactions, too.

First of all, I think that this is just another document proving that the river is indeed navigable! Like the river koan Creek Freak posted a while back, a sign or an email that says “no boating” and “no swimming” is actually evidence that a water body is boatable and swimmable. The navigability discussion is actually very important these days. The Los Angeles River’s legal protections under the federal Clean Water Act depends on whether the river is a navigable waterway.  Creek Freak has a series of earlier posts exploring this controversy (parts >1, >2, >3, and >4.) The issue is currently before the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to be decided any day now and Creek Freak encourages you to write to them in support of protecting the Los Angeles River.

When I first saw this, I self-importantly assumed that someone from the USACE had read my earlier blog describing a less-than-entirely-up-front use of film permits for the three-day kayak trip down the L.A. River. Then I realized that it was probably the more recent videotaped excursion made by Conan O’Brien, which, I have to admit, may have reached just a handful more viewers than L.A. Creek Freak does.

Video Capture from the other L.A. River Kayak Expedition (click to watch)

I also found it fascinating that the email went to twenty distribution lists. Count ‘em! Twenty!  It’s a powerful issue that needed to be disseminated far and wide.

Lastly I was glad to see, in the author’s signature block: “The mighty” Los Angeles District.  I write and say “the mighty Los Angeles” now and then, but in a fairly tongue-in-cheek way. It’s reassuring that the USACE chiefs say it too – apparently it’s in this person’s recurring signature block.  It probably goes out to hundreds of people every day.

Time to dust off my kayak and videocamera and head out to the river. Care to join me?