Public meeting 8/31 – Maintenance/impact to Sullivan Canyon’s stream

View of Sullivan Canyon from SoCalMtB.com

One site, two perspectives.

Sullivan Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains is one of LA’s most popular mountain biking destinations.  It is also a spot that many hikers frequent.

On September 1st, it could be temporarily closed down – and not for state budget reasons.

As you probably know, there’s a gas line in the canyon.  In the floodplain.  So naturally, it is compromised.  The service road in the canyon is also washed out in places.

The Southern California Gas Company has made plans to repair the gas line and the road.  They got their environmental consultant, met with the public agencies and got their permits lined up.  Everything was in order, done in accordance with the law.

Members of the Sullivan Canyon and local environmental community, on the other hand, got a rude shock when they learned they’d be losing access to their canyon – and losing 185 protected trees and 2+ acres of riparian habitat.  How could this happen without public notification, public meetings to review the plans, people wondered.

Parts of the stream will be lined in concrete matting, or covered with rip-rap, a common “fix” that environmentalists are constantly battling.  Concrete – any armoring of a stream that decreases its natural roughness – results in changes to the stream’s channel and its function, and routinely fails after enough time.  Habitat loses. Always.

But under the California Environmental Quality Act(CEQA), maintenance activities are exempt from Environmental Impact Reports, which is what triggers public notices and meetings.  So the decision to lay rip rap and concrete matting was made under this exemption – not that an EIR would have stopped it.  If you’re a regular reader of this blog, then you already also know that CEQA also doesn’t outright prohibit the filling of streams.  It just sets up a process for managing that loss through mitigation, which the Gas Company is faithfully doing, complying and cooperating with state and federal environmental regulators to mitigate through replanting and acquisition/restoration elsewhere.

It’s easy to say today that running a pipeline down a steep canyon with an active floodplain was probably kind of a dumb thing to do.  I find myself saying similar things about floodplain development all the time.  It doesn’t change the fact that it’s done.  So what now?  Can we as a society bear the cost of relocating these things to more sensible places?  We’ve also lost probably over 90% of our waterways to dumb development practices.  Can we really afford to keep chipping away at what’s left?  And while we’re at it, how do we ensure equity, that all the infrastructure isn’t just shoved into the poorest neighborhoods?

Public outcry has made it possible for you to have your say:  Monday August 31 (that will probably be today for many readers), there will be a public meeting about this.  Thank the Brentwood Community Council and others for working with their local elected officials, Bill Rosendahl and Mike Feuer, to make this meeting possible, as well as for seeking a postponement of the work until everyone understands the options.

Meeting info:

PLACE:

West Los Angeles Municipal Building

Second Floor Hearing Room – Room 200

1645 Corinth Ave

Los Angeles, CA 90025

DATE and TIME:

Monday, August 31, 2009

7:00pm

Invasive plants: like pouring oil on water – and setting it on fire.

My heart goes out to all of you dwelling on the edge of the San Gabriel Mountains, who are either in the evacuation zones or in the smoke zone.  This is a difficult time for all.

These fires are pounding the canyons above some of my favorite waterway haunts.  Up Azusa Canyon, the Morris fire burns around the Morris Dam, which sits on the upper San Gabriel River.  My friends and I shook our heads in disbelief years ago when we saw the Mountain Cove development go in, right in the floodway of of the SGR; now I shake my ahead again, this must be one of LA’s most miserable places to be right now.  To the west, the Station Fire burns above the Arroyo Seco, heading now up Millard Canyon, having run through Brown’s Canyon – as well as over the ridge to the west and into the heights above Tujunga (and thank you, Meredith McKenzie, for the FB updates on its movement).

We all know what this means – come winter, there will be debris flows.  But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

You’ve probably noticed, these fires seem to be occurring with an ominous, greater frequency than in the past.  They also are tending to burn with greater intensity.  I read we are fortunate this time around, it sounds like it is a lower temperature fire.

We all know Southern California rains and burns in cycles.  We will often go 8-10 years pretty dry, then get a good soaking.  Within that, every 15-20 years, it will be more than a soaking – it will be a thunderous wet El Niño hell for about three weeks.  Usually right after several hot, dry years.  But it has seemed that in the last five, ten years or so, the dry has been drier.

So more drier weather, less moisture in those plants up in the forest.  Things tend to burn hotter.  And those hotter temperatures of recent wildfires make recovery of our native habitats more difficult (even the ones that regenerate with fire are adapted to lower temperature, slower fires, believe it or not!), and the non-native material (that pretty fountain grass you see everywhere, mustard, castor bean, etc) that moves in pretty quickly is prone to be drier and burn hotter than even our native chaparral, keeping a downward habitat spiral alive.

Even in streams.  Streams are generally less fire-prone than the uplands, although they too will burn (just less).  I’ve heard some ecologists refer to steams as something like natural fire breaks.  Riparian (stream-side) plants aren’t generally adapted for fires – which means, they don’t generally get exposed to them.  Their higher water content in their leaves and branches generally protects them as well.  But consider that today:

“Riparian and wetland lowland habitats are at high risk from the fires, due to opportunistic exotic plants, including Giant reed (Arundo donax) and other non-native grasses and forbs”. (San Diego Wildfire Education Project)

So if you love hiking in streams but don’t know what all us creekfreaks get worked up about when we start ranting at the Arundo or Cape Ivy or Sticky Eupatorium or LA’s iconic Washingtonia palm tree (aka riparian Roman Candle) or that g@%$& fountain grass in the stream please understand:  this is a big part of why.  For example, on the Rio Grande in New Mexico, the increasing dominance of Russian Olive and Tamarisk (in part facilitated by decrease in natural flood cycles, due to levees – ok, it’s a long story) has resulted in devastating bosque fires, from which the native cottonwood trees aren’t generally regenerating.  You get habitat loss and nasty fires.

We can’t control the lightning strikes that start fires.  We could – but it would be a major political undertaking – control the potential risks caused by electrical utility lines.  And I don’t know if anyone can control kids playing with fire, workers with equipment that accidentally sparks or the myriad other “accidental” things that start fires(remember the heartbroken ranger who was burning letters? I’d hate to have to explain that to the boss).  We could (again p-o-l-i-t-i-c-al) stop building in wildlands, but I don’t know that we will (and in fairness – I totally fantasize about living in Topanga or a cabin up Baldy-way, so this is a conversation between pots and kettles).

But we can be responsible in our landscaping choices, we don’t have to recklessly landscape without knowing whether or not the latest thing at Home Depot is going to turn into the next high-tinder invasive weed nightmare.  We can choose to use native plants, or the non-natives that are demonstrated not to escape.  This is not obvious information, when it comes to landscapes, we generally only know what we are marketed.  It sounds counter-intuitive, but supporting our native habitats generally supports lower-intensity fires.  The San Gabriel Mountains on those steep slopes may not have a lot of the non-native material. It will be interesting to get ahold of the post-mortem of this fire, and see if any further correlations between fire intensity and vegetation type shows up.

In the meantime, stay safe.

______________________

Lotsa good reading on this topic:

The Fires This Time, Los Angeles and San Gabriel Rivers Watershed Council (LASGRWC)

Watershed-Wise:  Brush Clearance, Fuel Reduction, and Fire-safe Landscaping, LASGRWC

Watershed Council Symposia on these topics.

And because I’ve really, really got an axe to grind with fountain grass, an article about its evil cousin, the buffelgrass:

Bonfire of the Superweeds, High Country News

Travels along the L.A. River with Briar

Briar walking (perhaps napping) on the L.A. River's Lario Bike Trail under the Pacific Coast Highway Bridge in Long Beach

Creek Freak is pleased to share the following emails from Tim Kirk who, with his daughter Briar, has been exploring the Los Angeles River. I really like what he has to say (below) about our waterways giving us some sense of place. He says it better than I’ve summarized it – read below.

I present his words here, though I’ve added a few links and interspersed some of his photos. Click on any of the photos to see larger images at Tim’s river photo gallery. Thanks, Tim for promoting my book, so I don’t have to.

In early August I received this email:

“Hey Joe,

Briar's first L.A. River Trip - in Atwater Village

I wanted to thank you for your excellent book on the LA River.  My daughter and I are walking the LA River in pieces.  We started when she was 5 months old and she is now 15 months.  Our first treks were in Atwater Village and headed south through Frogtown.  We walk 2-3 miles, looking for a place to pick up our trip next time.  Having completed this, we then headed north and, in this fashion, made our way through all the walkable parts of the river up to Lake Balboa.  We did a few side trips to tributaries along the way.

We just discovered your book.  Our good friend, Dominique Dibbell sugggested it (she interviewed you when she was editing the Sierra Club magazine.) It has been a blast to read about the areas we have already walked.  We are now headed south and have done two of your walks (Chinatown & The Estuary).  We are also exploring the Arroyo Seco.

Here is a link to our flckr site with an ongoing photo essay of our journey.   I hope you get a kick out of it.

Thanks again and if you see us walking along, say hey!

Tim Kirk (and Briar). 

and here’s a second email I received in mid-August:

Hi Joe,

We’ve been busy on the river.  We made that final trek down to the bay in Long Beach, which was a blast, and the reason for this note: to thank you for the excellent description in your book of the parking situation, and the byzantine trek from there to the river — I doubt we would have found it otherwise.

Briar along the Arroyo Seco in Highland Park

We had a fun hike today.  We’ve been heading north on the Arroyo Seco, and finally connected with an earlier walk, at the Archery range.  Next, we’re going to see if we can find a spot to continue, above the Rose Bowl.  Here’s the link again, if you want to see some pictures. 

This continues to be a cool experience to share with my daughter, even more so as she gets older — now nearly 16 months.  I know that traveling the river has changed my head significantly, my geographical sense of LA has shifted and I feel a certain sense of connectivity between the disparate parts of the city that the river links.  I’m excited for Briar to grow up with this awareness, which I hope will be part of her identity as an Angeleno.

All the best,

Tim Kirk

Briar rides the Rattlesnake Wall in Studio City

Why I, creek freak, like bike!

Bicyclist riding along the L.A. River - from cicle.org

I’ve mentioned this on some previous posts and in my book, but I want to go into excruciating detail telling the tale of why I choose to ride a bicycle, and how this connects to improving the health of rivers and creeks. There are a lot of good reasons to bicycle, related to health, community, global warming, peace, and joy… but I am going to focus herein on connections to waterways.

Bicycling, more than driving and I suspect perhaps even more than walking, gives the rider a sense of the contours of a place. When I bike east from my home at Los Angeles Eco-Village, I immediately notice that First Street dips. Most of us creek freaks out there know that these dips are L.A.’s historic creeks – in this case, I am riding across Arroyo de la Sacatela as it enters the Bimini Slough.

I find that many very useful streets for bicycling are those that follow the course of a creek; these tend to be low-lying and have a nice gradual grade. In my neighborhood, a few of these include Silver Lake Boulevard , Myra Avenue and Glendale Boulevard – which correspond respectively to an eastern branch of Sacatela, Sacatela and Arroyo de los Reyes.

Bike paths are often the way that the public gets introduced to Southern California waterways. Growing up in Tustin, I biked along the Santa Ana River to get to the beach. It was pretty much as concrete as L.A.’s rivers, and only much later did I learn how that river had been straightened; it had formerly flowed through Tustin (an area that the early Spaniards had called Rancho La Cienega de las Ranas – the swamp of the frogs.) When I lived in Long Beach, before I knew it was the Los Angeles River, I rode the river bikeway and began to notice the bird life in the estuary below Willow Street.

Bicycling contributes to river health largely because getting around by bike impacts our environment much less than driving does. We mostly think of cars as a major source of air pollution, but driving also has very serious direct and indirect contributions to water pollution. Many pollutants from cars settle onto our roadways and,when it rains, are swept into our stormdrains, creeks, rivers and ocean. Every time a driver presses her/his foot on the brake, brake pads shed a small amount of copper. This copper (and copper from some other sources) finds its way into our local rivers which are officially impaired by copper – meaning there’s a little too much copper to be healthy for aquatic life. Similar water pollution attributable to automobiles includes oil, transmission fluid, brake fluid, antifreeze, etc. It’s basically all the gunk that makes those spots on ground in parking spaces… the rain carries those spots into our rivers.

Comparison of Runoff from Various Types of Surfaces - from Upper Parramatta River (New South Wales, Australia) Catchment Education Resource Kit

And then there are the huge indirect automotive impacts on watersheds – those impacts that are a result of all those roads, driveways, and parking spaces. The health of our streams is largely a reflection of the health of the watersheds that drain into them.

Hardscape in our neighborhoods contributes to rainwater rushing out into our waterways very rapidly. This is represented on the hydrograph below.  A hydrograph shows how stream flows change over time; the peak represents what flows follow after a rain storm. The red line shows a natural hydrograph; the blue line shows an urbanized one - basically the chart says that, where there are a lot of impermeable surfaces, when it rains, we get higher peak flows sooner.

Natural Flow vs. Urbanized Flow Hydrograph - from Upper Parramatta River (New South Wales, Australia) Catchment Education Resource Kit

Our urbanized impermeable surfaces rapidly shunt water out into our creeks and streams, causing scouring and flooding. This flooding danger leads to interventions including armoring the levee walls with concrete. Before we can remove a lot of concrete on our river banks, we’re probably going to have to remove some concrete from our neighborhoods.

Urban development that is pedestrian-centric or transit-oriented can be very compact, where car-centric development sprawls across our landscape, extending impermeable surfaces more broadly. One big culprit in this vicious cycle is parking requirements. For every car, whether a prius or a hummer, we build at least 3 parking spaces. (In L.A. I’ve heard the number is more like 6 or 7, but I couldn’t find a  reference for this.) For a lot of interesting work on how parking impacts cities and the environment check out the work of UCLA professor Don Shoup; I recommend starting with this short interview.

There are also some reports that indicate that driving consumes a great deal of water – in the manufacture of cars, the refinement of oil, and other aspects. There are more impacts… but I think I’ve already made my point.

At this point, you’ve probably stopped reading… tired of Joe’s zealous anti-car rant. Perhaps you’re thinking “I live in Los Angeles, it’s too dangerous to bike and I can’t possibly give up my car.” I would agree with you to some extent – bicycling isn’t the right choice for every single trip. I am in a car now and then, and certainly on the bus and train more and more often. 

I would suggest that change – for our rivers, for our lifestyles – doesn’t happen all at once. Bigger changes are the sum of many small changes. Bicycling (walking, or taking transit) now and then is great – every trip counts. It can also give us confidence to bike further and more often. One strategy is to identify shorter trips and take those by bike. For example you might visit a local friend, restaurant, video store, etc. Forty percent of trips are two miles or less, an ideal distance for easy bicycling. There are a number of local groups (including one that I work for – called C.I.C.L.E. – Cyclists Inciting Change thru Live Exchange) that teach workshops to help inexperienced cyclists gain skills and confidence.

As you get out of a car and up onto a bike, your local waterways will thank you.

Today’s L.A. Times on Fisherman and Farmers

Today on page A2, the L.A. Times has another very good article that is likely to appeal to many of us Creek Freaks. Sacramento correspondent George Skelton’s ‘Water buffaloes’ got it all wrong suggests that California’s delta struggles shouldn’t be framed as farmers vs. fish, but more like farmers and fishermen. The article is perhaps a bit human-centric (and perhaps could mention fisherwomen, too,) but definitely worth reading.

Also, folks might want to listen to Homegrown Evolution‘s first podcast, where L.A. City’s Wing Tam and I speak about the city’s rainwater harvesting program. The stormwater story fills the second half of the hour-long audio file.

Images of Proposal for Studio City Golf and Tennis Site

Studio City River Park Proposal

In October 2009, L.A. Creek Freak reported details about a proposed new Los Angeles River Park at the current site of Studio City Golf and Tennis; for text explaining this proposal, see that earlier post. At the time, the visuals weren’t available for the press. I later received them from Esther Feldman, the president of Community Conservancy International. I forgot to run them at the time…

Recently I attended a meeting hosted by California Senators Judy Chiu and Fran Pavely to present and discuss river and waterway projects in the San Fernando Valley, and I saw another presentation on what’s now called the Studio City “Los Angeles River Natural Park” proposal. Below are the images. The group, which emerged from the Studio City Residents Association, promoting this project now has its own website: Save L.A. River Open Space. The site includes these images in a downloadable color Vision and Design report (pdf.)  If you’re interested in getting involved in this project email “saveopenspace [at] SLAROS.org”

Overall Concept Design

 The overall design features multi-use green space on the site, and trail connections along the river.

Habitat and Open Space Elements

 Habitat elements include preserving existing trees, and adding a new creekbed bioswale that drains to the river.

Sub-Watershed Drainage Area

 The park would treat stormwater from the surrounding neighborhood.

Water Quality Improvement Elements

 Water quality features would include the main large creekbed bioswale (receiving rainwater from street run-off), cisterns, and infiltration areas. 

Recreational Elements

The existing (golf and tennis) uses would be preserved, though with smaller footprints.

Public Access via foot, bike, bus, and car

Access to the site would be mainly via bike and walk paths along the river.

For higher resolution images and additional details, click here or on an image to download the report.

News and Events – 12 August 2009

Some recent coverage of items that might be of interest to our fellow creek freaks – scroll down for events:

>The Los Angeles Times Greenspace Blog entry Trapping the Rain highlights the Natural Resources Defense Council’s new report A Clear Blue Future: How Greening California Cities Can Address Water Resources and Climate Challenges in the 21st Century. The report  is about Low Impact Development “LID” and how we can build smarter to save water and energy.

>Los Angeles westside property owners can trap your own rain if you apply for the city’s new rainwater harvesting program. If you’re looking to set up your own rain harvesting system (like Homegrown Evolution details here) check out creek freak’s favorite water harvesting expert Brad Lancaster‘s recommendations for selecting the least toxic hose. 

 >Homegrown Evolution reports on the recent approval of California’s smart new greywater law, designed to make it easier to reuse your greywater. Greywater is “used” water from your washing machine, sinks or showers. Mr. Homegrown will  be teaching a greywater workshop this Sunday – see below. Soak in creek freak’s washing machine greywater system here.

>The San Gabriel Valley Tribune covers the new master planning underway for the Whittier Narrows Recreation Area – 1200 acres where the San Gabriel River and the Rio Hondo squeeze together behind the Whittier Narrows Dam. Also, the Pasadena Star News reports that the Altadena Foothills Conservancy is doing the early planning work to create a new trail system along the Eaton Canyon Wash, which could connect from the foothills above Pasadena all the way down to the Whittier Narrows.

Bixby Marshland - photo from LACSD

>The Los Angeles County Sanitation District website profiles the Bixby Marshland – a 17-acre remnant wetlands located near the intersection of Figueroa and Sepulveda in the city of Carson. They’re looking for volunteers to help steward the site.

>The City Project is about to unveil new proposals for Griffith Park on the East Bank of the Los Angeles River – a future Los Angeles River park on the Los Angeles City Recreation and Parks 28-acre Central Service Yard, located at the end  of Chevy Chase Drive in North Atwater. The city is already planning to restore a small remnant creek in one corner of the site.

>Federal stimulus money is helping make the Los Angeles River healthier (though creek freak would like to see it do a whole lot more!) Funds are being used to provide trash capture devices that prevent trash from getting into the river (via Spouting Off.) They’ll be installed in about a dozen downstream cities from Vernon to Montebello to Long Beach. There’s also some federal funding planned for reworking the “Shoemaker Bridge” where the 710 Freeway crosses the Los Angeles River near downtown Long Beach. The project includes doubling the size of Cesar Chavez Park. Let’s hope that it doesn’t hasten the expansion of the rest of the 710 Freeway - a huge threat to restoration on the lower river. 

>An odd little video featuring a homeless man fishing by throwing rocks into the Los Angeles River (thanks Jeff Chapman.) See creek freak’s earlier post on fish in the L.A. River. 

>And, for bridge geeks, Blogdowntown reports on the city of Los Angeles’ Cultural Heritage Commission instructions for the city’s bridge engineers to consider more preservation options as they plan to demolish (*sob*) and replace the monumental 1932 6th Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River. The proposal is to widen and straighten the bridge into freeway proportions. Creek freak feels a wave of despair just writing about this wrong-headed project and its “let’s destroy our heritage while bringing way more cars into dense urban areas” mentality. Here’s a grim rendering of the proposed “3-dual tower cable supported viaduct.”

Proposed 6th Street Bridge Replacement - click for link to larger version - from Blogdowntown via Flickr

Upcoming events to explore and get involved with local creek freaks:

>The excellent documentary movie Tapped shows today and tomorrow at the Arclight theaters in Hollywood. Showtimes here. Creek Freak’s review here.

>This Sunday August 16th at 11am, Homegrown Evolution offers a greywater workshop called “D.I.Y. Greywater: Hack Your Washing Machine“

>Friends of the Los Angeles River is hosting a few upcoming Los Angeles River clean-ups. On Saturday August 22nd they’ll be at the Sepulveda Basin, and Saturday August 29th at Taylor Yard. There will also be river sites at this year’s Coastal Clean-Up Day coming up on September 19th.

More on the North Branch of the Arroyo Seco

Sycamore Grove Park, with concrete-lined North Branch of the Arroyo Seco in background. Image: LA Public Library, #00019799

A couple weeks ago, Jessica made a thoughtful post about Stream Spirit Rising (part 1, part 2), a series of activities organized around the North Branch of the Arroyo Seco. I wanted to continue that thread by summarizing the history of the North Branch in Highland Park, culled from old photographs and published materials. The extent to which we have slowly altered the landscape in the last hundred years still seems unbelievable to me, even after I’ve been looking into Northeast LA water history for several years now. I keep hoping that by getting more of this history out there, it will start to seem more “real”!

Though little trace of it remains above ground today, the North Branch of the Arroyo Seco was once a defining feature of the “vast meadow” that would eventually become Highland Park. Archduke Ludwig Louis Salvator noted the stream in his account of his travels through Los Angeles, which were published in 1876. Building a railroad over the stream near what would become Sycamore Grove Park, altered its surface appearance irretrievably. But even so, the stream persisted aboveground in places into the earliest years of the 1900s.

According to Chas. Elder, who wrote about the stream in the mid-twentieth century, the North Branch’s main source was “a great spring situated just west of North Figueroa at Springvale Drive” whose flow was once “as big around as a water bucket.” Smaller springs added to this flow, most significantly Glenn Rock Spring, at the head of Milwaukee Avenue. (Glenn Rock Spring had once been little more than a trickle, before an investor drilled a tunnel 350 feet into the hillside around 1890. Thus developed, the spring became the source of what may have been Northeast Los Angeles’ first water bottling company, “Poland Rock,” which was well advertised through much of that decade.)

Of the North Branch, Elder wrote:

This little river had a good stream of water flowing down it even in the driest seasons, and was full of mountain trout and catfish even up as far as York Boulevard. I myself have seen boys pulling fish weighing half a pound as far north as North Avenue 51 and Buchanan Streets. The North Branch from Springvale Drive to Meridian Street flowed through a beautiful little glen about 40 feet deep and 200 feet wide in places, which was full of most beautiful ferns. Along the banks of the stream were hundreds of fine old oak and sycamore trees.

A map from the 1880s, shows the stream sinking underground into the sandy banks of the Arroyo Seco even before reaching present-day Sycamore Grove Park.

By the late 1920s, the North Branch’s reach had been extended and tamed for middle class urbanites by routing it through the Park in a neat concrete liner.  A wading pool filled by the stream became a central feature of the park.  Idyllic landscaping around the pool included bamboo clumps, night lighting, and rustic benches. The path of the stream through the park is indicated on maps from the 20s and 30s.

Aerial of the North Branch of the Arroyo Seco, coursing through Sycamore Grove Park. Note the substantial flow of water entering into the Arroyo Seco. Photo: USC Digital Archive.

Adventurous boys of that era would follow the creek down into the wilder banks of the Arroyo Seco, where cattails and willows reigned. Henry Welcome was one of those boys:

Sometime in the dim past a large pond had developed in the Arroyo Seco. As time marched on, the youths of the neighborhood had enlarged the pool, adding a raft or two made from abandoned railroad ties. As little fellows we used to catch, in mother’s canning jars, minnows and crayfish. We called them ‘crawdads,’ taking them and the tiny fish home in the evening, where in a few days they usually died of neglect. As we grew bigger we ventured into the big pond among the tules…

After a devastating flood in the 1930s, a large storm drain was built to convey the waters of the North Branch under the Park, and the wading pool disappeared.

That the stream was missed by many is evidenced by Fred Allen’s observation in mid-century that  “the creek is still placed [in paintings of Sycamore Grove Park] by some artists, who think it adds to the natural beauty of the area.”

A small grove of walnut, sycamore, and oak trees just northwest of Arroyo Seco Museum Science Magnet School is the only remaining fragment of the large grove that once shaded the route of the creek.

Very near where the stream had once emerged onto the flood banks of the arroyo at the northern end of Sycamore Grove Park, a particularly prolific spring was tapped by a succession of commercial bottling companies between 1904 and 1970. This spring was most recently known as “White Rose Spring.” Though the spring has been capped, the owner of the building next door told me that whenever there is heavy rain, or if the ground is disturbed during earthquakes or trembles, water reappears through small fissures in the concrete.

In the middle of the last century Chas Elder had mourned that the “great spring” from which originated the North Branch had dwindled to the size of his arm: “Newcomers will laugh at the idea of a river with fish in it wandering through Highland Park, but the old-timers of whom there are over 40 who have lived here over 50 years, will wipe away a tear and sorrowfully commence “I remember when—“

Though we can only imagine what the North Branch was like during Elder’s childhood, a surprisingly simple solution has been proposed that could allow the North Branch’s waters to flow once again through Sycamore Grove Park. An ‘alternative’ streambed would be laid through the park. During storm events, flows in excess of the safe capacity of that streambed, would bypass the intake and continue through the existing storm drain under the park. Dan Sharp, an engineer for the Watershed Management Division of LA County Public Works, suggested that this solution for providing habitat, public use, and quality of life benefits would come at a fraction of the cost and risk of a full-scale daylighting.

Maybe one day residents of Highland Park will laugh, saying, “Remember when the North Branch flowed under the park through that big pipe?!”

Thanks to Virginia Neely for sharing some of the articles and photographs that were the source for this entry and to Jessica Hall for spreading the word about the North Branch. Other sources include Connie and Adrian Saxe, and Charles Fisher. For more on water history in Northeast Los Angeles, visit  Myriad Unnamed Streams.

Stream daylighting covered in LA Times

Many thanks to Hector Tobar for getting in touch with me about LA waterways and writing this lovely piece about them, and about the desirability of daylighting lost streams:

A rivulet (actually, many of them) runs through it – Los Angeles Times.

Tapped – Movie Review

“Bottled water is the greatest advertising and marketing trick of all time”
- from an interview in the movie Tapped

The documentary film Tapped is showing now though this Thursday August 13th in Los Angeles at the Arclight in Hollywood. It’s part of the International Documentary Association‘s 13th Annual DocuWeeks series.  Showtimes rotate each day, so see the schedule of Tapped screenings available at the Arclight website. The film is directed by Stephanie Soechtig.

It’s an excellent documentary, that I enjoyed and recommend. The production values are high – lots of beautiful footage, great soundtrack,  appealing and clear graphics, fun credit sequences, and insightful interviews with many experts, including US Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Robert Bullard, Charles Moore and many others – inlcluding a few industry shills who come off pretty badly.

The film touches on issues of water privatization, environmental impacts, lax regulation, health impacts, bottle bills, but I found that the most compelling case that they make is for the dangers of all that plastic. It’s pretty chilling to hear the stories about bisphenol-A and other toxic chemicals that are in those ubiquitous plastic bottles. Also scary is the story of how common plastic is becoming in our seas and waterways – told well by Charles Moore.  It even includes one of those scary clips of all the floating trash collecting behind the boom on Ballona Creek.

Go see Tapped this week. If you’re interested in getting involved locally in the struggles against bottled water, I’d suggest contacting Food and Water Watch. They run a ”Take Back the Tap” campaign, educating consumers that tap water is better for us and better for the environment.  They’re also pushing for state regulations that would mandate that private water companies report how much water they’re extracting from California groundwaters.