Guide to Building Rain Gardens out of Recycled Concrete

Left side of urbanite rain garden 1-pager I drew in 2008, click for full page

A flash from the past! I created this 8-page Landscape Rainwater Harvesting booklet for a workshop I taught the summer of 2008. The class was held June 14th 2008 at Los Angeles Eco-Village. The main activity was building las trincheras – an urbanite-terraced rainwater harvesting garden that I wrote about here a while back – and in this vid. It’s funny, the workshop was pre-creekfreak – the month before Jessica and I got started with L.A. Creek Freak in July 2008.

Right side of rain garden page - click for full page, link for full booklet in blog text

It’s sedimentary, my dear Watson

Calling your attention to an excellent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times this past week, Let the River Run – providing some historical context for the construction of dams on the Mississippi River that have contributed to the massive loss of coastal wetlands along the Louisiana coast (they lose approximately 25-30 square miles a year) and floodplain development – and therefore heightened flood risk, and background to the recent opening up of the Morganza spillway.  The piece also gives space to an often unconsidered, forgotten, human dimension: the forcible relocation of Native Americans, in the middle of the 20th Century.

To those unfamiliar with the issue, dams trap sediment, but sediment builds and rebuilds river channels, floodplains, wetlands and coastlines – via flooding.

So dams interfere with this natural process, and we (the collective we, who have handed responsibility over to our Publics Works departments) are then stuck with the management problem of clearing dams and basins of sediment and all sorts of things to manage downstream effects. We need to make the connection: this story about the Mississippi and its management problems has information for us. Their trapping of sediment had downstream effects, our trapping of sediment has downstream effects. And in an emergency situation, flooding had to be brought back into the picture…meanwhile we in LA fight over whether or not to clear basins of sediment to prepare us for inevitable large storms.

What’s missing from our discussions is recognition of a San Gabriel Mountain-sized elephant in a corner of the room: the absence of a long-term sustainable solution, one that involves some measure of floodplain restoration, in-channel sediment transport. How much money have we sunk in diesel fuel alone over the decades to truck this stuff around, supplanting the free, emissions-less, work of gravity?  And how much more are we willing to spend? How many more oak woodlands or canyons are we willing to fill with dirt that naturally washes downstream? How many times will we watch increasingly rare species colonize in debris basins only to be wrenched out to protect downstream humans? Some of the outrage and fighting over short-term management issues is a worthy reaction, a wake-up call to the fact that surprise! our rivers aren’t exactly healthy, but I believe that we need to refocus on that not-healthy-rivers bit, reach a little further in our scope, and recognize the beautiful simplicity of a gravity-based solution.  That, yes, entails dealing with my favorite two words (after sediment and flooding, that is): political will.

Reading the L.A. Times, between this fine piece about a far-away river, and our local flood control dramas, such as the Devil’s Gate sediment removal, may make your head spin for the lack of consistency in perspective and understanding, insofar as the Times editorial staff is keeping a much narrower view of managing our waterways in the name of public safety. Would they ever acknowledge the value of floodplain restoration as a key to unlocking the sediment troubles at Devil’s Gate and beyond? Perhaps someone in Louisiana is writing an op-ed to that effect, albeit no doubt while grumbling about the Morganza spillway.

Winning!

Creeks are big winners in this year’s Westside Urban Forum Design Competition, with design honors going to:

Ballona Creek Greenway Plan (category: Plans)

Piggyback Yard (category: Plans)

Milton Street Park (category: Open Space)

And Friends of the Los Angeles River gets a special nod, the John Chase Legacy Award, for their tireless efforts over the years. Congrats!

Restoration Design Group, the stream-restoration oriented design firm I work for, produced the Greenway Plan with ALTA Planning + Design and Ecotone Studios for the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission, and RDG also provided some restoration-oriented input into the Piggyback Yards concept, a collaboration by Mia Lehrer + Associates, Perkins + Will, Michael Maltzin Architects, and Chee Salette Architects for Friends of the L. A. River. SWA designed the Milton Street project for the Mountains Recreation & Conservation Authority.  Cheers all around!

Next step: moving these things from plans to actual projects. Can we add an award category for Political Will?

And thanks to Jim Lamm for emailing the results.

L.A. Zoo’s New Watershed-friendly Parking Lot

L.A. Zoo's new bioswale median set to capture parking lot runoff - all photos Ciara Gonzalez

(Please give a warm welcome to our newest L.A. Creek Freak blogger: Ciara Gonzalez! I met Ciara when she was an intern at the Coalition for Clean Air. This is her first LACF article – hopefully the first of many! – Joe)

The new environmentally friendly Los Angeles Zoo parking lot was officially introduced on April 7th 2011 during an Earth Day weekend event. The project is a $13.9 million dollar stormwater enhancement with multiple types of best management practices constructed to help reduce runoff of polluted water during storm events.

I visited the new green project earlier this week, while the city was in the middle of a series of rainstorms. What better time than now to walk the premises and see the permeable pavement and bioswales in action? 

Tuesday night Chautauqua talk

Creekfreaks, I’ll be on the Westside at Temescal Canyon tomorrow night, at the MRCA’s Chautauqua series to talk about sustainability and Los Angeles. You won’t be surprised by the creeky focus.  Come on out!

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Temescal Canyon Park, Woodland Hall

7:30 pm.

Trying to Respect Work Toward a Halfway Decent North Spring Street Bridge Project

Back in 2006, the city of Los Angeles proposed tearing down the 1929 North Spring Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River. The city planned to demolish the locally and nationally recognized historic bridge and construct a brand new bridge. The project included widening North Spring Street  from about 43 feet to about 96 feet. More than double. Really. Spring would have gone from a large neighborhood-scale street to a freeway-scale street.

It was particularly irritating to me that city engineering folks would present this project as needed for bike safety and for river revitalization… though no cycling or river groups were pushing for it, and, in fact, many opposed it. Grrrrr. Cyclists sure don’t need fifty-feet’ worth of widening.  Wider bridges and streets just mean faster-moving cars… making conditions less safe for biking and walking. And if you really wanted to spend ~$50million to make the river healthier and/or to make streets safer for bikes, there are a lot better and more effective ways to spend it. To me, it’s clearly about wider roads for more and more and more cars… in a dense central part of the city where high percentages of people walk, bike and take transit… hence it’s about jamming more non-local car traffic into Lincoln Heights and Chinatown.

Enjoy and defend our historic bridges while you still can. Pictured: Detroit Avenue Bridge over the Rocky River - Cleveland, Ohio - demolished

Due to a lot of pressure, mostly from historic preservation folks, that massively wrong-headed version of the project is now off the table. Whew.

Sedimental nostalgia on Ballona Creek

A few posts ago I mentioned the Rain Gardens being built on Ballona Creek. I am working with the contractor on the project, and so have been fortunate to observe the stages of implementation.  We are still weeks away from completion.

Cobble and sand deposits, Ballona Creek flood control right-of-way.

Several weeks ago I took a walk along an excavated area of the right of way. These excavations will be filled with a soil-compost mix in terraced bioswales. But the walk along this opened-up bank was oddly poignant, revealing layers of Ballona Creek that had itself been excavated and then piled up here. The sense of Ballona as a once-natural watercourse became more tangible seeing pockets of cobble and sand that must have been in the creek’s bed at one time, carried from the Hollywood Hills, tossed and gently moved over decades until deposited out of the channel to build up the flood control channel.  It was as moving to me, imagining the life that once flourished here, and as haunting as visiting the ruins of Chaco Canyon or any archeological site.

This bit of geology will be closed back up soon as walls are built up, filled and planted.  But perhaps someday those cobbles will be free to roll down a restored river – when we’ve finally embraced our waterways as part of the urban fabric.

Maybe someday.

A Balloneous Funk

I will probably regret this. Today a hit piece went out on the Ballona Wetlands Restoration planning effort. And I posted a comment (hyperlinks added here):

I would be laughing if this wasn’t smearing good people doing solid work. The SMBRC is among public environmental agencies (technically it’s a state entity) being dragged through the mud for preferring to relocate the Ballona Creek levees to the (almost) outer edges of the state property – and while I could respect a point of view that says hey, what’s colonized within the current disturbed ecosystem is valuable, it is absurd to ignore the realities of the effects of manmade levees and constrained tidal flows on a wetlands system and pretend that it is highly functioning with these structures. You may discredit me on the grounds that I’m former SMBRC staff and remain friends with current staff, or that I’ve received a contract for work on Ballona Creek*, or that I’m not a scientist - that is entirely within the spirit of the article, and variations of that kind of discrediting have been spun for just about anyone not in agreement with your sources. So for the skeptics, here’s a fun fact: the Regional Water Quality Control Board listed hydromodification (aka the levees) as a water quality impairment for the Ballona Wetlands, in other words the levees themselves impact the wetlands in a way that violates the Clean Water Act. And for the curious, I recommend a Google Maps/Earth tour of the California coast to observe how our healthiest coastal ecosystems don’t have levees parked between wetlands and creeks. And if it took heavy machinery to place those levees, it will probably take heavy machinery to remove them.

*And where’s the study for that money? Downloadable on the SMBRC website.

Bring back the floodplain!

Creekfreaks who enjoy (if that’s the word for it) my regular call (rant?) for floodplain reacquisition may find this Washington Post article gratifying.

Floods along the Mississippi River lead to renewed calls for a change in strategy.

A point of view folks in California from the Bay Delta on down to “Katrina West” areas  may want to take under consideration.

Thanks to Melanie Winter of the River Project for forwarding the Wash Post story, and Jeffrey Jones for the Bay Delta report news.  To echo Mel, a functioning LA River floodplain – especially in the San Fernando Valley – would benefit our local water resources as well as bring back habitat and create recreational areas.

Chunking concrete on Ballona Creek

 

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Is that concrete coming out of the channel? Almost – but no enchilada.   But doesn’t this visual of big equipment removing concrete chunks  just fuel the imagination, gladden the heart, enliven the spirit… well, maybe only for a select cadre of oddballs such as myself and maybe you.

 Hanford ARC is building stormwater raingardens along the top-of-channel easement of Ballona Creek, a project funded by the Santa Monica Bay Restoraton Foundation (via your federal ARRA dollars), brainchild of Mark Abramson, and following the spirit of the Ballona Watershed Task Force’s Ballona Greenway Subcommittee and the Ballona Creek Greenway Plan. So there’s no change to the channel itself.

But back to the concrete. The contractors, while excavating the upper banks for future terraced walls that will capture and treat drainage from 22.5 acres, came across concrete – lots of it, as you can see here.  Surprise! And in a few months there will be a native garden, another step towards a greener Ballona Creek.