Demolition underway at the 6.3-acre Albion Dairy site in Lincoln Heights. Photos taken looking downstream from the North Spring Street Bridge. The existing Downey Recreation Center park (with green lawn) is visible on the far left. The Los Angeles River is on the right, with the North Main Street Bridge visible.

I recently spotted a couple of projects that L.A. Creek Freak has reported on that are now making on-the-ground progress. In Lincoln Heights (photo above) the Albion Dairy site industrial buildings and parking lot are well on their way to being completely demolished. Information on that planned L.A. River park here. In Santa Monica (photo below) the Ocean Park Boulevard green street project is under construction. Information on that complete street project (including its green bike lanes) here.

Construction underway on the city of Santa Monica's Ocean Park Boulevard complete green street project

Driver's trajectory through the Arroyo Verdugo - Photo from Tropico Station - click to go to larger images at Tropico Station

A unfortunate story about how our local creeks don’t look all that different from our freeways: Yesterday a woman drove her car down an access ramp and into the concrete Verdugo Wash. The Verdugo Wash (or Arroyo Verdugo) runs through the city of Glendale and enters the L.A. River across from Griffith Park. 

The driver apparently thought she was on a freeway and reportedly accellerated to about 70 miles per hour. She whizzed past county maintenance workers, before she clunked down a series of steps and stopped near where San Fernando Road goes below the 134 Freeway.

Good coverage with images at Tropico Station. Full story at L.A. Times, KABC, and Glendale News-Press.

> Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar visited the L.A. River this month. Will plentiful federal funding for river revitalization soon follow?

> Will Campbell discovers a sweet new city of Burbank bike path along the Burbank Western Wash.

> Here’s a blog about recycled concrete rain gardens I’ve been working on with Koreatown Youth Community Center.

Sidewalk cyclist next to the new Avenue 19 bike lanes in Lincoln Heights

> The L.A. River Bike path bike lane bikeway takes a detour onto the streets of Lincoln Heights. I really really like bike lanes and I like the idea of getting them in first, then moving on to more expensive bike paths… but I fear the massive parking removal on this one here will trigger a backlash… potentially leading to future city reluctance to remove any parking anywhere ever. Even if  it’s not quite the L.A. River bikeway, it is a new precedent: the city of Los Angeles’ first completed asymmetric one-way bike lanes couplet… a treatment that I think works better on actual one-way streets. How about Cypress and Avenue 18 next?

SOME UPCOMING EVENTS:

> Elysian Valley neighbors have been experiencing some pollution issues due to Metrolink operations right across the river at Taylor Yard. Metrolink, So Cal Air Quality Management District, elected officials and the public will meet and discuss how to make the situation better. The meeting takes place TONIGHT – Wednesday January 25, 2012 at 6:30pm at the L.A. River Center, 570 W Avenue 26, L.A. 90065. More information here.

> Creek Freak’s Joe Linton will be speaking as part of the environmental media panel at the Council for Watershed Health forum on Tuesday January 31st 2012. More information at CWH website under events.

> CicLAvia returns Sunday April 15th 2012, starring the 4th Street Bridge over the L.A. River.

That’s just the regulatory/cost barrier.  Some people are concerned about the potential flood risk to humans, while others are concerned about the flood risk to…the wetlands.  This has been an ongoing debate, and while it’s not the point of today’s post, I think we’ve got new information that can help us all consider the alternatives – as well as create new projects.  Back when I was watershed coordinator, I felt the conversation about the watersheds could be elevated if we had a better handle on the historical ecology of the watershed.  Agreed-upon, documented sense of what natural processes shaped the habitats of the watershed, and what had actually been here.  I drafted a proposal for this study, as well as an assessment of the watershed’s springs/water budget, both of which got funded and managed by others later.

Look at all those wetlands! (click to redirect to the Ballona Historical Ecology website).

And the historical ecology report is done, and is beautiful!  Props to the team comprised of CSUN, SCCWRP, SFEI and UCLA researchers!  This report provides insight into the diverse habitats of the Ballona Creek watershed, and demonstrates considerable evidence that lower Ballona Creek was much like a large marsh, with a considerable prism of marsh and wetland habitats from the base of the Baldwin Hills down to the ocean.  While Ballona Wetlands restoration won’t reestablish historical conditions – and any work to restore Ballona Creek or its tributaries will face significant physical constraints, the study does provide information that can help us make the best use of the land and the natural processes (hydrologic flows) that remain in the interests of reestablishing wetland and riparian habitats.   The accompanying website (photo above) they created also fulfills one of my long-standing wishes (although I’d love to have this for all LA’s watersheds) – an overlay map of streams and wetlands against today’s landscape, so you can find the lost creek near you!  Check it out, enjoy!

P.S. You’ll find many other great studies posted under Technical Reports at SCCWRP’s website.  Among them, the springs/Ballona hydrology assessment, a historical ecology study of the lower Santa Clara River & Oxnard Plain, a report on episodic channels, studies on hydromodification (channelization etc), and tendencies of southern California wetlands to seasonally open and close and on and on.  Good stuff for folks who want to better understand our waterways and watersheds.

The four L.A. Creek Freak blog writers: Jessica Hall, Joe Linton, Joshua Link, and Jane Tsong.

It’s Jessica here, summarizing the thoughts of the bloggers Joe, Jane, Josh and myself about our biggest stories of 2011.

But first, I want to take a moment to note that on a personal level, 2011 marked my decade as a Creek Freak.  In 2000 I’d begun mapping LA’s waterways, but it wasn’t until I, with a team of three other landscape architecture graduate students, had completed Seeking Streams that I realized I’d been hooked by the desire to bring buried waterways back to the surface of LA.  It’s been a decade of ideas & argument, at times petty politics, and for me, standing on the outside of bureaucracies with the power to restore our landscapes, feeling like I was staring up from the base of Hoover Dam.  But on the other side of that wall are gradual changes in watershed management, still rooted in a philosophy of nature control, but testing how controlled habitats can be better managed alongside more traditional engineered structures and approaches.  I’m still waiting for that leap to working with natural processes – treating the flood channels like the streams they were.  It will happen someday.  But the fight has been good for me too, it forced me to hone my understanding of how streams function, to understand the genesis of undesirable flooding and erosion, to better relate the role of waterways within an ecosystem.  Our ecosystem.

I believe restoration and protection of waterways happens in places like Portland, Seattle, Boulder, Austin because the waterways supply their water (or are the early-warning system of their aquifer) and because enough people understand ecology and have some experience and appreciation of natural processes in their lives to demand restoration and protection.  A version of the Boulder story I read once stated that they ran the Army Corps out of town when the Corps came offering channelization.  A citizen-led initiative led to building restrictions over Austin’s aquifer recharge zones, and citizens informed the planning processes in Seattle and Portland that wrapped endangered species recovery in a package with Clean Water Act water quality commitments.  In LA, we mostly defer to experts.  We eschew big ideas unless someone from higher up the political hierarchy proposes it.  We sigh at the tangle of bureaucracy that makes it phenomenally difficult (and expensive) to get even a small plot of land planted, a bit of roadway striped for bicycles – something that definitely succeeds in keeping us focused on the short-term.  And we fight.  We fight opportunism of a few powerful people er, corporations, who profit by threatening our community dreams, something that also keeps us focused on the short-term, on triage.  (As members of our community, these “people,” er corporations, should share our vision.  Which vision, you ask?  Good point.)  And we fight each other.  If we have a common vision, and I’m not sure that we do, it lacks ecosystem function.

Let’s celebrate our steps towards sustainability, but with a solid vision that includes the regeneration of our degraded riparian ecosystems.  May our steps be clearly towards support of our incredible natural heritage, the biodiversity that supports us.

And with that… our top 10 stories of 2011. 

Victories

Legal permitted kayaking jobs on the yes-of-course-navigable Los Angeles River

This year saw the unveiling of legalized (if highly monitored) boating on the LA River!  This summer’s canoe trips through the Sepulveda Basin helped bring the river to life for people lucky enough to get tickets.   Quoting from Joe’s earlier post:

I’ve mentioned it before… and huge props again to George Wolfe for showing me this… but we treat the river the way we picture it in our heads, in our stories. If our mental image of the L.A. is a godforsaken grey concrete canyon, then we’re unlikely to invest in it. If our mental image of the river is a place where there are boats and birds and fish and trees and bikes and… jobs! … well, then, of course, it’s worth protecting and investing in.

It’s been a good year for expanding bicycle facilities on the LA River, with ground-breakings for new bikeways and improvements such as solar lighting.  Now if we can just keep the copper wires attached….  But bicycling got its own non-creekfreaky shot-in-the-arm with the successes of CicLAvia.

Construction to enhance the creeklet in North Atwater Park is well underway – we should see a ribbon cutting early in 2012!  It’s already being tested by rain.  We’ll call this one a victory even though the project was part of a legal settlement…and the creeklet was already in a natural channel even though it is not a historical waterway.  What it will do is offer us a vision for more naturalized creeks in city of LA parks – an important step towards increasing our collective appreciation of our local ecosystems and understanding options for coexisting with them.  I’ve also been working on the planning phases of two creek restoration projects that, depending on what phase they’re at, we may be able to write about in 2012.

Thought-Provoking for Water Geeks

Why it is reasonable (and important) to rethink Los Angeles as a place that provides its own drinking water, and inspiring historical landscapes of aquifer recharge, of springs and streams were also given artistic expression at the Huntington this year.

Courts threw out the lawsuit against the planned Malibu Lagoon restoration.  Why do I call this thought-provoking instead of a victory?  Mainly because it provoked a firestorm of comments, one of the demonstrations that we don’t have a common vision or understanding of ecological processes.

Japan’s devastating earthquake rippled our coast, and reflected the hazards we subject ourselves to by ignoring natural processes in land planning.

Threats

An immediate threat to a cohesive Los Angeles River vision is embodied by the development option of the “person” known as Trammel Crow, who could take the Rio out of Rio de Los Angeles State Park.  Or ransom it back to us.

Arcadia's oak woodlands, gone but not forgotten. Photo by ecotonestudios

This was the year we woke up to the impact of our sediment management approach – but are still a long way from acknowledging sustainable solutions.   If we thought it was unacceptable to cut down 100-year oak trees to make way for a dirt pile, why can’t we get behind restoration of sediment transport – river restoration?  Instead, we’ve signed up for more dirt piles in our wildlands, including up in the Angeles.

Beautiful bridge design is a mostly lost art.  They remind us that the waterways they crossed were once also impressive.  Many of these historic bridges are slated for demolition or alterations.  Meanwhile LA was put through “Carmageddon” to prevent the relocation of Mulholland Highway’s “historical” route over the 405, costing taxpayers beaucoup bucks.

Steadily, the Santa Clara River is subjected to development patterns that eventually brought the Los Angeles River to its concrete entombment.  We are fortunate, indeed, that the rest of the animal kingdom is limited in their capacity to fight back.  Other, smaller waterways threatened by, quite literally, tunnel vision,  include Stone Canyon and an unnamed drainage in the way of a mall development in the San Fernando Valley.

Things are about to get a little ridiculous over by the RIO DE LOS ANGELES State Park.  Because that whole Rio de Los Angeles part could potentially be blocked from that State Park part by a wall of industrial development.  Kids, come and play soccer over by this…well never mind.

Here’s the shortish explanation:  Anyone remember that huge battle to buy the Taylor Yards and create a vision for a riverside park(1,2), with the potential for eventual naturalization of the river along this largest underutilized brownfield parcel on the river?  We got 40 acres and developed parkland along San Fernando Road for something like $45 million, with another parcel (aka G2) between that and the river.  (We also got an 18-acre strip, G1, along the river further upstream for an additional $10.7m- A link to parcels and ownership is here.)  Parcel G2 (that really should be river floodplain) is up for grabs.   Developer Trammel Crow appears to be an interested buyer in G2, and is apparently talking industrial development.  Is this a ploy – common enough in local environmental conservation/acquisition efforts -  to up the property value with entitlements and re-sell to the City/State for a big return?  And who would take on remediation costs in such a scenario?  Who knows.  Why even let the situation get to that point?  Here’s a link to a petition, sponsored by The River Project, an organization that’s carried the Taylor Yard torch from early on, to Trammel Crow asking them to withdraw their interest in exercising their option to buy.  Phew, that’s a mouthful.  But hopefully correctly stated.

I’m a little confused why/if the City/State didn’t have an option to buy this parcel, and why “railbanking,” something the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy makes look so doable never seems to be so in LA.

Anyway…we need our developers to share our vision of a livable Los Angeles – and to put their resources towards making it happen.  This action seems like the wrong direction when visions of a Los Angeles living with natural processes is actually becoming chic.   This is even more humiliating when you see how Chicago has managed to coalesce around a really big vision of a 140,000 acre conversion of brownfields to wildlands.  (Yes, you just read 140,000.)  A higher quality of life supports multiple returns on investment, so what’s the big?

Some of Joe’s previous posts related to the Taylor Yards/Rio de Los Angeles State Park:

Demolition at the Taylor Yards

What’s the Plan

Touring Native Plantings at the Rio de Los Angeles State Park

Los Angeles County Storm Drains in Google Earth

Since this post about tar on Ballona seems to have generated a lot of interest, I thought I’d also provide you with an image of LA County Storm Drains from the Tar Pits connecting to Ballona Creek.  The oil sheen I referred to in my previous post is visible at Cochran Avenue, at the upper end of the blue line representing Ballona Creek here.  As mentioned in my prior post, if tar is coming into the creek from the tar pits, it should be apparent downstream between Marvin and La Cienega (I had previously said Fairfax).  As you can see here, there are a tangle of drains, which I assume means there are overflows built into them from one drain to the next.  Very large drains outlet at Fairfax and La Cienega, bringing in flows from as far north as Beverly Hills and West Hollywood (and the south slopes of the Hollywood Hills beyond them).  And as many know, there are active oil wells in this zone, so it is fair to speculate there can be tar in these neighborhoods too.  While my photos clearly show tar seeping in from above Cochran Ave, I perhaps should clarify that there could be other sources related to other occurrences (that I’m unfamiliar with) on Ballona Creek.  There’s tar to go around for all of us!

If you’re kind of an infrastructure nerd and don’t know about Navigate LA yet, by all means you should poke around this fun site.  I’d have used their maps to explain this better, but alas, my browser no longer supports it.

$2 million worth of funny. Click to enlarge. Map: Jessica Hall. Base Image, GoogleEarth.

Image #1: Not news. Oil sheen at Cochran Avenue on Ballona Creek, 2000. Photo: Seeking Streams.

Image #2: Um, oil sheen on Cochran Avenue, Ballona Creek, 2010.

I’ve been a pretty regular visitor to Ballona Creek’s daylighting spot, at Cochran Avenue near Venice Boulevard, for over ten years now.  And I don’t think there has ever been a time when there was no oily rainbow sheen when I’ve peered over the railing, to watch water flow out of the culverted creek to the open channel. It’s something I’ve pointed out on tours to various watershed groups over the years.

So I’m pretty unimpressed by the observation of an oily sheen there.  Back when I first observed it in 2000, city staff told me they were already aware of it, and pretty sure it was from a natural source, observing that tar seeps are fairly common along Wilshire east of the tar pits.  There is also fairly high groundwater, which is pumped out of many apartment building basements.  Tar seeps + sump pumps = oily water downstream.  In 2004 I took Ballona Creek Watershed stakeholders on a “watershed walk” where we easily observed tar seeps as far east as Lafayette Park, oozing between cracks in the concrete.  Indeed, in my 2001 group-thesis, Seeking Streams, we mention the active tar seeps at a parking lot across the street from Lafayette.  So there’s no surprise there, or shouldn’t be, on the part of anyone who’s taken a tour with me (and that includes people in Agencyland).

Image 3: Dried brea(tar) ooze near the culverted Arroyo la Brea observed by Ballona Creek Watershed stakeholders walking near Wilshire/Hoover in 2004. Photo: Jessica Hall

Which is why I’m surprised that this has been traced to the La Brea Tar Pits.

Actually I’m flabbergasted.  You see, the article indicates this is the result of overflow when stormwater overwhelms the oil and water separator at the Tar Pits.  To that point, I’m a little skeptical.  Folks, that sheen is there year-round, I find it hard to believe that seasonal overflow is dribbling out all year round.  Know how our storm flows come in large-volume flushes?  The sheen would be seasonal, actually would probably move with that large flush and not be terribly visible on dry winter days.  And certainly not on dry summer ones.  There’s got to be a perennial source of discharge.  As city staffers had said, it seems most likely that oily sheen is a side effect of a naturally occurring process upstream.

Image 4: Creek flowing through the La Brea Tar Pits property. View looking SE, the famous large pit can be seen in the center-top of the photo. I regret not knowing where I originally obtained this image, nor the name of this creek.

And, um, upstream doesn’t lead to the La Brea Tar Pits.

For the Tar Pits to be the source, we’d see this sheen somewhere between Marvin Avenue and Fairfax where stormdrains from that area connect to Ballona, not several blocks upstream at Cochran.  There has been a long-standing odor problem around Fairfax and the creek, but that was tied to scrubbers on the sewage system.  I’ve never seen any other issues with oil in the creek.  While the Tar Pits separators may periodically overflow, there are other continual sources elsewhere.  You know, upstream.

Now I hate to see $2 million go to waste, may I humbly renew the suggestion that we consider daylighting Arroyo de la BREA which flowed from Lafayette Park down to Ballona Creek?  And is, in fact, upstream of the known & observed offending sheen.  Given the natural occurrence of tar here, the gadfly in me also wonders if this particular water quality battle is as misguided as everyone’s sense of direction.  Tar here is a background condition, and I wonder if any ecologist can speak to unique species diversity that evolved to inhabit this type of environment, and can offer a fair assessment of that to the level of ecological or public health threat this poses downstream.  This brea, after all, has been present for thousands of years while downstream rivers flowed to coastal wetlands.  Perhaps the fragility of our remaining resources exceeds the benefit of restoring creeks in the city, especially if they ooze tar.  I could accept that conclusion if, over the past ten years, there’d been some fair consideration of the benefits of daylighting.

Tar Seep on Santa Paula Creek. Photo: Natural Channel Design

As a point of reference/contrast, there’s open tar seeps on Santa Paula Creek, a trib to the Santa Clara River.  I don’t see anyone trying to slap an oil-and-water separator on that.  Indeed, I find a lot of irony in how we in Los Angeles have made our natural environment so unnatural that we cannot find what’s upstream of a given point, nor can we accept some of the messy natural processes of the land, nor can we fathom a restoration that provides benefits and context for this messiness.  But we can apparently throw money at devices.

Trash seepage traced to Wilshire Blvd.

So there’s this simple device  called a trash can, and another one called a garbage truck, that I think could definitely be a benefit in greater quantities to this area of the Ballona Creek watershed.  If we can’t put money into restoration, could we at least throw some more of it at this?  And into housing, food and aid for the homeless, whose rummaging through these already overflowing receptacles in search of something to eat or recycle often lands garbage in the gutters – trash in street runoff merely being a side effect of their plight.

And lest we try to cloak ourselves in the notion that ugly place names pertain uniquely to the attitudes of far-away-others, we have our own local history of place name alienation attached to a street and a former LA-area waterbody.  A link to my previous piece on the N-word Slough turned up in the comments to the LA Times piece, and Joe noted it here.

Source: Cal State Dominguez Hills

I’ll write a little more about the wetland itself another time.  Today is for remembering the lives and courage of regular people, 19th Century African-Americans finding their way in the newly colonized, racially-charged Los Angeles.  Is there a way to honor the perseverence, while also genuinely balming the pain?

New solar lighting (pole on left, with white sandwich board and cone at base) being installed on the L.A. River Bike Path. Glendale-Hyperion Bridge is in the background.

In mid-November, I spotted some new lights being installed along L.A. City’s stretch of L.A. River bike path. With the help of the city Department of Transportation’s Tim Fremaux and Department of Public Works’ Richard Lee, I have some background on the new lighting. 

The new lighting is being installed from just upstream of Fletcher Drive all the way to Riverside Drive (near the Zoo and Bette Davis Picnic Area), which is a total distance of about four and a half miles. The bike path in this stretch has been open for a while. Above Los Feliz, it opened in 1996. Below Los Feliz, I think it opened around 2000-2001, give or take a year. Those projects opened with lighting to help make the path more useful for commuting, but the copper wiring connecting the lighting was stolen three times, so there’s been no lighting there for a couple years.

The new lights are fully off-the-grid solar (like on Elmer Avenue) with no copper connecting them to each other. The solar panels are quite a bit bigger than the actual lighting element. The total project cost is about $900,000.

Assembled tall photo of the new solar lighting