Pamo Valley : Wildlife, Artifacts May Receive More Study Before the Flood

Pamo Valley is a quiet pocket in the vast stretches of eastern San Diego County, a haven for hawks, coyotes and grazing Brahma bulls, where a man like Jimmie Renfro might while away a lifetime watching the seasons change.

Renfro lives alone in the shadow of Black Mountain, beside the dirt road that runs into the valley and stops. He keeps a few horses, fishes for catfish and watches the geese flying south, while relishing the simple joys of this pristine place.

“Like I say, peace and solitude,” explained Renfro, a 39-year-old carpenter who is one of the few inhabitants of the valley. “You pass your time getting wood for the winter; getting the roof nailed down after the Santa Anas blow it off.”

Sometime next month, federal engineers in Los Angeles intend to decide whether to let the San Diego County Water Authority proceed with plans to turn much of Pamo Valley into the county’s largest reservoir by building a dam and inundating the place with water.

Water officials say the long-planned project is crucial to ensuring an emergency water supply for the swelling northern reaches of San Diego and North County. They say an earthquake, almost certain within 20 years, could shatter the aqueducts that bring the county water.

But several federal and state agencies have reservations about the project, its environmental impact and whether all options have been explored. Some environmentalists and others fear that the reservoir will simply spur more growth in a county they feel has grown enough.

“It should be a park or a preserve,” said Richard Gadler, an archeologist and environmental planner from El Cajon. “But the City of San Diego is not into preserves; they’re into development. The city abhors vacant land like nature abhors a vacuum.”

The question before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees development along the nation’s wetlands and waterways, is whether to require that the water authority do an environmental impact statement--a detailed analysis of the project’s effects and any possible options.

Such a study could mean another 375 days before the corps approves a permit for the project, said Allison Arnold, a corps scientist. The alternative, a less sweeping study combined with plans to minimize environmental damage, could take 180 days.

Authorities say it would be unusual not to require an impact statement for such a significant project--an 1,800-acre reservoir and a 250-foot-high concrete dam in a rare stretch of stream-side habitat in a part of the country where wetlands are fast disappearing.

But Water Authority officials want very much to avoid it. They say it would duplicate an environmental review already done for the state. And anyway, they say they have an extensive plan to create new habitat in a neighboring valley and more than make up for whatever is lost.

“I don’t think anything has been looked at more for alternatives,” said Lawrence R. Michaels, general manager for the Water Authority. “It’s kind of been studied to death, and what is the question? ‘Why don’t you study it some more?’ ”

Michaels argues that above all the corps should consider the need for emergency water storage in San Diego County, which receives 90% of its water from the Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District through aqueducts winding down from the north.

The U.S. Geological Survey predicts a 90% chance of a major earthquake on the San Andreas Fault in the next 20 years, Michaels notes. And the two aqueducts cross the stretch of the fault that scientists say is most likely to include the epicenter of that quake.

MWD officials say a severe break in at least one of the aqueducts could take six months to repair. During that time, Michaels said, demand for water would exceed the supply stored in the county’s reservoirs by ever-increasing amounts.

“We’re looking at something that the people who study this fault movement expect to happen within 20 years,” Michaels said in a recent interview at authority headquarters. “That’s like saying it could happen tomorrow.”

Hardest hit would be the expanding midriff of the county, since there is adequate storage positioned to serve the northern and southern reaches. But Michaels says northern San Diego and southern North County would suddenly be without emergency supplies.

No one seems quite certain what that would mean. Officials of the Water Authority, the city and MWD said it would necessitate a 50% reduction in consumption. They say that would mean people could wash their dishes and take baths, but could not water their lawns.

“It would be a burden and it would be hard to handle,” said Ernest Clay, assistant water utilities director for the city. “People would be using wash water to water their roses.”

So the authority turned to the Pamo Valley, which city officials say they began buying up in 1925 with an eye toward water storage. In November, 1984, voters approved revenue bonds for the $82-million project by a margin of 55% to 45%.

Now Michaels says the devastation wrought by the Mexican earthquake and the Geological Survey’s prognostications serve as warnings of what could happen. The authority has launched a lobbying effort to press the Corps of Engineers for its OK.

“What we’re really trying to say to the corps is, ‘This means an awful lot to the County of San Diego,’ ” said Ben Clay, the Water Authority’s lobbyist. “We don’t want to be caught flat-footed without adequate emergency water supplies for this area.”

The reservoir would be filled in part by Santa Ysabel Creek, the small waterway that winds through the valley. But most of the water would come from the San Diego Aqueduct, one of two that bring water down from the north.

The reservoir would be the first storage facility linked to San Diego’s Miramar filtration plant, which currently depends on pipelines from the north. In a drought, city users could take Pamo water, leaving pipeline water for communities to the north.

The location is suited for a reservoir, with its narrow canyon and deep valley, city water officials say. It allows for a relatively small dam and a capacious reservoir with relatively little surface area for evaporation.

But the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, federal Environmental Protection Agency and California Department of Fish and Game have all come out urging the corps not to grant the Pamo permit without an environmental impact statement.

Fish and Wildlife Service officials argue that the authority’s inventory of the valley’s natural resources was insufficient because it did not cover a full year. Plants blooming in different seasons attract different species, they say, and resources vary throughout the year.

They also question the water agency’s massive habitat-replacement plan, which would attempt to create new woodland, wetland and grassland habitat in the San Pasqual Valley. Some say it could never replace what would be lost; others fear the project is too ambitious to ever be done.

“It’s not just a matter of planting a few oak trees,” said Steve Rader of the U.S. Forest Service, whose Cleveland National Forest would be peripherally affected. “It’s a whole ecosystem. You don’t just say, ‘OK, we’re going to put a riparian area over here.’ Nature doesn’t work that way.”

“To do it is an art, not a science,” said Sharon Lockhart, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service who is assigned to review the Pamo proposal. “There’s absolutely no guarantee that it will work.”

Other reservations concern how the project would affect the least Bell’s vireo, a bird species under consideration for the federal endangered species list. Officials have also questioned whether the estimated 78% reduction in the water flowing into Santa Ysabel Creek will damage ground water supplies and hurt wetlands downstream of the dam.

“We want to know what effect this project will have on a regionwide basis,” said Robert Leidy of the EPA’s regional office in San Francisco. “ . . . Because riparian vegetation is lost and continues to be lost (throughout Southern California), the loss of that huge chunk becomes that much more significant.”

Finally, the agencies remain unconvinced that the Water Authority has considered all the options, in spite of Michaels’ protestations. They say the state environmental review demands a relatively cursory examination of alternatives compared to the federal impact statement.

That last argument is also being used by environmental and planning groups that want the Corps of Engineers to deny a permit for the project. Forty-eight individuals and organizations submitted comments to the corps, almost all of them negative.

Running through many of their arguments is a nagging suspicion that the reservoir is not really needed and will not be used only for emergency supply. They predict that, intentionally or unintentionally, it will encourage more development and growth.

“It’s the same concept as more freeways because of more traffic,” said a spokesman for Citizens Coordinate for Century 3, a citizens’ planning group. “There’s got to be a finite limit at which we stop.”

“It seems to me that if they were more efficient and aggressive about water conservation, we wouldn’t have to have this enormous pond that would destroy our riparian and stream-side habitat,” said Emily Durbin of the Sierra Club, a leader of the opposition.

Unconvinced of any overriding need for the project, its critics also stress its cost in natural and cultural resources. They say the Water Authority would be demolishing an unbroken record of thousands of years of social and cultural change.

The valley contains the remains of at least three villages inhabited by Diegueno Indians in historic and prehistoric times. There are traces of grain and seed milling, cremation burials, and scatterings of artifacts such as tools and broken pottery.

At least one of the villages remained inhabited into mission times, when white settlers began usurping valleys for ranching, said Ken Hedges, a curator at the Balboa Park Museum of Man. The Indians moved into the mountains to the north, now the home of their descendants, the Mesa Grande band.

The Water Authority has proposed a program of “archeological mitigation,” which would involve removing the Indian artifacts before the valley is flooded. Indian bands have endorsed the mitigation plan, but they say the project as a whole is profoundly disturbing.

“We’re talking about some differences in values,” said Patricia Nelson, a water analyst for the nearby Santa Ysabel band. “The members of the Santa Ysabel band think a great deal of that area because of the part it plays in their history. It is a very frustrating experience not to have anybody share that sense of value or sense of worth. . . .

“That’s how we feel: That area is important to us and leave it alone. But there’s the law and the politics. I mean really, how could the Santa Ysabel Indians compete with the forces that need to put that in? Hey, we’re not even in the same league.”

Meanwhile, life goes on timelessly in Pamo Valley, between the dark rock faces of the mountains to the north and east and the hazy shoulders of the hills to the south and west.

On a recent afternoon, cattle and horses moved slowly across stubbly pasture, and ground squirrels raced down the lone dirt road. Hawks hung in the air high above the valley, dropping occasionally to circle rhythmically near the ground.

With calving season past and earmarking finished, Jimmie Renfro took a buzz saw into his yard to bring in some wood. Pausing to talk Pamo Dam with a passer-by, he smiled and said quietly: “Personally, I never thought it would happen.”