Residents Fight for Lost Lake : Water, Hopes Up at Hansen Dam

Beneath the towering wall of Hansen Dam lies a small, stagnant pool that 20 years ago was a sprawling lake attracting thousands of people to swim, fish and water ski.

A once-busy boat ramp drops into a sea of chaparral. A tall, rickety lifeguard station overlooks a grove of willow trees. A cluster of abandoned picnic tables and barbecues stands like a relic.

But most of all, there is sand. Millions and millions of tons of sand, gravel and silt that for 50 years washed into the Hansen Dam reservoir and choked the lake to death, killing what was the East San Fernando Valley’s most popular recreation area.

Community leaders get mad when they see all this. It makes their blood boil. It makes them curse.

“We want the damn lake back,” Richard Packard said.

“We want to see water back in that damn dam,” Evelyn Montgomery said.

“It’s damn time they do something for Pacoima,” Ed Kussman said.

Despite a continual community outcry, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, owner of the land, and the Los Angeles City Department of Recreation and Parks, which leases it, never have made restoring the lake at Hansen Dam a priority. The agencies blame each other for years of government inaction that have left the recreation area a ghost park.

Pent-Up Frustration

But this logjam of government bureaucracy and pent-up community frustration is breaking loose at Hansen Dam, because an ambitious man with a fleet of bulldozers is digging out the silt-filled reservoir faster than anyone dreamed he could. For the first time in almost a decade there is reason for optimism, albeit guarded optimism, that the lake is on its way back:

* Army Corps officials say the recent dredging has far exceeded original goals of restoring flood protection, clearing the way for concurrent digging of a hole for a lake. They support creation of a new lake as long as flood control is given top priority.

* The city Parks Department said last week it will try to complete a master plan for Hansen Dam in six to nine months. This is a small but important first step as it would establish the location of a new lake.

* Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) has promised to make revitalization of the lake a priority. He has asked the federal government to release $300,000 generated by the dredging and has formed a group of East Valley community leaders to decide how to use the money. The consensus of the group is to use it solely to restore the lake.

* Finally, there is Bill Blomgren, the owner of Channel and Basin Reclamation who has a five-year contract with the corps to dig out silted-in flood control channels and says he is on a mission to resurrect the lake of his childhood. He has told the corps, the city and the community he could dig out a 30-acre lake hole by the end of the year. His efforts have pushed officials and the community into action.

“He just thought if he started digging it would get the thing going,” one corps official said.

These recent developments have ignited a new determination among community leaders from Sunland to Sylmar to pressure local officials to move forward once and for all.

“I think this is the best chance we’ve had in a long time,” said Lewis Snow, president of Lake View Terrace Homeowners Assn. “We don’t see any reason now why we can’t have our lake back within five years.”

But formidable obstacles exist.

It is unclear how committed city and corps officials are to lake restoration, despite public statements that they support it. At this point neither agency wants to take responsibility to build the lake. The corps says the city must design and build it under a corps-approved plan. The city says such an undertaking clearly belongs to the corps.

Then there is the least Bell’s vireo, a little bird with the important distinction of being a federal and state endangered species. The bird was quick to move into the lush grove of young willow trees and chaparral that thrive where the lake used to be. Disturbing its nesting place without providing another of equal size would violate federal law.

Community members are angered by the tangle of government explanations and regulations. Their once-vibrant lake and surrounding park are all but abandoned for recreation. The area is plagued by crime and has become a haven for transients.

Packard, a lifelong Pacoima resident who drives by the muddy remnant every day, calls it “the worst kind of insult” to the northeast Valley. For many, it is a symbol of government inaction in a predominantly low-income, minority community with a dire need for parks.

As for the bird, many in the rural areas of Sunland and Tujunga are sensitive to wildlife concerns. They point to another area on the reservoir’s fringe that could be preserved for a new least Bell’s vireo habitat.

Further infuriating East Valley residents was last year’s unveiling of an ambitious $20-million plan to develop Sepulveda Basin in affluent Encino. Like Hansen Dam, Sepulveda Basin is owned by the corps, and the land is leased by the city.

At Sepulveda Basin, the city devised a master plan for a 26-acre lake with a fishing cove, rowboat facilities and a wildlife pond surrounded by landscaped parkland. To pay for it, the city is planning to match $10 million in federal funds, mainly with state bonds.

“Why don’t they have the same problems in Sepulveda Basin?” asked Montgomery, a Pacoima resident who, like others, views the revitalization of Hansen Dam as a fair-share issue.

“We see the money that they are spending at Sepulveda and we hold out our hands and pennies fall in. How come we are not getting the same service for our tax dollars?” Snow asked. “How come we are stuck with this abysmal facility? Why did they let Hansen Dam fall apart?”

As far as corps officials are concerned, nothing is falling apart at Hansen Dam. The actual dam structure--97 feet high and 2 miles long--is as strong as it was in 1940 when it was built to control the waters of Big and Little Tujunga washes.

What is not fully understood by the community, corps officials explain, is that the massive buildup of sediment that led to the lake’s demise is all part of a 50-year plan for Hansen Dam.

Furthermore, if another lake is built, it too will eventually fill up with silt washing down from the San Gabriel Mountains.

The Hansen Dam Flood Control Basin was built to control waters and collect silt from the worst rainstorm that could be expected in a 50-year span, corps officials said. The reservoir is designed to hold 35,800 acre-feet of water and sediment. An acre-foot is equivalent to one square acre, one foot high.

Of this, 5,000 acre-feet was allocated for sediment storage and an additional 2,700 acre-feet in sediment storage space is found in “borrow pits”--the holes that were excavated in 1940 to provide gravel to build the dam, corps engineers explained.

It was these borrow pits that filled with water “and lo and behold, we had a lake,” said Lowell Flannery, chief of operations and maintenance at corps projects in the Los Angeles area.

In 1947 the city began leasing Hansen Dam property from the corps for parkland. In 1949 the city opened the 130-acre Holiday Lake, said John Ward, who, as assistant general manager of the Parks Department, oversees the Valley region.

The Parks Department built a sandy beach and a boat ramp at the lake. A shallow section was cordoned off for swimming and supervised from sunup to sundown by lifeguards. The city stocked the lake with trout. And a grassy picnic area with barbecues was built nearby.

Area Thrived

For 25 years, Hansen Dam and the surrounding area thrived. Developers built homes on hills overlooking the lake, giving their community a stylish new name: Lake View Terrace.

At the park, private concessionaires operated a children’s petting zoo, train and pony rides. On summer weekends the 400-space parking lot was jammed with visitors’ cars.

Community leaders talk wistfully of that heyday, for they were the children and young parents who crowded the lake’s shores and swam in its waters.

“I remember going down there as a kid, swimming all day long,” Snow said. “It was the best place around for a kid.”

What they didn’t know, however, was that even in its prime, the lake had a precarious existence. The city had to pump in water 24 hours a day during the summer to keep the water high enough for boating.

Then in 1969 Los Angeles County was hit with severe rainstorms that brought some of the worst flooding in history. Two bridges at Foothill Boulevard and Wentworth Street collapsed in the flood and seven homes on Big Tujunga Wash were swept away.

Filled by Debris

The borrow pits of Holiday Lake were inundated with debris and sediment. After the storms, the lake was 4 feet deep in some places where it used to be 20 to 30 feet deep, Ward said.

“We tried to limp along in the ‘70s,” Ward said. “We started out by banning motor boating. It finally got to the point that swimming was the only thing left.” In 1975 came fires that stripped canyon vegetation and thus increased the erosion rate. By 1975 Holiday Lake had been reduced to about 80 acres, according to corps documents.

In an attempt to save the lake in 1975 and 1976, the city opened bidding to contractors to dredge for sand and gravel. But no one responded, Ward said, mainly because the lake was filled with fine silt, which is not as lucrative as gravel.

What was to be both the death knell for the lake and an impediment to flood control came with the heavy rainfalls of late 1981 and early 1982. The sediment buildup reduced the lake to less than 30 acres, corps documents stated.

In the summer of 1982 the swimming beach was closed because the water was becoming stagnant and unhealthful, Ward said. “We didn’t attempt to rejuvenate the area,” Ward said. “We let it stay covered with silt and lost the lakeside development.” According to the corps’ original 50-year life expectancy, the lake died eight years prematurely.

‘They Don’t Understand’

It was no surprise to parks officials that the lake had filled with silt. “People now blame the corps and blame the city, but that’s just because they don’t understand,” Ward said. “We used the lake for 20, 25 years. It was a wonderful asset. Then it did what it was supposed to do--it filled up.”

This is why, he says, recent community criticism over the slated Sepulveda Basin lake is misguided. There is no risk that the Sepulveda lake would fall victim to the same silt inundation as Hansen Dam, Ward said.

In late 1981 the corps began to study ways to deal with the sediment, which at 10,000 acre-feet was twice what it should be and hampered the water’s flow toward the dam gates, Flannery said.

The community began to call for lake restoration, and relations with the corps turned sour. The corps’ response then was the same as today:

“Our goal is to restore flood control, not the lake,” Flannery said. “If we have the opportunity to restore the lake, that’s fine, but it’s not a priority. It doesn’t matter to us.”

Expense Not Justified

Furthermore, while the silt buildup was significant, it never justified spending millions of dollars in removal, Flannery said. Even waters from a severe storm could be controlled by using the dam’s spillway, he said.

In 1982 the corps authorized private firms to dredge as much of the sediment as they could sell to construction firms. However, residents complained of noise, truck traffic and the destruction of horse trails in the reservoir.

The corps then introduced the idea of awarding a single five-year contract to one excavation firm because it would be easier to regulate.

Enter Blomgren, the lifelong Tujunga resident who formed Channel and Basin Reclamation and won the corps contract in April, 1984. His license, good until April, 1989, called for removal of at least 1.4 million tons of sediment the first year and 1 million the following four years. In exchange, Blomgren pays the government between 15 and 25 cents for each ton that is removed.

A 1986 measure pushed by Berman earmarks the royalty money, which now totals close to $300,000, for recreational uses at Hansen Dam.

Building Boom Helps

Since October, 1985, Blomgren and four subcontractors have nearly tripled the minimum sediment removal requirements. Building booms, coupled with the closure of a gravel pit in Sun Valley, created a strong demand for gravel and fill dirt, he said.

Also fueling Blomgren’s bulldozers is his personal desire to see the lake return.

“It’s going to be my lake. It’s going to be Lake Blomgren,” he said. “I want my son’s kids to say, ‘We are swimming in Grandpa’s lake.’ ”

As a result of the heavy excavation, two 5-acre-wide holes have emerged where the lake used to be. A 10-acre hole near the dam gates, fed directly by water from the washes, puddled up about two months ago--a violation of Blomgren’s contract because of safety hazards created by ponds.

The community group meeting since November to decide how to spend the $300,000 sees the illegal pond and the nearby holes and envisions a new lake. Members are intent on using the money for a lake and estimate it could pay for a small shoreline area and picnic tables and benches.

‘Lake Within Year’

Blomgren has attended their meetings and said that if the corps and city allow it, he can “make a nice usable lake by the end of the year.”

“What it boils down to is that we have moved faster than anyone ever thought we could,” he said.

Blomgren clearly has sparked enthusiasm with the swiftness of his work and his willingness to appease the community. Flannery describes him as “the kind of guy who drives 60 m.p.h. in a 55 m.p.h. zone--he is still a good person, he just goes a little overboard.”

Three weeks ago, Blomgren was ordered by the corps to fill in the 10-acre pool that he dug out. But Rep. Berman has asked officials to hold off on the order until plans for the lake are devised.

In the meantime, the corps maintains that if the city wants a lake, “they have to do the master plan and the environmental work,” said Wanda Kiebala, chief of the recreation division for the corps.

Three years ago, staff members with the city parks planning and development division drew up a draft master plan for the Hansen Dam, but the corps rejected it, saying in a letter it was a “good first attempt” but needed more details and did not conform to the corps format, which requires the presentation of topics in a certain order.

Since then the plan has been in limbo, said Joel Breitbart, assistant general manager of the Parks Department. “It simply was not a priority item . . . so it languished for years.”

Two weeks ago, Berman fired off a letter to the department demanding to know “why this process has been allowed to continue for so long . . . after many years of discussion and inaction.”

City parks officials have agreed to redraw the plan for a new lake. Ward predicted that new community pressure will hasten what usually is a 1- to 1 1/2-year process to 6 to 9 months.

“But a master plan shouldn’t be holding anything up,” Ward said. “The master plan will show an outline of a lake, and it will be labeled ‘lake.’ The next step is up to the corps.”

Despite the bureaucratic bickering, Berman says he is determined to support the community group in seeing that a lake is restored. Still to be worked out between the corps and the city during the master plan process, which includes public hearings, is how big the lake would be, where would it be, when it would be finished and other details. Estimated costs also are unknown.

Not only will corps and city officials have to answer to community members about lake restoration, but “they will have to answer to me,” Berman said.

Meanwhile, Blomgren vows to “keep digging until they tell me to stop.”

And the residents are “going to scream and yell until they give us our lake,” said Tina Eicks, a Sun Valley environmentalist.

Packard said, “We’re at least going to get a damn fishing hole by summer.”