Conservationists Keep a Wary Eye on Wetlands

A flock of gulls floated peacefully on the blue-gray water while nearby, a willet, a tall white-and-black-winged bird with a narrow beak, pecked in the mud for worms.

But if Talbert Marsh seemed the picture of tranquility Friday afternoon, appearances were deceiving.

This 25-acre saltwater marsh is a wetlands on life support.

Since Sunday, hastily built dikes on three of its channels have prevented contaminated tidal waters from flushing it. Now the marsh, also known as the Huntington Beach Wetlands, is oxygenated by two orange machines that pump bubbles of air into the water.

The Feb. 7 oil spill off Huntington Beach has threatened the life of this wetlands preserve. And with rain expected this weekend, a new crisis loomed as county flood control officials on Friday lowered one of the sandy berms that has kept life-destroying crude oil from the wetlands.

That action is expected to prevent Talbert Channel from flooding homes upstream, as it did in 1983. If the berms were to remain at their original height, rainwater flowing toward the ocean during the storm could back up and flood property inland.

But if the lowered dike allows oil in the ocean to flow into the wetlands, environmentalists fear this recently restored estuary could be damaged for years to come.

“It is precarious. . . . Oil could be a real setback,” said Victor Leipzig, a Golden West College biology instructor who serves on the wetlands conservancy’s board of directors.

Added state Fish and Game wildlife biologist Greg Gerstenberg, “It could do a lot of long-term damage” to fish, birds and invertebrate animals that live in the tidal mud and form the bottom rung of the food chain.

The damage could last “a long, long time,” Gerstenberg said softly Friday as he scanned the marsh. “Longer than I’m going to be here--that’s all I know.”

Until the oil spill last week, the story of Talbert Marsh in recent years has been an extraordinary success story. More than 100 years ago, when 253,000 acres of wetlands covered the California coast, Talbert Marsh was part of a 3,000-acre system of saltwater marshes located near the mouth of the Santa Ana River.

But since the turn of the century, more than 80% of California’s wetlands have been lost to development, the California Nature Conservancy has estimated. And for a time, Talbert Marsh disappeared too. In the 1950s, as the California Department of Transportation laid plans to build a coastal freeway, bulldozers filled in part of it, cutting it off from the ocean and leaving it to become a trash-covered and dusty vacant lot.

The freeway was never built. Meanwhile, in 1984, a citizens group called Friends of the Huntington Beach Wetlands was formed with the dream of restoring the marshes. One year later, at the urging of the state Coastal Conservancy’s director, leaders in that group created a nonprofit corporation, the Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy, and set about trying to reclaim Talbert Marsh.

On Feb. 18, 1989, wildlife biologists, county officials and conservancy leaders cheered as a backhoe cut through a levee and ocean water poured onto the land.

Biologists estimated that it would take several years before the land would look much like a marsh, but soon crabs, fish, shore birds and coastal plants made the marshland home.

In all, the reclamation of the marsh was proceeding apace--until the oil hit.

Since then, some conservancy leaders have maintained a nearly 24-hour-a-day vigil at the marsh to try to protect it. And, said Gordon Smith, chairman of the conservancy’s board of directors, they have faced one “close call” after another.

The first came last Saturday night as it became apparent that booms placed at the mouth of the Santa Ana River were not enough to stop the oil. Conservancy leaders agreed with county officials that wide sand dikes, totally shutting off tidal flow from the marsh, were needed to keep the oil out. Dikes across the river, on nearby Talbert Channel and the adjacent Greenville-Banning flood control channel, were built late Saturday night and early Sunday morning.

State Fish and Game spokesman Curt Taucher said that some clams and mussels were killed when oil breeched the dike. Still, most of the oil was contained by a couple of rubberized booms 20 to 40 feet from the dike, and by Friday night, oil had not entered the marsh itself. On the oceanside edge of the sandy berm, however, the rock jetties and channel water were streaked brown with crude.

But on Friday, fearing rain and possible flooding, county workers removed sand from the 10-foot-tall Talbert dike, lowering it by at least four feet.

If the rains are severe, water in the Talbert Channel should be able to easily break through the lower dike and avert flooding upstream, county public works chief Bill Reiter said.

“We think we’ll get the best of both worlds,” he said. With the lowered dike, they have reduced the risk of flooding, he said, and if it doesn’t rain, the dike at six feet was still high enough to keep oil from the ocean out of the channel, even at high tide.

Conservancy official Smith called the lowered dike “a little bit of a gamble. If we have the right combination of waves and tide and oil and a breach of the levee, then we could get oil in there.” Still, they hope the the marsh will not be harmed.

But even if the Huntington Beach wetlands survive the weekend without becoming oiled, conservancy officials still worry that when the dikes are gone for good, remnants of oil--on the underside of rocks or sunk into the sand--could still tar their precious marsh.

“Is British Petroleum (the firm that was paying to ship the oil) going to be around to pick up when the berm is removed?” asked conservancy leader Gary Gorman.

“The oil is embedded well down in to the nooks and crannies of those jetties and that oil hasn’t had time to cook onto the rock,” said Leipzig. “At high tide, it could wash off readily and be driven back into the wetlands. . . . I think we face a long-term problem here. There’s going to oil on those rocks for a very long time.”