Freeman Dam Just Needs Water to Help Aquifer : Public works: The $31-million project will divert Santa Clara River flow to recharge underground pools that have been breached by seawater.

Nearly three years after men and machines began moving earth for one of the county’s largest public works projects, the Freeman diversion dam is ready to capture its first drops of water from the Santa Clara River.

Final touches on the $31-million concrete dam and adjacent canal will not be completed until the end of the year, but the project is operational now. The banks and bed of the Santa Clara are so dry, however, that Monday night’s half an inch of rain merely moistened the soil and left no water in the river for the dam to divert.

The bulk of the 60-foot-high structure, built with state and federal funds and a $6-million local contribution, is underground.

Only a small portion of the 100,000 cubic yards of concrete used for the dam are visible from the east, but from the west visitors can see a 28-foot cement face featuring steel ladders and drains.

The dam, which is unusual in that it diverts water rather than storing it in a reservoir system, will for the first time since the 1920s wipe out the annual deficit of ground-water overdraft, said Frederick J. Gientke, general manager of the United Water Conservation District, which is building the project.

“It’s not a Grand Coulee in terms of its size,” Gientke said, alluding to the huge dam on the Columbia River in Washington state. “But in terms of significance, it’s every bit as large.”

Freeman was designed in the early 1980s to stop seawater from intruding into shallow underground freshwater pools called aquifers. Seawater has breached the Oxnard aquifer because for 60 years growers and cities have pumped more water out of the ground than rainfall or mountain runoff can replenish.

In 1989, federal government reports showed for the first time that the deep Fox Canyon aquifer probably also is contaminated by seawater.

The State Water Resources Control Board has criticized United because it has not moved quickly enough to stop the intrusion problem.

But board Chairman W. Don Maughan said this week that United is making reasonable progress toward the goal of balancing extractions and recharge.

“But it’s not as much progress as we think they could have made,” he said. Maughan said United also should have been finding reclaimed waste water to recharge aquifers. Gientke said United is beginning to work on such a source.

Freeman was controversial when serious design work began in the early 1980s, inducing protests from the California Department of Fish and Game, the city of Ventura and area environmentalists.

Most objections have since been satisfied, said Carla Bard, an Ojai businesswoman who was a member of the State Water Resources Control Board in 1981 when United received money for the project.

“I think there is unanimous opinion that the Freeman is a good project as long as the fish ladder was installed,” she said of the $2-million structure that allows fish to swim over the dam and stay out of diversion ponds.

But Fish and Game officials say the project on one of the county’s two main rivers is far from ideal.

“Any time you divert water from a river it is going to adversely affect the fish and wildlife populations,” said Capt. Roger Reese of the department’s wildlife protection division. “But considering this is a diversion, it has been mitigated as much as they possibly can.”

Fish and Game objected to the project in part because it would eliminate what little is left of the steelhead trout fishery in the river and farther upstream in Sespe Creek, said Reed Smith, a department patrol lieutenant.

“One of the things that killed the steelhead fishery in the Ventura River was the lack of a fish ladder at Lake Casitas dam and a fish ladder that did not work at Matilija dam,” Smith said. He said his department had monitored the design of the fish ladder for the Santa Clara.

The city of Ventura opposed the dam for a different reason. United had planned to add a loan repayment surcharge to the fees that Ventura and other pumpers pay United. Ventura sued United, saying the city should not have to help repay loans for the dam since the city receives no benefits from it.

“Our whole argument during the battle was that Freeman doesn’t provide benefits to the city because the city doesn’t pump water from the aquifers that Freeman recharges,” City Manager John Baker said. The suit was settled out of court with Ventura agreeing to pay about one third the originally proposed surcharge.

Phil White, a Ventura environmental engineer, headed a group of residents concerned that the dam would cause beach erosion by preventing sand from moving down the river as it has done for centuries.

“The beaches between Ventura and Point Mugu are formed by sand that originally came down the Santa Clara River, mostly from the Sespe Creek,” White said. United agreed to fill in land on the upstream side of the dam so that the sediments could spill over the top and continue to the ocean. White said he is now satisfied.

Named after Vern Freeman, general manager and chief engineer at United in the 1950s, the dam was built to replace an earthen dam that was wiped out with each heavy rain.

The Santa Clara is now dry most of the year. But during a normal rain year, the river carries 110,000 acre-feet per year to the ocean, Gientke said.

Freeman is designed to capture about 12,700 acre-feet per year. The water is diverted into a half-mile-long, aboveground canal that empties into a series of desilting basins. The sediment is removed from the water before an underground pipeline carries it a mile to the 120-acre Saticoy spreading grounds or a mile farther to the 100-acre El Rio spreading grounds.

The spreading grounds are simply a flat area divided into large squares with small earthen berms. Water forms pools before it settles into the ground. Beneath the spreading grounds is the Oxnard Aquifer, the shallow underground pool that has been overdrafted by 296,000 acre-feet.