Rush Hour : At 6:27 A.M., Bulldozer Takes Its Last Bite, Creating Talbert Channel

As the sun came up Tuesday morning, a bulldozer moved like an agile metal crab over a high bank of sand at Huntington State Beach.

At 6:27 a.m., the last bite of the bulldozer joined the Huntington Beach Wetlands and the Pacific Ocean. The water began trickling at first, then cascaded to the sea.

It was the birth of the new Talbert Channel, a $14-million county flood control project that has the added benefit of freshening newly restored wetlands with ocean water.

Despite the early hour and a chill wind, a small crowd of spectators was on hand. History, after all, was in the making.

“It’s not often that a new channel is cut to the ocean,” noted Victor Leipzig, a Huntington Beach planning commissioner. “Can anyone remember when the last one was? Was it down in Oceanside?”

The consensus of the small crowd of environmentalists at the site was that it had been at least 10 years since any new channel had been cut from land to the ocean in Southern California. The one opened Tuesday was particularly significant, spectators said, because of its environmental potential.

“The primary benefit of this is flood control, but in terms of wildlife, it will provide an unobstructed outlet into the marsh,” said Gary Gorman, executive director of the nonprofit Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy.

Gorman noted that for most of the 20th Century, development has sealed off Huntington Beach’s wetlands from the ocean.

The land north of Pacific Coast Highway, between Beach Boulevard and Brookhurst Street, once was a great swamp, full of coastal birds and sea life. As development progressed in Huntington Beach, the swamp was drained, the Santa Ana River was housed in a concrete channel, and the wetlands disappeared.

In the late 1980s, Gorman and a band of environmentalists led a drive to try to restore some of the former wetlands. “We got a grant from the state Coastal Conservancy, and we were able to buy land (at Brookhurst and Pacific Coast Highway) from Caltrans,” Gorman said.

In 1989, the 25 acres, with a channel cut to the river, became a functional wetlands again. However, the river channel to the wetlands has never been as efficient as direct access to the ocean, said Gordon W. Smith, chairman of the Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy.

“This will be the first time we’ve had a direct flushing from the ocean,” Smith said. “The ocean carries a lot of nutrients with it. And when you have direct tidal flow coming in, it deposits those nutrients on the mud flats in the coastal marshes. There is already a lot of life regenerating in the wetlands already, and with the direct flow and the nutrients coming in from the ocean, I think it will, in a few months, become noticeably richer environment.”

Smith said the conservancy wetlands, though opened only two years ago, already are a nesting ground for one endangered species, the Belding’s savannah sparrow.

“The least tern, which is another endangered species, hasn’t nested there yet, but it uses our wetlands area for foraging,” Smith said. “There also are some brown pelicans and white pelicans that feed and roost there.”

The wetlands are northwest of a new bridge the state is building over the Santa Ana River between Huntington Beach and Newport Beach. The ocean channel opened Tuesday has its own bridge that crosses Pacific Coast Highway.

Gorman said the channel itself was all but complete Monday. Only a 25-yard cut was needed to open the inland water to the ocean Tuesday morning.

The engineers sealed off the old river opening to the wetlands late Monday night, after a high tide, Gorman said. “That held in the high tide” in the wetlands, he said. “Then we wanted to cut the opening (to the ocean) early this morning, at low tide.”

The result, he said, would be that water in the wetlands would rush out of the new channel into the ocean, cleaning out the system. New ocean water would come back in at the next high tide.

As Gorman, Smith and other environmentalists stood on the beach and explained the project, a bronze- and purple-colored dawn broke on the horizon. The angry, gray-green ocean slapped at the shore as the nearby bulldozer cut deeper into the sand bank that still plugged the new channel.

Louann Murray, an environmental researcher, watched as the bulldozer sliced into the disappearing wall of sand. “One more scoop, and there it goes,” she said.

A few seconds later, the ocean and inland waters joined in a cascade. Leipzig smiled as the ocean link was completed.

“This is a great sight,” he said. “After all the years we put into this project, it’s really a thrill to see it happen at last.”

Smith said the wetlands will now become an even richer breeding ground for various species. “With the direct opening, we’ll get a lot more fish coming into the wetland.”

“This really turns the wetland back into what nature intended,” he said.