Past Is Prologue for Witnesses to ’38 San Juan Flood

It was 54 years ago next month that Lawrence F. Buchheim was shaken out of an early morning sleep by his father and hustled over to his bedroom window.

Their entire Capistrano Beach ranch was under water.

“I could have paddled a rowboat out our front door all the way to Newport Beach,” recalled Buchheim, who was 11 at the time. “My dad called it a sight I might never see again. I’m not so sure of that.”

Buchheim, a Capistrano Valley citrus farmer and rancher, was talking about the flood of ‘38, which left 119 people dead and 2,000 homeless across the county.

The flood of March 2, 1938, still stands as the benchmark for all the county’s floods. In tiny San Juan Capistrano, every road and railroad bridge in the valley was wiped out, leaving the townspeople cut off from the rest of the county.

It’s an experience that still haunts many old-timers here.

“It’s an awesome sight,” said Bill Bathgate, a former mayor of San Juan Capistrano who grew up with Buchheim. “Anything that gets in the way, whether it’s a tree, a car or a telephone pole, will be swept along.”

During the 1938 flood, Bathgate, then 14, watched in horror as his uncle and another man were swept down Oso Creek, one of three creeks that drain into the Capistrano Valley from Santiago and Modjeska peaks in the Santa Ana Mountains.

“They were trying to clear debris from a bridge that supported the main water line going to our property,” Bathgate recalled. “When a neighbor’s bridge upstream washed out, the heavy timbers that made up the bridge came rushing down the creek toward them.

“We hollered to warn them, but they either couldn’t hear us or they couldn’t move quick enough. I remember running along the creek, trying to keep track of them and catch them. But they were moving way too fast,” he said.

The body of Simeon M. Bathgate, 53, was never found. Several days later, the body of Charles Parks was found about three miles down the creek, partially buried in the sand.

Buchheim, Bathgate and others who lived through the flood fear it will happen again in Capistrano Valley.

“I’m not a fortuneteller, but I can tell you there will be a major disaster,” said T.J. Meadows, the general manager of the San Juan Basin Authority. “I’ve seen these creeks look like the Mississippi River three times in my life and we don’t need near as much water today to make a storm worse.”

What rankles Meadows and others in South County who live with memories of that disaster is the lack of flood control improvements to the local creeks since that time. While development has occurred up and down Oso, Trabuco and San Juan creeks, they say there have been mostly empty promises of flood control programs.

When flood control bond money becomes available, it winds up in the north and central areas of the county, they say.

“They promise us everything and give us nothing,” Meadows said. “We’ve been saying the same things for 40 years. It’s time somebody started to listen.”

H.G. (George) Osborne, a director of the Orange County Water District and longtime employee of the county flood control district before retirement, does not deny Meadows’ contentions. Money typically goes to the most populated areas first, and South County has been the last part of the county to grow, Osborne said.

It was one year after the devastation of 1938 that work began on the Prado Dam in Riverside County, which was designed by the Army Corps of Engineers to stem the flow of the county’s largest water channel: the Santa Ana River. The same flood control program also called for two dams in Trabuco and Oso creeks to check the flow to the Capistrano Valley.

Fifty-four years later, those dams have never come.

“No money was ever appropriated for the South County dams,” Osborne said. A 1956 bond measure allocated $1.1 million for improvements to the two creeks. Money was spent to line the creeks with concrete, but work was never completed, Osborne said.

“That bond measure was horribly underfunded,” Osborne said.

Since 1983, when the March rains caused flooding throughout the region, the county has spent about $10 million to raise levees and to line the stream beds of Oso and San Juan creeks with concrete. But critics say that is not nearly enough to avert disaster.

San Juan Capistrano City Engineer William Huber is a newcomer to South County. But as an engineer with the city of Ontario, he has witnessed the devastation of flash floods.

With that destruction in mind, Huber has asked the county to develop a funding mechanism to finish the work on the local creeks.

“My big area of concern is that we have sort of been ignored down here,” Huber said. “A lot of money has been spent in the northern areas of the county, along the Santa Ana River, and understandably so. But we believe money needs to be set aside for work down here. After all, we are talking about tax money we all contribute to.”

Huber’s plan is to seek the county’s help to establish some sort of cooperative effort between the developments upstream in Laguna Niguel, Mission Viejo, Rancho Santa Margarita and areas that are impacted downstream.

“It’s going to take a bit of a crusade on the part of a group of cities to get government to recognize something has to be done down here,” Huber said. “As development is occurring upstream, our channel flows have increased. . . . I know no one wants more fees, but there definitely is a nexus between development and additional water going downstream.”

Bathgate, now 67, has been advocating flood control improvements for most of his life. He still lives on the farm alongside Oso Creek where his uncle drowned, and he has watched Oso Creek widen year after year, eroding farmland in its path.

“Floods are like earthquakes,” Bathgate said. “It’s not a matter of if they will happen, it’s only a matter of when.”