Weakened Rail Trestle Rekindles a Dispute : Ventura River: Southern Pacific cites safety as a reason to replace the bridge since recent floods. A state panel wants the plan to be thoroughly reviewed.

The flash flood that inundated a recreational vehicle park last month also wiped out wooden supports below a train trestle across the west channel of the Ventura River mouth, rekindling a decades-long dispute involving the railroad, a state agency and environmentalists.

The dispute pits Southern Pacific railroad representatives, who cite safety as a reason to replace the bridge, against the California Coastal Commission and environmentalists, who say the style of bridge that has been proposed will hinder both the flow of water and efforts to restore one of Southern California’s few natural rivers.

After the Feb. 12 flood, the railroad applied to the city of Ventura for an emergency permit to bypass normal environmental reviews and begin work immediately to replace the 78-year-old trestle with a concrete bridge.

The urgency permit was granted six days after the flood, but the California Coastal Commission intervened the following day. The commission said a new bridge is too extensive and too permanent a project to be built on an emergency basis.

On Friday, after an independent analysis by a structural engineering firm, the commission said the railroad could install temporary pilings to make the existing bridge safe enough to last at least two years.

That would allow enough time for the proposed new bridge to undergo complete environmental studies and agency reviews, said Virginia Gardner Johnson, a Coastal Commission analyst.

“We want to make sure that the bridge isn’t overkill,” she said. “The site is a sensitive habitat and a wetlands and we are concerned about having a completely new bridge with permanent pilings driven 40 to 60 feet into the riverbed without an environmental review.” Environmentalists applauded the commission’s action, saying the railroad was using the flood as an excuse to achieve a long-term goal without costly and time-consuming environmental review.

They pointed out that Southern Pacific has been planning for a new Ventura River bridge for at least five years and had formally applied to the city of Ventura for permission to replace the aging structure in December, nearly two months before the flood eroded bridge supports.

“They are using this as an opportunity to avoid the obligations of the California Coastal Act,” said Marc Chytilo, an attorney with the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center. “The fact is they are still running trains across it, so I don’t think it can be that much of an emergency.”

But Southern Pacific representatives, who acknowledge that the bridge replacement has been a long-term goal, said the best fix is a permanent one. The same style of permanent concrete bridge that the railroad proposes has been built elsewhere without adverse effects on the environment, said Southern Pacific spokesman Mike Furtney.

“We think the better way is to repair it on a permanent basis rather than waiting for some arbitrary period of time while the same bridge model that we have built in many other locations is re-re-re-reviewed,” he said.

Furtney said the railroad is allowing both freight and Amtrak trains to use the crossing, which is on Southern Pacific’s only coastal line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. But the trains are slowing to less than 10 m.p.h. before they cross.

“We can’t guarantee the structure,” he said. “If another huge flood were to come, we might lose the bridge altogether, and that would interrupt Amtrak as well as our own freight schedule.”

Furtney said Friday that the railroad was still evaluating its plan of action but would make a decision this week on whether to make the temporary fixes allowed by the Coastal Commission.

At issue is whether the trestle should be temporarily fixed or immediately replaced, and if so, with what kind of structure.

The railroad proposes a concrete bridge supported by 12 concrete pilings driven into the riverbed.

The Coastal Commission prefers the temporary fix for now so that a more permanent bridge with fewer effects on the river can be evaluated. Johnson said the commission, under the mandates of the California Coastal Act of 1976, prefers a “free-span” bridge that would reach across 150 feet of the west channel known as the second mouth of the river.

A free-span bridge would eliminate the need for pilings in the riverbed. Pilings disrupt the riverbed habitat and, during flash floods, catch debris and obstruct the flow of water, Johnson said.

Free-span bridges can be built across a 150-foot stretch, engineers said. But it would be significantly more costly than the piling-supported concrete structure being proposed.

Earlier this century, three truss-style bridges spanned both the west channel and the main channel of the river. The trestle closest to the Ventura Fairgrounds and the bicycle path was built in 1909 and installed across the main channel of the river in 1911, according to documents at the Ventura County Historical Society museum. That trestle is still intact.

A quarter of a mile away near the Emma Wood State Beach and straddling the westernmost channel of the river stands the trestle in question. It was built in 1914 as half of a set of two free-span bridges supported with trusses.

The trestle was shored up in 1987 with wooden supports built on compacted fill dirt.

The other half of the bridge across the west channel was removed in 1970 and replaced with a berm built of fill material that blocked off a portion of the channel, a project that would probably be rejected under today’s laws, said Patrick R. Richardson, a planner for the city of Ventura.

“You’re in a wetlands and a riparian habitat,” he said. “That’s what the Coastal Act and the California Environmental Quality Act were designed to prevent.”

Environmentalists fought the fill-in of the river bottom back in 1970 and continue to object to it today. Members of the Friends of the Ventura River, along with the Coastal Commission staff, want the railroad to eventually remove the fill and restore it to its original state.

The latest round in the debate over the riverbed began after a week of steady rain in mid-February, when the normally trickling river became a muddy torrent.

The flooding river spread silt and water over the Ventura Beach RV Resort that sits directly upstream from the train trestle. The racing mud suffocated a homeless man who made his home in the riverbed.

The force of the water also scoured out filled-in dirt beneath the five-year-old wooden supports on the trestle. That left some of the supports dangling from the bottom of the bridge. Southern Pacific tried to shore up the supports by adding more fill dirt beneath them, but the continuing flow of the river eroded the fill, officials said.

Brian McDonald, an engineer at the Bay Area-based Failure Analysis Associates firm that was hired to evaluate the trestle, said Friday that there is no way to make the existing truss bridge safe for any length of time.

“The truss that’s out there is just too badly corroded to be fixed,” he said.