WORKING IN L.A. / THE DAM TENDERS : Where the Living Is Easy but the Work Is Hard

Sam Villegas and Gary Elrod live and work only 21 miles from Los Angeles City Hall, as the crow flies. But their habitat is a whole different world.

Surrounded by almost 700,000 acres of national forest--36,500 acres of it wilderness--their visitors are usually deer, mountain lions, bighorn sheep, bobcats and other wildlife. Last month, Villegas’ wife, Mary, videotaped a bear, who weighed about 300 pounds, rummaging through their trash cans.

Villegas, Elrod and their boss, Kevin Sweeney, are the tenders at Cogswell Dam, a massive flood-control barrier on the Upper West Fork of the San Gabriel River. Screened from the Los Angeles metropolitan area by a broad range of the heavily forested San Gabriel Mountains, they are 25 miles by twisting canyon roads from the nearest town, Azusa.

“We’re really isolated,” Elrod said. “It’s a long way to a store, or a movie, or to go out to dinner. The television reception is lousy. It all takes a little getting used to.”

The Villegas, Elrod and Sweeney families--11 in all--live in houses on a wooded slope by the dam that is more than seven miles from the nearest public road, and even farther than that from their nearest neighbors.

“We have to all get along with each other,” the 34-year-old Elrod said with a grin. “That can be tough sometimes. But to tell the truth, I really love it here.”

“It’s away from everything in the city that we don’t need--the gangs, the crime, the violence,” said Villegas, 30.

“And it’s beautiful up here,” Elrod said. “So beautiful that I quit smoking. We’ve got clean air, and I wanted to keep it that way. Besides, when I used to run out, it was 25 miles for another pack of cigarettes.”

Cogswell Dam is the farthest upstream of five major dams built along the San Gabriel River during the past 60 years for flood control and water storage. The other four, heading downstream in order, are San Gabriel Dam and Morris Dam, both in the San Gabriel Canyon above Azusa, Santa Fe Dam in Irwindale, and Whittier Narrows Dam, north of Pico Rivera.

Almost 240 feet tall and about 585 feet long, Cogswell Dam is a rock-filled rampart that blocks the West Fork canyon behind Monrovia Peak, forming a reservoir capable of holding back more than 6 billion gallons of water.

All that may seem a bit unnecessary in midsummer, when the river is down to a trickle and the reservoir is reduced to a small, tepid puddle, but the situation can change dramatically in the winter, when most of the rain falls in Southern California.

In the winter of 1937-38, just four years after the dam was completed, monumental rains filled Cogswell Reservoir to overflowing. The dam held, but it sagged a couple of feet on each side. Repairs restored the original shape and replaced the timber-facing on the upstream side with concrete.

As often as two or three times a day, depending on the complex and often conflicting demands of water supply and flood control, Elrod, Villegas and Sweeney get telephone calls from the office of Don Nichols, director of storage operations for Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Works.

The caller tells the dam tenders which of Cogswell’s five outlet valves to open, and how far they should open them.

Right now, to keep the river downstream from drying up, one of the seven-foot valves is open a crack, just enough so the amount of water flowing out of the reservoir--about six cubic feet per second--matches the amount of water flowing in. During last winter’s heavy rains, the outflow from Cogswell was about 2,200 cubic feet per second.

When they are not turning the hydraulically powered valves, the three men have a variety of other jobs.

The day starts with regular chores--raising the American flag beside the office, checking the readings at the dam’s weather station, measuring the level of the reservoir (it stood at 2,248.5 feet above sea level last week, 151.5 feet below the spillway), and doing general cleanup and maintenance.

“Sometimes we have to chase out hunters,” Elrod said. “Sometimes we have to clean up the rocks that fall on the road. Sometimes, in the winter, when it’s pouring rain and the lightning is coming down around you, you have to go out in the lake in an aluminum boat and adjust the log booms that keep debris away from the dam.

“Sometimes you sweat your butt off. Sometimes you can just go find a tree to rest under.”

Elrod and Villegas say they like their jobs, but because of the remoteness, they will probably seek transfers to dams closer to the city when the opportunities arise.

“But I know that I’ll miss this place,” Villegas said. “This is God’s country.”