Ventura River Faces Modern-Day Threats : Environment: Development and pollution are the two primary dangers in an increasingly urban world.

In a rugged mountain canyon five miles northwest of Ojai, Allen Carrozza’s home near the edge of the rushing Matilija Creek is the most peaceful refuge he has ever known.

“When I drive that last five miles to my house, and I don’t see any sign of human presence, I feel like I’m going to a timeless, ageless place,” Carrozza said. “If you don’t know how to meditate, you can go sit on a rock anywhere in Matilija Canyon and nature will teach you.”

A few canyons to the east, Wheeler Hot Springs--a wooded complex of secluded hot tubs and an elegant restaurant--sits on the edge of the North Fork of the Matilija. Lanny Kaufer and his family built their business here on the tranquil trickles and cascades of canyon streams.

But like its sister creek to the west, the North Fork can be transformed into a raging and deadly torrent in the winter. And Kaufer has spent more than 20 years watching the river’s dramatic mood swings.

“An untamed river can have such destructive power,” said Kaufer, whose family owned the resort from 1968 until last year. “When it really gets moving, you can feel the boulders hitting each other as they roll down the river.”

The Matilija forks are the largest of four major tributaries that feed the 16-mile-long Ventura River, one of the few remaining mostly natural rivers in Southern California.

The river provides water not only for families like Carrozza’s and Kaufer’s, but also for entire communities, farmers, fish and wildlife.

But while Ventura County’s largest river, the 100-mile-long Santa Clara River to the east, is now the subject of a large multi-agency task force working to plan its future, the Ventura is less-known and, some say, less appreciated.

Like the Santa Clara and every other river that winds through increasingly urban terrain in Southern California, the Ventura River is at constant risk of destruction.

Threats to its health and existence lurk along the length of its banks.

Some originate in the past, buried like time bombs in the historic Ventura oil fields that line the river’s path. Just last week, state wildlife officials revealed a previously-undisclosed spill by Texaco of 370,000 gallons of toxic oil byproducts near the river.

State officials suspect that the gas condensate may have leaked into School Canyon Creek near Ventura Avenue and flowed into the Ventura River during heavy rains in January, 1993,--the biggest oil-related spill in county history.

But threats to the river are not confined to the past. They come also in a new county plan for more houses, a proposed golf course and possible industrial development. They come from pesticides and pollution fed by everything from storm drains along the river’s path to a homeless camp where it meets the sea.

And they also include the diversion of the river’s waters to a multitude of uses.

The Ventura River and its tributaries already have four major dams and more than 100 wells that siphon off water below ground. Now--in one of the most serious threats to the river’s future--the city of Ventura is considering increasing its diversions, possibly taking all the surface water during dry periods.

“Five hundred years ago the Ventura River was one of a whole bunch of lovely Southern California rivers,” said Cat Brown, U.S. Fish and Wildlife biologist. “Today, it’s one of a handful.”

Everything in nature is important, Brown said. But some things, such as rivers, are essential to life.

“To lose any of the natural habitat in Southern California would be like cutting off your hands,” she said. “But losing rivers and wetlands would be like cutting out your heart.”

*

The Ventura River really begins in the headwaters of its 52 miles of tributaries, up above Carrozza’s house, beyond Matilija Dam, over the hill from Wheeler Hot Springs at a place called Dry Lakes Ridge.

The two Matilija forks originate in the mountains of Los Padres National Forest. They are the largest and steepest tributaries in 226 miles of watershed that drain into the Ventura River.

The forest is in many ways the river’s savior. It helps keep the water clean and cold enough to support fish and wildlife, and it offers open space for wildlife to roam, forage and hunt.

Brown, whose love for animals is reflected in the nickname “Cat” that she uses for Cathy, has learned about the Los Padres by hiking its trails, sleeping under its sycamores and studying its creeks.

“It is one of Southern California’s last huge tracts of essentially native habitats,” she said. The forest is what enables the Ventura River corridor to remain so rich and vibrant with life, she said.

“Wildlife habitat is only as valuable as what it is connected to,” she said. “You can have a perfect postage stamp of great habitat, but if it’s surrounded by development, it’s worthless.”

Even during extreme drought, the two Matilija forks run year-round, fed by a constant flow of runoff from the mountains and their springs. And like the Ventura River itself--which floods dramatically about once a decade--the tributaries are dangerous when swollen with intense rainfall.

“These rivers are incredibly powerful and incredibly violent,” Brown said on a recent visit to the river.

As an osprey flew overhead with a newly caught fish in its mouth, Brown paused. “That’s really cool,” she said, and returned to the topic. “They are sleepy little dry stream beds 10 months out of the year and for two months, they are sheer hell.”

Carrozza has seen that hell firsthand. By day, he commutes to Ventura to make a living selling solar energy, and by night, returns to remote Matilija Canyon, where 50 families find peace along the creek and look the force of nature in the eye.

“I’ve seen it rolling boulders the size of Volkswagens,” he said.

Because the streams are steep and cut through mountainous terrain, they carry large amounts of sediment downstream and into the Ventura River. When rains are heavy, the sediment fills in low spots and redirects the river--constantly moving the river’s historical course.

The confluence of the two Matilija creeks about four miles northwest of Ojai marks the beginning of the Ventura River proper. And about 10 miles downstream, San Antonio Creek and Coyote Creek join the flow.

Tony Thacher, who runs Friends Ranch at the confluence of the two Matilija forks, grew up on a stream that feeds into the San Antonio. The otherwise tranquil San Antonio cost people their homes and one woman her life when it cut a new course during the big floods of 1969, Thacher said.

Thacher grew up at Thacher School, founded by his grandfather on Horn Creek, which the county now calls Thacher Creek.

“That little creek caused a lot of trouble, too, in 1969,” Thacher said. “And now that people have built more houses up there, they are trying to keep the creek in a little channel.”

He wishes them luck in the next big storm, he said.

*

The seasons and rainfall that periodically transform the river’s gentle flow into raging waters will always be the dominant force over the Ventura River.

But human intervention--with dams and diversions and development--has altered the river’s dynamics, some say irrecoverably.

Before there were dams on the river and its tributaries, the Ventura River was a trout fisherman’s paradise, where the limit for steelhead was 50 a day, according to a 1912 newspaper article.

Longtime Ventura residents such as Manny Paquette, who retired as assistant fire chief for the Ventura County Fire Department in 1964, remember those days well.

When the fishing season opened on May 1, people would flock to the Main Street Bridge and cast their lines, he said.

“It was a tradition. It was like the county fair--when it was smaller. Everyone talked about it,” he said.

But then came the drought of the 1930s. It dried up the river and the Ojai Valley, leaving crops to parch in the sun. After the drought came a devastating flood in 1939, one of the most damaging in county history.

The people needed a way to irrigate crops as well as control catastrophic floods. The result was the Matilija Dam, built in 1948. It was a massive 200-foot high concrete structure that spanned the creek in a concave curve about 600 feet across. It was designed to hold 7,000 acre-feet of water, enough to supply 14,000 families for a year.

The dam, which stopped up the flow of the largest tributary of the Ventura River, allowed a five-mile pipeline to bring a reliable water source to Ojai and area growers for the first time.

In Ojai, the water was spread out to replenish underground water basins.

“That kept the wells in the Upper Ojai flowing and saved the orchards up there, and saved the whole Ojai Valley from burning up,” said Kenneth Johnson, a newcomer to the Ventura River valley in 1925.

But many complained at the time that the dam was doomed from the start. Johnson’s wife of 64 years, Liz Johnson, said her family was among those who opposed the dam.

“Dad thought it was put in the wrong place and that it wouldn’t hold,” Liz Johnson said. “A lot of people didn’t like it.”

Johnson’s father turned out to be right. The dam, which engineers now say was built of poor-quality concrete, was declared unsafe in 1964. Soon afterward, a 30-foot notch was cut into the dam to reduce the amount of water it would hold.

And after heavy storms in 1969, 1978 and 1992, the dam accumulated so much debris that its capacity was further reduced. Now, it barely holds 1,000 acre feet.

Paquette objected to the dam for other reasons.

The dam was an insurmountable obstacle for the steelhead trying to swim up to the far reaches of the Matilija to spawn, and it ruined the once abundant steelhead run up the Ventura River, he said.

“When the Matilija Dam came, there was no fishing anymore,” Paquette said.

Because of the Matilija Dam’s inadequacies, the federal Bureau of Reclamation and the Ventura River Municipal Water District soon went to work on a new means to capture and store water, which led to creation of Lake Casitas.

The Bureau built Casitas Dam on Coyote Creek in 1958, flooding area farms and forming Lake Casitas. The Santa Ana Creek’s flow was also directed into the lake.

The Bureau also built a diversion dam across the upper Ventura River to siphon some of its flow into the lake. The small Robles Diversion dam about two miles south of the beginning of the Ventura River proper was built the same year as Casitas, further blocking the steelhead from making their way upstream.

To connect the river diversions to Lake Casitas, a concrete canal was built. It wound its way for five miles through open space and pastures, to its destination at Lake Casitas.

“There was objection to the Casitas Dam too,” said Liz Johnson, who spent much of her girlhood on the Santa Ana Ranch, which was flooded by Lake Casitas. Many landowners whose property was condemned by the government and flooded by the lake contested the plan. In addition, she said, “people said it would never fill up.”

The Matilija Dam and Robles Diversion dam, which sailed through the scant regulatory process more than 25 years ago, might have faced a different fate if they were proposed today, said Alex Sheydayi, manager of the Ventura County Flood Control District, which owns Matilija Dam.

The Matilija, was the first large dam constructed in the county, and the people of the area, including the Board of Supervisors, were naive about the engineering challenges associated with constructing such a piece of work, Sheydayi said.

“That dam was sold to the Board of Supervisors by a hotshot consultant from Los Angeles for a certain amount of money and it cost considerably more,” Sheydayi said.

“The purpose and intent was fine,” he said. “But I suspect that people in this county were pretty green when it came to this kind of issue and were sold a bill of goods.”

*

Had he been more than a child at the time, biologist and university lecturer Mark Henri Capelli might well have been at the head of the line making sure everyone understood the full effect of a project such as the Matilija Dam.

But with the advent of environmental regulations of the 1970s, the rivers would have had some measure of built-in protection they did not have 20 or 30 years ago, Capelli said.

Those regulations included the California Environmental Quality Act, which spawned the requirement for environmental impact studies, and the federal Endangered Species Act, which protects the habitat of animals threatened with extinction.

A Ventura native who has spent his off hours for the last two decades working to save the Ventura River from a variety of assaults, Capelli first became aware of the river’s need for protection as a student at Ventura High School in the early 1960s.

“I was running cross-country and noticed the Caltrans maintenance yard on the river, where a bunch of oil had accumulated at the outfall,” he said. Capelli wrote a letter to then-Rep. Robert J. Lagomarsino.

“I sent him a jar of the stuff and asked him what he would do about it,” Capelli remembered.

Nothing came of the letter, Capelli said. He finished college and graduate work in history and science at UC Santa Barbara, where he now teaches. He later received another graduate degree at UC Berkeley.

In 1972, he was appointed to the Ventura County Fish and Game Commission, which advises the Board of Supervisors how to spend money collected locally from fish and game violations. Capelli and fellow commissioners wrote the first government-sponsored report on the river.

After issuing the report, Capelli and other commissioners created the Friends of the Ventura River. He has been its voice ever since.

“That report says the same thing we say now,” that the river is at risk from pollution and development, Capelli said. “It was the first crude attempt at finding the issues and solutions.”

Capelli and the Friends have battled on many fields since the 1960s.

The group won a fight 20 years ago to force the Ojai Valley Sanitary District to upgrade the quality of treated sewage discharged into the river.

The Friends also helped thwart plans in 1989 to build a state university on Taylor Ranch west of the river.

Capelli said the university would have brought too much development to the area.

The group also helped kill an idea to build a mobile home park in the river flood plain just south of Rancho Arnaz in the Ventura River valley. That plan, proposed in the early 1970s, would have brought pressure on public officials to build new flood-control works on the river in the area, Capelli said.

Capelli and the Friends also helped shape the development of Emma Wood State Beach just west of the mouth of the river, which was originally planned as a large RV park.

The plan would have paved over an important wetlands area, Capelli said. He helped get the plan scaled back to include only day-use camping and use by organized groups.

But the Friends of the Ventura River have also lost some of their skirmishes.

During the early 1970s, after an ammonia refining plant closed down near the river, Capelli and the Friends were working with the county to buy the property and convert it into a park.

“But a private company said ‘We think we can make this live again,’ and the Board of Supervisors decided not to purchase the property,” Capelli said.

The Petrochem refinery operated on Ventura Avenue from 1974 to 1984, when the refining operation was discontinued. Petrochem still stores oil on the property--a lingering concern to environmentalists.

Since oil was discovered along Ventura Avenue in the 1920s, oil field wastes and drilling muds were routinely dumped into the Ventura River.

Most of that problem was corrected with the advent of environmental regulations in the 1960s and 1970s.

But oil field operations, some still in use and some capped and abandoned, still pepper the hills above Ventura Avenue. And although the industry is careful about its discharges, accidents are bound to occur, Capelli said.

The most recent example was last week’s disclosure of the 370,000-gallon Texaco spill. The California Department of Fish and Game and the Ventura County district attorney’s office led a raid on Texaco offices along Ventura Avenue last week after a year-long investigation.

“It just illustrates how important it is to protect the whole watershed,” Capelli said. “We can protect the channel itself all we want, but if we are not careful about what drains into the river, we don’t have much of a resource.”

But the issue wasn’t pollution in the longest and most important of the battles waged by Capelli and the Friends of the River.

In a 10-year struggle against the city of Ventura and the Casitas Municipal Water District, the issue was the river itself--how much of its water could be diverted for human use.

Since the Robles dam was built in 1958, Casitas Municipal Water District was required to let pass through the dam the first 20 cubic feet per second of water, which amounts to about 40 acre feet per day, or about 14,600 acre feet per year.

When less water than that was flowing down the river, Casitas diverted no water. That guaranteed downstream users such as the city of Ventura and others along the river, a minimum supply of water.

But then came an agreement between Casitas and the city, negotiated in the 1970s and signed in 1983, in which Ventura agreed to allow Casitas to take all of the water on condition that Casitas would sell the city a guaranteed amount of water, even during drought.

That agreement could have taken the last drop of water from the river during dry periods, Capelli argued. He geared up for what turned out to be the longest battle of the Friends’ history.

“It was fundamental,” he said. “It’s pretty hard to have a river without water.”

The Friends of the River, employing the Environmental Defense Center, sued the city and Casitas to stop the so-called low-flow diversions, looking to Patagonia Inc. for $4,000 in financial support.

“I saw Yvon (Chouinard, owner of Patagonia) in the parking lot one day and he asked me how much we needed to fight this battle,” Capelli said. “He had a check cut that same day.”

The battle concluded in 1988 when the California Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal, letting stand an appellate court ruling that required Casitas to allow the first 20 cubic feet per second of water to pass down the river.

“That was a turning point for a lot of reasons,” Capelli said. “It stopped the diversion of low flows from the river. But just as important, it convinced the state and local officials that the Friends were a force to be reckoned with.”

Capelli said it also forever changed people’s ideas “about what they could get away with on the river.”

After that battle, everyone was tired of fighting over water, Capelli said. So he began work on a study on the plant life in the river. The study, in cooperation with UC Santa Barbara, turned out to be the most complete work of its kind on the Ventura River.

“That was another turning point,” Capelli said. “The suit was negative; it stopped destruction. The study was a positive thing.”

Up to that time, the Friends of the River and the city had frequently been on opposite sides. Now, with the study in hand and the Friends and city looking together to restore the lower river and the estuary, the city became an important and powerful ally, Capelli said.

“The city really began to understand the value of the resource that was right here in their back yard,” he said.

The city, with the help of the California Department of Parks and the California Coastal Conservancy, has written a draft plan to restore the estuary and develop a kind of nature reserve area at the estuary called the Seaside Wilderness Park.

“It’s the most significant public effort to protect and restore the river,” Capelli said. “It’s the first evidence of public recognition of the value of the resources in the river,” he said.

The city is also working on a plan with the County Transportation Commission to develop the Ventura River Trail, a six-mile bicycle trail between Main Street and Foster Park that would link two existing bike trails.

But a new controversy looms over the river’s future. It concerns new talk about siphoning off more water than ever. And it pits the city against environmentalists and state wildlife biologists.

Tomorrow: The city of Ventura’s renewed interest in diverting more water and other new threats to the Ventura River.

The Ventura’s Watershed

A HISTORY OF CONTROVERSY, FROM DAMS TO DIVERSIONS

The Ventura River is one of two major rivers in Ventura County. The confluence of its two largest tributaries, the two forks of the Matilija creeks, marks the beginning of the river proper. From that point, it flows 16 miles to the sea. But the river’s waters have a history of controversy that began with the first dam on one of its tributaries in 1948. Contention over the river continues to this day with a proposal for increased water diversions and pollution threats that range from street runoff to a giant reed that invades the river’s entire length.

Voices

“‘We can protect the channel itself all we want, but if we are not careful about what drains into the river, we don’t have much of a resource.”

Mark H. Capelli, lecturer at UC Santa Barbara in coastal systems and executive director of Friends of the Ventura River

“These rivers are incredibly powerful and incredibly violent. They are sleepy little dry stream beds 10 months out of the year and for two months, they are sheer hell.”

Cat Brown, wildlife bioligist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Great Floods This Century

There have been five major floods since records began in Ventura County, their intensities measured by the rush of water in cubic feet per second. A cubic foot of water is about 7.5 gallons; a fire hydrant with a valve fully open gushes at about one cubic foot per second.

In any given year, there is a 10% chance that a 10-year storm will occur. A 50-year storm is one that has occurred on average once every 50 years. There is a 2% chance that it will occur in any given year.

Year Date River flow Type of Storm 1938 March 2 39,200 cfs 10-year event 1969 Jan. 25 58,000 cfs 50-year event 1969 Feb. 25 40,000 cfs 10-year event 1978 Feb. 10 63,600 cfs 50-year event 1992 Feb. 12 47,600 cfs 50-year event

A River’s Path

Dry Lakes Ridge. Springs that form the first headwaters of the Ventura River rise up here, cascading down the side of a mountain along State Route 33 at Bellyache Falls.

North Fork of he Matilija Creek: The creek, which some still know as the North Fork of the Ventura, is the Ventura River’s second major tributary. It too, can become destructive when swollen with rain and runoff.

Matilija Creek: The largest tributary to the Ventura River drains part of the Santa Ynez Mountains to the west. The creek can become a torrent during heavy rains.

Matilija Dam: Built in 1948 to help control floods and irrigate the Ojai Valley, the dam also blocked the migration of the steelhead, which swam to the northern reaches of the Matilija Creek to spawn.

Robles Diversion Facility: Built in 1958 to help fill Lake Casitas, the Robles diverts flow from the Ventura River and funnels the water by canal five miles to the lake.

Casitas Dam on Coyote Creek: Coyote Creek, one of the Ventura River’s major tributaries, was dammed in 1958, flooding ranch lands to the south and angering some area residents.

Sources: Ventura County Flood Control Dept., U.S. Geological Survey

Researched by JOANNA MILLER / Los Angeles Times