River Rescue : Environment: Conservationists' effort to have L.A. waterway listed as endangered is successful. However, concern is high over an Army Corps of Engineers plan to add concrete to 13 miles of the channel.

By BOB POOL

April 20, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Its 58 miles are paved with 3 million barrels of concrete. Its 25-foot-deep channel carries mostly sewage effluent, oily street runoff and illegally dumped trash.

But when local conservationists asked a national environmental group to designate the Los Angeles River one of North America’s most endangered waterways, officials decided to go with the flow.

That is how Los Angeles’ best-known storm drain landed Tuesday on a list of 30 endangered or threatened rivers compiled by the Washington-based American Rivers organization.

“It was put in as a concrete conduit. It’s a popular scene in movie car chases and most people back East who see it have no idea it’s a river,” said Kevin Coyle, president of American Rivers.

“We weren’t concerned about being laughed at. There’s a chance that a lot of the Los Angeles River can be restored to its natural state.”

Fat chance that’s going to happen anytime soon, say leaders of Friends of the Los Angeles River. They worry that flood control engineers are poised to pour new concrete along 13 miles of the channel that will further urbanize it.

The 400-member group is the organization that twice has nominated the river for inclusion on the annual threatened rivers list. It now has its hands full trying to persuade the Army Corps of Engineers and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works to scale down the river project.

“The river is the spine of Los Angeles,” the group’s nomination stated. The river links rural foothills with wealthy neighborhoods, working-class communities and industrial areas, giving it the potential to be a “textbook example of urban revitalization and environmental justice.”

But a proposal to build a flood wall up to eight feet high on top of the channel’s existing walls between South Gate and Long Beach threatens a wildlife habitat and the public’s enjoyment of the river, said Martin Schlageter, executive director of Friends of the Los Angeles River.

“The walls will become graffiti canvases and hide illicit activity,” Schlageter said Tuesday as he stood next to the river at Pacific Coast Highway. At the water’s edge behind him, a thick stand of bushes and trees softened the look of the channel.

The site is one of several segments--totaling 13 miles--where the river bottom is unpaved. That is because a high water table in those areas makes it impossible to cover the bottom without ground water pressure pushing the channel out of the ground.

“Some people may say we’re 50 years late trying to save the river,” Schlageter said. “But I don’t want people to say 50 years from now that we’re another 50 years too late trying to save it.”

Schlageter said river supporters have asked flood control officials to find ways of dealing with storm runoff upstream, “where it comes from, not where it spits out into the ocean.” Only 15% of rainfall in the river’s watershed is conserved--contrasted with conservation efforts totaling up to 85% in other areas, he said.

But flood control officials say heavy upstream development has eliminated places for dams, percolation ponds and other devices that could store winter rainwater. Thousands of street drains between West Hills and Long Beach funnel increasing amounts of runoff into the river.

Engineers were jolted in 1980 when a storm sent the Los Angeles River surging to the top of its concrete banks--depositing floating debris on the lip of the channel’s levee near Wardlow Road in Long Beach, said Jean Granucci, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works.

“A Corps of Engineers study discovered that a 100-year flood could flood 82 square miles and cause over $2 billion in damage and affect over 600,000 people,” Granucci said Tuesday.

Federal officials have built a scale model of the lower Los Angeles River and are testing the new levee flood wall design at a lab in Vicksburg, Miss., she said.

If things go according to plan, construction of the $346-million wall project is expected to start next summer, Granucci said. Higher walls will also be installed on portions of the connecting Rio Hondo Channel.

Back at the Los Angeles River, the future of the waterway was being viewed with skepticism Tuesday.

“We live in a desert area and this is basically our only river,” said Joan Hemphill, secretary of Long Beach Area Citizens Involved, a community group. “And we treat it like a garbage dump.”

Beneath the river’s Pacific Coast Highway bridge, transients Lorenzo Vasquez and Danny Mason were splitting a six-pack of beer as they worried about the fate of their riverside encampment.

“The water’s contaminated. You don’t even dare eat the fish in there,” Vasquez said.

“If they put up new walls, it’s gonna be like kicking people like us out of their houses,” Mason said.

Back in Washington, American Rivers’ Coyle said his group plans to continue taking a hard look at “rivers the cities have historically turned their backs on . . . rivers that some people think are too far gone.”

That could mean that the fate of the Los Angeles River is not sealed in concrete yet.

Troubled Waters Here is American Rivers’ eighth annual list of endangered and threatened rivers in North America.

ENDANGERED * Clarks Fork, Yellowstone River, Wyoming and Montana

* Anacostia, Washington, D.C.

* Clavey, California

* Columbia-Snake, Idaho, Oregon and Washington

* Mississippi

* Missouri

* Penobscot, Maine

* Rio Grande

* Thorne, Alaska

* Virgin, Nevada, Utah and Arizona