SANTA PAULA : Debris Basins to Collect Excess Water and Mud

Seven months after a fire blackened thousands of acres near Santa Paula, a team of contractors has completed two drainage projects that officials hope will safeguard the community from heavy rains and flooding.

At an afternoon ceremony Wednesday in Adams Canyon, Santa Paula Mayor Wayne Johnson joined other dignitaries to mark the opening of two new debris basins.

“They say it takes three years for the earth to heal itself (after a fire),” Johnson told the sparse crowd of workers and officials. “Well, this project and its sister project will protect us until then.”

The Adams Canyon basin was built just north of Foothill Road, east of Briggs Road. A second facility was constructed simultaneously at Fagan Canyon, just to the east.

Officials say the $2-million basins will collect any excess rain or mudflows that may result from the fire-denuded hillsides and damaged watershed, which take years to regenerate enough to effectively soak up rainwater.

The basins are designed to protect at least 500 homes and businesses in the event of a 10-year flood, Ventura County Public Works Director Arthur Goulet said.

“We’ve gotten through the first winter and we were very fortunate we didn’t have any heavy rains,” Goulet said. “But we’ve got four more years to worry about.”

Goulet said the last time that Ventura County experienced a 10-year flood was in 1992. “But you can never say,” he said. “The way the odds work, it’s really a 10% chance every year.”

The basins are designed to gather runoff water and the twigs, branches and mud that tumble with it down the mountainside into Adams Barranca and Fagan Canyon.

They will far outlive the immediate threat, Goulet and other officials said.

“This will function in perpetuity and we will continue to maintain it,” Goulet said. “When it gets beyond 25% full, we will clean it out and dispose of the materials properly.”

Johnson said he had been most concerned about the Santa Paula West mobile-home park, where hundreds of people live nestled against the foothills along Beckwith Road.

“There’s a lot of homes in there, and it’s been very close (to flooding),” he said.