COMUNITY COMMENT : A Lifetime of Flood and Mud

To those who have lost all to floods and mudslides, this winter’s drenching rains are devastating. But to KENYON DE VORE, 83, who has observed Southern California for most of this century, “they’re just part of the natural scene.”

After growing up in the San Gabriel Mountains, he rode horseback as a U.S. Forest Service ranger before becoming a dam operator and hydrographer for the Los Angeles County Flood Control District, where he worked for 35 years. He was interviewed at his home in Arcadia by BERKLEY HUDSON. In Southern California, there’s nothing normal about the weather. We’ve got this so-called Mediterranean climate.

I’ve learned it’s unsafe to say: “The squirrels are putting away a lot of stores; it’ll be a heavy winter.” It may be a heavy winter of rain and snow. It may not. You can say that about every 30 years you get a major flood, like in 1914, ’38 and ’69. But you can’t even count on that. To predict more than a week ahead is difficult. Maybe someday we will and there will be enough data and computers.

You get a winter like this with heavy rains and it may be months before the rain or snow penetrates sufficiently to lubricate the joints and cracks of the Earth. Then it will all start moving.

We’ve got an example right now in Ventura County (the community of La Conchita, where a mudslide had claimed nine homes and imminently threatened many more). The rain had been accumulating since January. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had more slides now around Malibu or in our local mountains. We’re not out of the woods.

The 1938 flood was so big because of the way the rain fell. There were many years when the rain total was greater but it didn’t all fall so close together and on top of a saturated drainage area.

The ’38 flood destroyed my family’s second trout-fishing resort. We had a big lodge. The water came right through the French doors at one end and swept the furniture out. My mother and her second husband escaped out to the Angeles Crest Highway.

I was living in a cabin in San Gabriel Canyon, working for flood control. The water came up to the front steps. We didn’t have anything destroyed but our outhouse, swept away and buried in a mudslide.

Hundreds of cabins were lost in the mountains. In the flatlands, there was a great destruction. There are 7.48 gallons in a cubic foot of water. The San Gabriel River at San Gabriel Dam peaked at 95,000 cubic feet per second. That’s a lot of water.

One of my jobs was to go out and measure these streams, these raging torrents, during storms. You don’t wade into that. You have a cable car over the stream. You pull the cable by hand, with muscle power. You drop your instruments into the water to measure depth and velocity. You add these increments up and out comes your cubic feet per second. You can be out there an hour riding in this cable car, in the rain, in the middle of the night, whenever. It’s your job.

I had a once-in-a-lifetime experience in the San Gabriel Mountains. I happened to be driving by and saw rocks coming down a cliff. I parked. More rocks kept streaming down. Finally the whole thing broke. I was practically under it. There was a parked car in front of me that was completely buried. Nobody was in it. The slide dammed the San Gabriel River, formed about a 2-acre lake. I never had seen anything like it before--or since.

The normal annual rainfall for Los Angeles is close to 15 inches. But when you get into the mountains, it’s almost three times that. In January, 1943, there was one hell of a storm: more than 24 inches in 24 hours. That was at Hogee’s Camp below Mt. Wilson, where the shape of the mountains makes the rain heavier there. That set the record for the United States for years.

The fires, floods, drought and earthquakes are all part of the natural scene in Southern California. I wish more people were aware and would not build their houses where they shouldn’t.