Down Under in Lake Elsinore : Flood Control Plan’s Failure Leaves City With a Dilemma

It hasn’t rained for a couple of weeks, but the huge natural sump that gives this community its name is still brimming with floodwaters. And that’s the least of the problems.

Not only is the lake draining so slowly that shoreline campgrounds are still flooded and Larry Fregin’s back-yard basketball court remains eight feet under water, but the floodwaters also have inundated a rural neighborhood a mile away.

So much for a $50-million flood control project that didn’t quite pass its first test.

City officials figured the project, incorporating diversion levees, wells and pumps, would prepare the community for a devastating 100-year-flood by directing torrential runoff into an overflow basin. The lake would swell but private lakefront property would be kept out of significant harm’s way.

To accommodate lighter rains, the lake’s only outflow channel was lowered by five feet last fall so shoreline residents would escape the chronic flooding that has cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage and lost business to waterfront campgrounds and RV parks.

The overflow channel worked fine--as far as it went--and began draining the lake before it reached flood levels of previous years. But the deepened channel didn’t extend downstream quite far enough.

Instead of naturally coursing further downstream beyond the end of the channel, the overflow water flooded a low-lying rural neighborhood where the channel ended at the Ortega Highway. About 30 acres of grassland, a home, local streets and a section of the highway were flooded; the city declared a local emergency, and work crews urgently built levees to protect other homes.

The area is expected to remain under water into the summer.

The design flaw was testimony to a weak link in a new lake management plan and sent embarrassed engineers back to the drawing board. Everyone thought water would flow downhill--but there just wasn’t enough of a downhill to generate a sufficiently strong flow, officials acknowledge.

“I’ve seen people out here in their Jet Skis,” resident Deborah Gaylor said incredulously of the onetime dry field that is now jumping with fish, croaking with frogs and fluttering with ducks.

The problem was that the creek below the low-lying neighborhood drops only three feet in elevation over 2 1/2 miles, and is so chock-full of reeds and other vegetation that the water could not freely run through it and work its way to the Santa Ana River near Corona. Instead, the water just backed up.

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One possible solution has remained bureaucratically off-limits: clearing the channel of vegetation to accelerate the water flow. Since the stream bed is considered an environmentally valuable riparian habitat, local authorities were precluded from dredging it clean in the first place.

Officials with the Riverside County flood control district and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers say one option is for the county agency to buy the flooded land downstream and officially declare it a wetland. When it rains heavily again, the flooding will at least have the official stamp of approval.

That prospect does not sit well with some local property owners.

“This was supposed to be a farmland, not a wetland,” said Kang-Shen Chen, who owns 100 acres of lowlands that he wants to develop, including some of the flooded land. “We feel we have been misled and cheated by the flood control district. Their environmental impact report (allowing the flood control channel to stop short of the existing creek) was wrong; otherwise, why did the area flood?”

Chen notes an irony: The rich stream bed habitat that state and federal officials want to protect--and which led to the neighborhood flooding--is a man-made problem, not a natural phenomenon. The creek’s thick vegetation was prompted by the flow of treated, nutrient-rich waste water from the local water district into the creek.

When the channel was initially designed several years ago, the stream bed was not so congested with vegetation, said Fred-Otto Egeler, spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers. “We didn’t anticipate the slow flow,” he said.

And Riverside County flood control officials say they didn’t check the Army engineers’ calculations. “I trusted the corps with the hydraulics,” said Steve Stump, a senior civil engineer with the flood control district.

Because the explosion in riparian vegetation was bureaucratically born, it should as easily be cured through dredging, Chen said. If the flood control district buys the wetlands, it should purchase not only the 30 submerged acres but his 100 acres as well, because they have lost their development potential, Chen said.

The corps will take into account the impact the new wetlands will have on the neighborhood, Egeler said.

City officials still hold out hope that, given the neighborhood flooding, the state and federal wildlife agencies will reconsider their objection to clearing the creek bed. They are enlisting the help of state and federal officials to carry their debate forward.

The problem illustrates a longstanding challenge to the city, which developed the $50-million plan to manage the level of the lake. In times of serious flooding, it is designed to accommodate overflow in the adjoining basin; in years of drought, water stored in the overflow basin can be pumped into the main lake to keep levels up.

When Lake Elsinore is at its optimum level, there is bountiful fishing, water skiing, boat racing and simple bobbing on inflatable rafts. The lake is a blue-collar paradise, closer to home and more affordable than Lake Tahoe or Lake Mead or Lake Havasu, but just as wet.

Lake Elsinore is, after all, a natural sink basin at the low end of a 750-square-mile watershed that includes the western slopes of San Jacinto Mountain above Palm Springs.

Homeowner Fregin, whose property runs 540 feet into the lake and is now mostly inundated, says he is trying to take the chronic flooding problem in stride, even if it means he won’t be able to play hoops in the back yard for months.

“I know the city is doing all that it can to help me,” he said. “But I won’t get ulcers over this. That’s why I buy flood insurance.”