In for the Long Haul : Sentiment Triumphs Over Sediment at Hansen Dam

To his doubters, Bill Blomgren came across as a hopeless neophyte and dreamer, a small-time excavation man who said he could move a mountain and pay the government for the privilege of doing it.

No ordinary mountain, this one covered 1,500 acres in the northeast San Fernando Valley and was as flat as the Mojave Desert.

It consisted of an estimated 32 million tons of rock, gravel, sand and silt that had sluiced down Big and Little Tujunga canyons and stopped behind Hansen Dam since the giant flood control project was built in 1941.

With silt building up to the floodgates, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers needed a Hercules to clean its two-mile-wide flood control basin.

There was no chorus of acclaim when Blomgren, a lifetime Sunland-Tujunga resident whose legs were permanently paralyzed in a 1966 auto accident, offered his services.

“Everybody thought I was crazy, a crazy guy in a wheelchair,” he recalled.

But Blomgren won the contract based on an optimistic projection that his tiny company could move 1.4 million tons a year out of the basin and pay 15 to 25 cents a ton in royalties on the marketable sand and gravel, much more than his larger competitors thought they could do.

“You don’t know how to do this, Bill,” they would say with well-meant concern, warning that he was undercapitalized and lacked the marketing skill.

Even officials of the Army Corps acknowledge their initial doubts about his ability to perform.

What skeptics failed to appreciate was the vision that drove Blomgren.

He didn’t see himself merely as a mover of dirt, but as restorer of the lake that had given him fond childhood memories.

Holiday Lake, a 130-acre body of water formed naturally by stream water caught behind the new dam, was once one of the Valley’s prime recreation spots, attracting hundreds of residents--including the young Blomgren and his father--for swimming, fishing and boating.

The Army Corps took a sanguine view of the lake’s slow strangulation by the rising sediment and its final extinction in the early 1980s. An unintentional creation, it was destined to die, they said.

“People don’t understand that,” Corps engineer Terry Wotherspoon said in a 1990 interview. “The lake was expected to fill up.”

But Blomgren publicly announced his goal of bringing it back to life.

“It’s going to be my lake. It’s going to be Lake Blomgren,” he prophesied more than a decade ago. “I want my son’s kids to say: ‘We are swimming in Grandpa’s Lake.’ ”

Sporting around the desert-like job site in a hand-controlled dune buggy while managing his company from his small house nearby, Blomgren humbled his detractors.

In the first year, and every year thereafter, he met his tonnage quota. Blomgren’s company, Basin and Channel Reclamation, grew from four to 125 employees and bought $10 million in off-road dirt-hauling equipment. His five-year contract was renewed once for three years, then again for five.

And the royalties piled up, garnering more than $1 million for the Army Corps to date.

It took more than just a dream to propel his success.

Blomgren acknowledges his good fortune with both nature and the economy: The longest drought in state history kept the water table out of the way of his heavy equipment, and six years of booming construction expanded the market for sand and gravel.

He also credits himself with business savvy in getting giants such as Blue Diamond and Industrial Asphalt to sign on as customers. He said he did it by undercutting another major supplier of construction aggregate, and then luring the firm onto the job as his subcontractor.

Over the years, Blomgren overcame a painful split with his partner, subcontractor lawsuits and impurities in his product that once forced him to pay $125,000 to cover the cost of jackhammering and replacing a blemished walkway at Universal Studios.

With the manner of a helpful neighbor, he solved the problem that had most vexed his unsuccessful predecessor on the job--keeping the peace with nearby equestrian organizations. As the shifting face of the excavation obliterated precious riding trails, Blomgren carefully rerouted them.

He also weathered a brief outcry over his own profits, which he concedes with satisfaction paid for the 7,000-square-foot Victorian mansion he built on his 29-acre estate in Santa Clarita.

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Officials of the Army Corps couldn’t help warming to Blomgren’s perseverance and cooperativeness.

“In most of our cases, the people we get out there think of only one thing, themselves and making money,” Wotherspoon said. “He has lived there and he wants to try to give something back for the inconvenience he’s caused over the last years with the trucking.”

With three years left on his contract, Blomgren is enjoying a semi-retirement, leaving the work largely to his son David and David’s informally adopted brother, Mike Dickens, who was taken into the Blomgren household at a young age.

That almost everything has turned out well for Blomgren these past 11 years doesn’t eclipse his personal sense of failure for being unable to fully re-create Holiday Lake.

Encouraged by the 170-acre lake shown on the Hansen Dam master plan--which his royalties partly financed--Blomgren had his earthmovers start digging the hole. Filled by natural springs and runoff, it remains today an emerald pond hidden in the huge crevices of the excavation.

But the winds of political fortune and public finance have shifted against Blomgren’s dream.

The Army Corps and the Los Angeles City Recreation and Parks Department have embarked--with Blomgren’s ever-cheerful assistance--on construction of a smaller lake high on the edge of the basin where storm runoff won’t touch it.

Really only a nine-acre pond--with an adjacent 1.5-acre swimming hole--it will be filled with well water and kept swimming-pool clean by an expensive filtration system.

Officials aren’t scratching the larger, naturally fed lake from their plans but concede that it won’t fit into the budget for at least another decade. They’ve told Blomgren he’ll have to refill the lake he carved.

Despite his bottomless optimism, Blomgren now doubts he’ll ever see his lake reborn.

“It was a nice spot,” he said. “It could be the same way. Looks like now it will never be.”