Flood Control by Riparian Rape

Public anxiety over El Nino is being manipulated to serve the purposes of federal and county officials who want to make a cement tomb of the Los Angeles River in the name of flood control.

Last week the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works an “emergency” permit to destroy some 880 acres of riparian habitat in the Los Angeles, Santa Clara and San Gabriel rivers and their tributaries--nearly every inch of riparian habitat left in the Los Angeles Basin and home to as many as 200 species of birds.

To understand the corps’ and county’s perception of the river is to understand this drastic action. Corps and county public works officials are uncomfortable even calling the river a river. Instead, they describe it as a “flood control channel.” To them, the intricate system of rivers and streams that make up the Los Angeles River and its tributaries is a “drainage project.” Public Works chief Harry Stone describes the river as having been “designed and built” by engineers “with 48 miles of its bottom lined with concrete and stone.” He knows it’s easier to sell the public on “removing the vegetation” from a “flood control channel” than it is to bulldoze a river.

Other great metropolitan areas--Portland, Chicago and San Antonio, to name a few--have magnificent rivers running through them, apparently without any extraordinary hysteria about flooding. Los Angeles County is unique in choosing to cement and destroy its natural river system.

El Nino may well pose a real threat of serious flooding. But if Los Angeles is not prepared, the blame should not be on the few hundred acres of wetlands, cottonwoods, willows and cattail marsh that grow along 50 miles of cement. The county’s Public Works department refused for 22 months to work with the agencies responsible for enforcing California and U.S. environmental regulations. They could have slowed the flow into the cement channel by raising the Whittier Narrows dam. Now, invoking El Nino hysteria as a cover, they are attempting to free themselves from environmental oversight not just for this rainy season but for the next five years.

The paradox is that the flood control system contributes to flooding. It was designed for a Los Angeles County of 3 million people. It was expected that open space and agricultural land in the San Fernando Valley would achieve “natural” flood control by sponging up the winter rains. Paving three-fourths of Los Angeles has increased runoff by 25% in the last generation. In a severe storm, the system will be flooded regardless of habitat removal or higher walls.

Instead of adopting “hazard zoning,” first proposed 50 years ago by the visionary U.S. city planner Frederick Law Olmstead, myopic Los Angeles officials have zoned millions of people into harm’s way, on flood plains and hillsides (not to mention zones of seismic danger). These politicians and bureaucrats, rewarded by shortsighted developers, have sought technical fixes like cementing the river in their war to subordinate the natural environment to the needs of development.

More than $350 million a year in tax dollars is spent to maintain the flood control system, which includes 470 miles of major channels, 2,400 miles of underground pipe, 250 major and minor dams and 97,000 catch basins. And the county and the corps now plan to spend another $250 million to shore up the faltering system with ugly, expensive concrete walls and levees 4 feet to 8 feet higher along 21 miles of the lower Los Angeles River. While walls can be compatible with river restoration, the county wants walls instead of the river.

If hundreds of thousands of people and $2.3 billion worth of property are at risk, as the county claims, it is time to raise critical questions about a failed system that has become little more than the MTA of flood control, a perpetual public works project that benefits construction firms while failing to fully achieve its purported objective.

Los Angeles needs a new vision centered on restoring, not cementing, our natural blessings. Every asphalt parking lot and school playground in the Los Angeles Basin should be remodeled with green openings to allow maximum absorption of storm waters. The $250-million proposal by the county and the corps to build 21 miles of levees and walls in the lower Los Angeles River should be revised with a multiuse project of flood protection, storm water cleanup, ground water recharge, parkland creation and habitat restoration.

The last remaining riparian habitat in the Los Angeles Basin is not the enemy. The real problem is the Concrete Cult: the mind-set that will misuse laws and sidestep environmental safeguards to pour more concrete and cut more trees as the solution to every problem.

Just as L.A. environmentalists envisioned and then fought to create the Santa Monica Mountains parklands a generation ago, now is the time to envision a Los Angeles with a river running through it.