While Stubborn Weed Takes Hold at Beach, Bureaucrats Quibble

While bureaucrats quibble, a virulent weed is making an assault on Surfers Point.

The Arundo donax, which has plagued the county’s rivers and channels in the past, has hit the beach this year.

With El Nino-driven storms, the hardy, invasive weed washed down the rivers and floated ashore with the tides, broken and twisted.

A relative of bamboo and sugar cane, the leafy reed can grow several inches a day and reach heights of 25 feet. Within months, it can blanket parts of the beach, providing home for transients, spoiling scenic views and leaving shards of reed underfoot.

Like a jellyfish, it can regenerate from just a fragment.

Once it gains a foothold, the giant nonnative weed is almost impossible to eradicate.

The city and state beaches have been cleared of the winter detritus, but no one has taken responsibility for the stretch of sand at Surfers Point that runs from the end of the Promenade to the mouth of the Ventura River. And as long as the weed grows there, it can spread to beaches along the coast.

“Jurisdictions are fairly easy to identify,” said Steve Treanor, district superintendent for the California Department of Parks and Recreation. “Who is going to do the work is more of a struggle.”

Technically, the city owns the property from the pier to the end of the Promenade. At Surfers Point, everything from the mean high-tide line down to the ocean belongs to one agency, the state Lands Commission.

The property above the tide line is owned by another state entity: Seaside Park, which doubles as the Ventura County Fairgrounds. That is where the arundo grows.

Yet the fairgrounds board has no budget for cleaning the beach and, as of last week, has no plan to do so.

Originally from the Mediterranean, Arundo donax is known more commonly as giant reed, carrizo or canya brava, meaning brave cane.

Initially imported to this country to provide stream erosion control, it is also grown commercially along riverbanks in some parts of California to supply reeds for musical instruments such as saxophones and oboes.

With a ready supply of water, the weed can grow taller than a two-story building. Its root system begins near the surface but eventually works deep into the soil.

Treanor said the arundo is taking root all over Southern California. It has overtaken beaches in parts of Orange County.

It has also invaded huge parts of Ventura County’s watershed--putting down roots along the Santa Clara and Ventura rivers.

Treanor said the plant is so resilient that after cutting the arundo sprouts down to stumps and dousing them with chemicals at Emma Wood State Beach, parks officials saw regrowth in the stumps within six months.

Jerry Revard, the city parks supervisor who managed the $750,000 restoration of the Ventura River estuary, worked on the front lines eradicating arundo there.

“The roots get buried deeper and deeper,” he said. “Once you remove the whole [root] system, you can end up with a crater 5 feet deep,” he said.

The weed, the most common growing along Southern California’s riverbanks, can choke out native plants and stanch the flow of water.

The winter’s heavy rains and pounding waves have swept the county’s arundo problem from the riverbeds and onto the beaches.

“The magnitude of it is probably related to the heavy storms,” Treanor said. “It’s occurring anyway. It’s just that now we are seeing it quicker.”

The beaches at Surfers Point still bear the marks of winter’s storms, with swaths of sticks and logs piled there.

Five months after February’s fierce rains, surfers walk gingerly over the sharp arundo stalks that cut their feet. It already grows in clumps that reach higher than a man’s head. On a recent day a homeless man squatted in the growth, partially hidden.

In other areas young green shoots of arundo--already 2 to 4 feet high--can be seen sprouting between the piles of dead sticks that litter the sand.

Those familiar with the weed worry that the longer the beaches are left uncleared, the better chance arundo will have to take root. In turn, the longer the plant is left to grow, the more severe the problem will become.

City officials are worried that the condition of the beaches could affect tourism.

State officials are also worried that if the weed grows unchecked, pieces will break off in future storms and wash along the coast to other beaches.

Mike Montoya, Ventura parks manager, has met twice with Mike Paluszak, the general manager of Seaside Park, to discuss future beach cleanups. They plan to talk again after the Ventura County Fair next month.

“The city does an excellent job maintaining its beaches,” Montoya said. “But we do have trouble with the state in cleaning and taking any action on the fairgrounds beach.

“The fairground is not really in the beach business,” he added.

Part of the problem is that cleaning up beaches is expensive.

Treanor said the state spent $200,000 just cleaning up its stretch of beach south of the pier to the Pierpont area. Yet his agency is responsible for the area around Surfers Point.

Although the fairgrounds board can be reimbursed for 75% of cleanup costs by the federal government, the board would still have to come up with the remaining 25%. At this point there is no funding for that.

Reached Friday, Paluszak said he was hearing the name Arundo donax “pretty much for the first time,” and since has had continuing conversations with Montoya.

“We’ve talked about creating an ongoing beach maintenance program,” Paluszak said.

Montoya said he hoped a plan to clean the beach and remove the weed could be worked out by the end of the year.

“We are continually seeing debris wash down on our city beaches,” Montoya said. “It’s getting to be an expensive operation.”

Treanor agreed.

“Every time we get a high tide, more debris washes up on the beaches that have already been cleaned,” he said. “We are all victims of arundo.”