Ojai Valley Group Pleads for County Flood Protection

Weeks after watching flood waters engulf their neighborhood for the second time in three years, a group of Ojai Valley residents made a passionate plea for help Tuesday before the Ventura County Board of Supervisors.

Residents of the Siete Robles subdivision--where storm runoff from Thacher Creek and another stream tore down a 6-foot retaining wall and damaged 30 of the neighborhood’s 100 homes last month--argued that government officials had known about the problem for years but had done nothing.

A short-term county plan to use federal emergency money to build up the creek’s southern bank is a good step forward, they said, but not nearly enough to ease concerns that people could lose their lives during a flood because the privately owned retaining wall is no longer there to protect them.

“Now that the wall’s come down, it’s become a three-ring circus,” resident Greg A. Williams told the board. “Everyone wants to come down and look at this, but no one wants to do anything about it.

“What is it going to take, for some little kid to get killed out here? Is that what it is going to take to fix this?”

County Public Works Director Art Goulet, who spoke with residents afterward to tell them what the county was doing to protect them, said it will be difficult to satisfy everyone with the limited money available.

Simply put, he said, the state and federal agencies that typically pay for flood-control projects do not always sign off on the county’s list of needs or the extent of measures required to solve the problems.

In the long term, county flood control officials plan to improve the section of Thacher Creek that passes through the neighborhood. But residents, along with members of the Ojai Water Conservation District, do not believe that is enough and are calling for an upgrade of the creek from California 150 to Soule Park.

But, Goulet said, “we don’t have the money to do that. That would be a substantial project, much more expensive than what we had in mind.”

Goulet did not have cost estimates on either the short- or long-term plans to avert flooding in the neighborhood, but said the emergency plan would not cost the county much because most of it would be paid by the state and federal governments. It could begin as early as this week, he added.

The heart of the problem, Goulet acknowledged, is that most of the neighborhood was built decades ago, without proper flood-control measures in a natural flood basin.

“This subdivision was built in a different era, when people looked at development in a much different way from the way we do today,” Goulet said. “If a developer tried to build that today, he would have had to pay for the mitigation. Funding would not be an issue.”

Such answers do not satisfy Jim Ruch, a member of the Ojai Water Conservation District who lives near the neighborhood behind Soule Park. He believes that both Thacher Creek and the nearby stream, which descends from the nearby hills into the subdivision, need to be better controlled--not just through the neighborhood but before they reach it.

“The one agency that should be taking the lead here is wringing its bureaucratic hands,” he said. “He [Goulet] reflects the historical, I guess you could call it concern, of an agency that has always been defensive.”

Still living in a hotel room after flood waters tore through her home, Kelly White hopes for some relief. Her home, which sustained $35,000 in structural damage during the 1995 floods, was hit hard again during the early morning hours last month. She fears that the damage this time is much worse, and she is considering selling her home.

“The water went from 6 inches to 4 feet in seconds,” White said. “I almost drowned in my garage.

“I’ve lost my house. I’ve lost the contents to my house. I haven’t been able to work,” she said. “I’ve pretty much lost my life, and I don’t know what to do.”