Forget Earthquake, Think Flood

There once was a mestiza who was treated cruelly by her fair-skinned husband. He abandoned her and his two children for another woman who was not so dark. Mad with grief, she drowned her children in a flooded arroyo and then herself. She became a ghost. Now she haunts dry creek beds and open ditches.

The ghost of the woman lures careless children who are playing there in the rain, and she drowns them in the suddenly rising water. You’ll see her in the muddy wave rushing at you, her white rebozo flung over the weeping sockets in her calavera face.

This is one version of the story of La Llorona, the Crying Woman of Southwestern folklore. There are others. This version was told to me as a warning. In my childhood in a suburb on the southeast edge of Los Angeles County, packs of boys played in flood control channels, caught frogs and dragonflies in the reeds, built forts and sometimes died when the open channels filled with rain faster than a boy can run.

Frightened parents demanded that the county Flood Control District clear the channels and fence them. Now, they are concrete gullies that fill almost full in every heavy rain. The boys, frogs, dragonflies and bulrushes are gone.

A river once ran through Los Angeles County. It was called the Rio de Porciuncula. Fray Juan Crespi, who was the diarist of the Spanish expedition that first crossed Southern California, named it on Aug. 2, 1769--a holy day in the calendar of his Franciscan order, a day when all the punishments for a man’s sins might be remitted. It was, Crespi said, “a good-sized, full-flowing river.” It watered “a most beautiful garden” that was “a very lush and pleasing spot in every respect.” Crespi was looking southwest from the mouth of the Arroyo Seco, about where the Pasadena Freeway and Interstate 5 meet, toward the present location of City Hall. “This spot,” he reported to the viceroy in Mexico City, “can be given preference in everything, in soil, water and trees, for the purpose of becoming, in time, a very large plenteous mission.”

In a single line, an already mythic Eden was measured for its fitness to be consumed.

In August 1999, a straight line of metal-blue water runs in the 28-foot-wide “low-flow channel” in the exact center of the white glare of the flat, concrete bed of the Los Angeles River. The water, about 90 million gallons a day of it, comes from two waste water reclamation plants upstream. The ribbon of water is barely noticeable where the river widens just below downtown to more than the width of a football field. On a few days of heavy rain each year, the flood-control channel carries almost 100,000 times its summertime flow from the watershed of the San Fernando Valley through working-class neighborhoods like mine.

Commuters follow the river’s 51-mile course along the Ventura Freeway in the San Fernando Valley to I-5 as it passes downtown until disappearing in the industrial wastes of Vernon and again along the 710 as the freeway and the river descend together to Long Beach. Perhaps, when the traffic crawls, drivers wonder if something which looks so much like a freeway might not actually become one.

Crespi’s lyrical description of the Rio de Porciuncula and the thoughts of frustrated drivers are separated by 230 years of serial flooding and a history of greed, fear and hope that is L.A.’s own story. The many transformations of the river are Blake Gumprecht’s extended metaphor for what we’ve made of this place and a reminder of the reckoning it asks of us.

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Gumprecht modestly claims that his interest in the Los Angeles River “has always been more in its past than in its future.” But we require the past he presents, like water in our desert, to make the choices in our future intelligible. Another of the catastrophes of the river will be that too few Angelenos are likely to find and read this essential book.

In Gumprecht’s history, the flood control system we have in place of a river, so often ridiculed by those who do not know Los Angeles, is an extreme case of a socially constructed landscape. So is Central Park in New York. The difference is that the park’s builders privileged public places over private ones. They domesticated nature for public use. The engineers of 20th century Los Angeles could not do the same, given the contingencies of our topography and climate. They erased a nature they did not understand to make one of the most private of American big cities. The fenced, trespass-forbidden blankness of the flood control system is L.A.’s monument to the cost of privileging private space over public.

Gumprecht is uncertain if new public spaces can be assembled from what’s left of the Los Angeles landscape, specifically the traces of the river in the few locations where the present channel simulates a real river. “Such dreams,” he concludes, “display a naivete about the reasons why the Los Angeles River was encased in concrete in the first place. On the majority of its course, it is very hard to imagine the [river] as something more than it is.”

It is the fragile barrier between the comforts of my not-quite-middle-class life on the Los Angeles plain and the certainty of flooding. The river might be more, advocates of its restoration believe. I agree, but Gumprecht shows why the river cannot be less.

The Rio de Porciuncula was remade by floods in 1811, 1815 and 1825. That year’s flooding shifted the course of the river by 90 degrees. It no longer disappeared into the wetlands (the cienegas) of today’s West Los Angeles but entered San Pedro Bay, 20 miles south, at today’s Long Beach Harbor.

American L.A. called this new southern course the Los Angeles River. It flooded disastrously in the winter of 1861-62 and again in 1867 and 1876. The restless San Gabriel, Santa Ana and Los Angeles rivers in those years shifted their beds, sometimes several times in a season of rain, sometimes miles from where they began. For decades, the Los Angeles River had no mouth; nearly a third of its length to the ocean had been captured by the San Gabriel River.

More flooding in 1884 led to channelization, beginning with a system of dikes at the foot of downtown. The river flooded again in 1888 and 1891. After flooding in 1914 threatened to close the new Los Angeles Harbor, local business leaders urged voters to create a flood control district to manage the river and its watershed.

The Times opposed district formation. Few L.A. residents lived in flood-prone areas, the paper argued, but the district would assess every household for protection, regardless of the threat. Gumprecht notes this early anti-tax argument for de facto “hazard zoning” (which would have made development prohibitively expensive in flood-prone areas). It nearly succeeded. District supporters won the bond issue by just 51 votes. The new Flood Control District began building in 1918; its successors aren’t done yet.

The river flooded in 1921, 1927 and 1934 (killing 40). It flooded in 1938 (killing as many as 113). Moderate flooding troubled the river 14 times between 1940 and 1997 (killing 12 more).

In those years, the Army Corps of Engineers and the county Flood Control District replaced the river with a concrete channel that serves the region’s enormous and nearly invisible flood control system. The corps and the county eventually constructed 470 miles of open channels through the watersheds of the Los Angeles and San Gabriel rivers, 2,400 miles of underground storm drains, four reservoirs, six major dams and more than 123 smaller flood control structures in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. It is a system designed for La Llorona.

After a light rain in late 1997, just before the school day began, she took seven teens loitering in the Los Angeles River, dragged them into the willows that flourish where the bottom isn’t concrete and drowned three of them. On average, according to the Swift Water Rescue Unit of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, six to 10 of the unlucky die like this every year.

The river could do worse, because suburban development has paved over much of the watershed in the San Fernando Valley since 1938. In 1992, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that the river was likely to flood again over the dead-level miles of blue-collar neighborhoods in Pico Rivera, Downey, Paramount, Bellflower, Lakewood and Long Beach. More than 170,000 homes are threatened in a 75-square-mile band along the river and its Rio Hondo tributary, and almost 500,000 residents. The cost of a flood might be as high as $2 billion.

The corps and the county responded with a plan for higher walls along 22 miles of the river’s southern reach. The parapet walls on the levees will increase capacity for the increased runoff. The new walls, of course, will not be enough. One day, say the experts, it will begin to rain and won’t let up for days. On the fifth day, after 15 or 20 inches of rain, the capacity of the river will be used up, and muddy, brown water will rise to the top of a levee north of my house and spill over the side. In about half an hour, the earth behind the concrete wall will erode, and the river will breach. A sheet of water, eventually about a mile wide, will begin to flow south as fast as a man can run.

Over the past 150 years, amnesiac L.A. has looked at the space occupied by the river and misread it as dry land ready for development, a western barricade against immigrant neighborhoods, a water resource to be exploited, a perfectly engineered drain and finally a concrete void. Gumprecht gives a broad historical, geographical and human context to these misreadings, and he understands their seductions, particularly the current image of the river as a pathetic captive to be exhumed from its concrete coffin.

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In the service of a “natural” river, advocates like the Friends of the Los Angeles River, Heal the Bay and Tree People have offered a range of alternative plans for rebuilding the flood control channel, including planting trees along the levee tops, putting parks at the foot of the levees, pumping storm water into the gravel pits of Irwindale and simulating a river’s meander through the former rail yard opposite downtown. The river might even be replaced again by the most radical re-engineering idea--concrete jackhammered out, the channel widened by 1,000 feet through former industrial neighborhoods, the levees made lower and the river left to make its own way.

In the contradictions of the river, Gumprecht reveals a broader conflict about the uses of space in Los Angeles, and that unresolved argument spills over into harder questions here and in every part of the country about the limits of environmental restoration. Confronting them in detail, as Gumprecht does, takes courage.

The place of the river in our lives disturbs every assumption we’ve made about notoriously “place-less” Los Angeles. To be as place-less as we are is to be history-less, to have no setting for either public or private life. It is to be displaced, as the river has been throughout its time in our company. Its abandonment, and our contempt for what we’ve made in our own image, summon La Llorona. Her punishment for our sins is not likely to be remitted soon.