Faster Pace of Dam Repairs Brings Dismay

Construction crews and heavy equipment are working around the clock to fortify Casitas Dam before winter storms threaten progress, but such haste is not winning many friends in the community.

The 40-year-old dam, deemed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to be at serious risk in the event of a major earthquake, has been undergoing a massive overhaul as part of a $42-million effort to ensure it can survive a direct seismic jolt.

Construction, which began in earnest in August, has since accelerated--outstripping the patience of neighbors in Casitas Springs and the bureau’s ability to keep promises regarding safety measures that it made to people downstream in west Ventura.

Residents are upset about legions of big trucks crawling along Casitas Vista Road each morning and the roar and clang of heavy equipment throughout the night. A machine called “the grizzly” seems particularly distressing; it spins, shakes and sorts tons of rock and sounds like a gigantic, unbalanced washing machine.

“This project was entirely not supervised enough. It’s ravaging the back country, and the dust and noise are fairly egregious,” said Dave Kaplan, who lives in the area.

Environmentalists are dismayed. The Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center earlier this year threatened to sue to halt the project until environmental concerns were addressed, although legal action was averted through a compromise to protect natural resources. Center attorney John Buse said that agreement needs to be revisited because lights, dust and noise appear greater than anticipated.

And Ventura County lawmakers and emergency response personnel are frustrated because they say the federal bureau failed to install a fully functional alarm system along the Ventura River to warn residents of an approaching flood should a quake topple the dam while it’s being strengthened.

During public meetings last spring, bureau officials assured the public a network of sirens would be installed before dam construction began. That did not occur, although Acoustic Technology Inc. later installed the devices at eight locations from the dam near Oak View to near the fairgrounds in Ventura eight miles away. However, tests conducted on Sept. 13 and Oct. 28 revealed the flood early warning system was still not fully functional, said Michael Lavery, assistant fire chief for the Ventura City Fire Department.

“It’s unacceptable,” Lavery said. “The siren system was promised to be in place before the beginning of construction.”

At a meeting last month, U.S. Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley), Ventura Mayor James J. Friedman, Councilman Brian Brennan and city fire officials met with officials from the bureau to express their displeasure over the agency’s response to community concerns.

“There were promises made and promises that had not been kept,” Gallegly said in a recent interview. “The thing they have done wrong, unquestionably, is public relations--making sure the folks potentially impacted would know everything was being done to protect their safety and interests.”

Lavery said improvements have since been made in the alarm system and he is hopeful all the bugs will be worked out in the next two weeks.

If the dam collapsed, an event considered possible but improbable, it would send a wall of mud and water up to 85 feet high down the Ventura River, threatening 14,000 residents of west and downtown Ventura, according to the reclamation bureau.

To reduce that hazard, work crews have installed wells that suck destabilizing water from beneath the dam, prepped the downstream face of the dam so it can be strengthened with additional dirt, and excavated a massive hole at its base to install a berm the size of an office building to act as a doorstop to prevent the dam’s collapse, according to Barry Longwell, the bureau’s field engineer for the project.

Longwell said those steps, which are still underway, have already made the dam considerably stronger than it was before construction began.

“There are going to be certain trade-offs when you are doing anything,” Gallegly said. “Every eight-hour shift that they are out there, the public is that much safer than they were before.”

Longwell said two big tasks, adding 400,000 cubic yards of dirt and clay to the face of the dam and back-filling a roughly 12-acre hole at the base of the dam with rock, should be completed by New Year’s Day. He said more double shifts will be required to complete those tasks in a race to beat storms.

“We’re pushing hard to maintain a schedule. There’s a lot of people who have been complaining about the noise, but we feel it’s something we need to be pushing hard on,” Longwell said.

Work will probably slow down through winter, he said, and heavy equipment operations at night will probably cease by Jan. 1. However, work will continue in the new year to pile up the earthen berm. The job should be completed, Longwell said, by autumn 2000.