Los Angeles built into a corner
Posted on | May 14, 2012 | No Comments
LA’s improbable relationship with the San Gabriel Mountains makes the cover story High Country News: The list price was $1.125 million in August 2011, when Sotheby’s International Realty held the first open house for 1674 Highland Oaks Drive, in the Los Angeles suburb of Arcadia. Scented candles burned, classical music played and the air conditioner ran as potential buyers milled through the home’s three bedrooms, living room and combination den/dining room. Through sliding glass doors, a pool was visible in the rear garden; beyond it stood a sharply trimmed hedge. Past the hedge, in the ravine below it, a deep wash lay. Metropolitan Los Angeles ends at the edge of this canyon property, and above the wash, its steeply upland collar of national forest begins.
The dams and debris basins strung along the San Gabriel foothills, forming what Flood Control historian Jared Orsi describes as a "Maginot line" around the LA basin, are choked with mountain sediment. A 15-month review of what to do with it is online at the LA Department of Public Works. Until January 2011, a favored option was felling pristine oak woodland, called only "native vegetation" by Flood Control engineers, for conversion to dumps. Public comment on other options for disposal of the sediment is due by May 30th. Click on the map to be taken to the LA County Department of Public Works' draft sediment management 20-year strategic plan.
Once, like all the canyons threading the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, Santa Anita Wash had a stream tumbling through it, lined with coast live oaks, sycamores and mountain mahogany. In the dappled light of the understory grew coffee ferns, delphinium, phacelia, monkeyflowers. Bears gorged on blackberries while scrub jays jealously cached acorns. By day, the canyon was atwitter with finches and bushtits, and at night, the tree frogs and crickets chorused.
But on the day of the open house for what Sotheby’s called its “Highland Oaks Beauty,” there was no wild swell of twittering. No frogs, no crickets, no sign of a creek. The roughly 200 acres of sun-bleached concrete, gravel and sand in the canyon below resembled some kind of quarry. In a sense, that’s what it was — a pit gradually gouged out of the woodland over the last 85 years in an ongoing struggle to contain the mountains.
Click here to keep reading the High Country News story on how the felling of the Arcadia oak woodland behind Highland Oaks Drive forced a public 15-month-long review of LA County’s plans for disposal of sediment from behind its 14 dams and 162 debris basins. If you don’t have a subscription to this excellent non-profit environmental report, please consider signing up for a 30-day free online trial. A six month online subscription is only $12. Below is a Joshua Link photo of the Arcadia woodland before felling, along with a photo of mine taken in May 2011, almost five months after the razing of the woods to enlarge a Flood Control District sediment dump. 
Tags: Arcadia woodland > Camron Stone > High Country News > LA County Flood Control District > Sediment Management Strategic Plan 2012-2032
The common purse: Las Posas / Cadiz
Posted on | May 12, 2012 | No Comments
A previous post, Rancho Santa Margarita, Meet Calleguas, hit a hornet’s nest. The decision to write it was little more than an instinct. “Poke there.” The post referred to something called the “Las Posas Basin Aquifer Storage and Recovery Project,” described by the Los Angeles Times during the project’s inception in the 1990s as “the largest reservoir in Ventura County, ensuring a reliable water supply in cities from Simi Valley to Oxnard in the event of drought or earthquake.”
Las Posas wasn’t big. It was bigger. “The $47-million project near Moorpark will hold more water than Lake Casitas and nearly four times what Lake Piru holds,” reported the Times.
Until it didn’t. When last month the Ventura County Reporter recounted that the capacity proved to not be the much-celebrated 300,000 acre feet, but instead 50,000 acre feet, no villain was named. Who needs a villain when, as the Reporter ran a rough tally, the cost borne by a water district serving 620,000 people exceeded $53 million?
No, no hand was caught in the civic till. There were only pregnant hints as to the possible miscreant, all implying that it was a one-man job. “After 18 years as general manager for Calleguas, Don Kendall abruptly resigned in May of 2010,” went the Reporter account. “Neither he nor the Calleguas board of directors will discuss with the press the reasons why he left. Nor will any other water official speculate on the record as to why he stalked off a job that paid him a quarter-million dollars a year. Off the record, a Metropolitan insider said that Kendall’s resignation was ‘not unrelated’ to the collapse of the Las Posas ASR deal… “
As it happened, when earlier this week I decided to put up a brief post connecting the early enticements made about Las Posas and a new generation of stunningly high estimates to do with a project best known simply as Cadiz, the fleecing of Ventura County was not on my mind. Orange County was, where a municipal water company has signed on to front the Cadiz project. San Bernardino County was, where the Cadiz target basin is located in the dry Mojave.
All it took to get me wondering aloud about the hard landing that the Ventura County rate payers covered by Calleguas suffered in the Las Posas venture was the chance observation that Las Posas shares a hydrologist with Cadiz. Cadiz has convinced the Rancho Santa Margarita Water District, an Orange County water company only a fraction the size of Calleguas, to go a-prospecting in the San Bernardino desert. Like Calleguas, Rancho Santa Margarita Water District is big enough to be credible, but small enough to be credulous. If only by coincidence, it’s been using hydrological estimates from the same man who consulted Calleguas.
So, in that earlier post this week, rightly or wrongly, and at least one person has shouted, “Wrongly!”, I insinuated that Terry Foreman, a hydrologist with the Ventura branch of the engineering giant CH2M Hill, not just exaggerated the potential for Cadiz, but was also a serial exaggerator. This drew a sharp comment from someone who at this point every reporter instinct that I possess tells me is a good woman cleaning up a bad mess. She is Calleguas general manager Susan Mulligan. Her comment may be viewed here. This post is my response.
Tags: Cadiz Inc. > Calleguas Municipal Water District > Las Posas Basin Aquifer Storage and Recovery Project > Rancho Santa Margarita Water District
Rancho Santa Margarita, meet Calleguas
Posted on | May 8, 2012 | 2 Comments
UPDATED 5/11/2012: As the board of the Rancho Santa Margarita Water District wades through the Draft Environmental Impact Report produced for them by their partners at Cadiz, Inc in the bid to involve the Orange County municipal water company in a water mining scheme in the Mojave Desert, let us pause to look at some bona fides of a lead Cadiz consultant. Cadiz engineer Terry Foreman would have Rancho Santa Margarita believe that “using 50,000 acre-feet per year is optimal for conservation” from a basin with recharge that is perhaps one tenth of that, and that mining groundwater poses “no long-term impacts to the desert environment.”
Believe that and you’ll believe in chocolate cake diets, so it seems unlikely that anyone involved in the project really cares about the Mojave. Yet when it comes to cost, the Rancho Santa Margarita Water District board of directors might reasonably be expected to care. To this end, it may behoove them to read up on the fate of another water company to believe fecund calculations* made by Foreman, the CH2M Hill consultant now making the claims for Cadiz’s supposed “conservation” potential. One of the biggest previous projects on his resume was something called the “Las Posas Basin Aquifer Storage and Recovery Project.” To see how that worked out for the Ventura County water agency that bought into the project for what looks from press reports like $139 million, the Rancho Santa Margarita board may wish to read these items from the VC Reporter and Ventura County Star. If the Star report is correct, after spending $86 million to get the project up and running, after Las Posas failed the Calleguas Municipal Water District also recently had to pony up another $53m to reimburse partners at the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. There is no mention of whether or not consulting engineers had to suffer any penalties along with ratepayers.
UPDATE : Inflated expectations of the actual capacity of the Las Posas project were not due to “fecund calculations” of CH2M Hill hydrologist Terry Foreman but a Calleguas employee according to Calleguas General Manager Susan Mulligan. To read a 1998 technical memorandum from Mr Foreman concerning the capacity of the Las Posas project, click here. “It was quite clear about the fact that (1) basin water levels would decrease significantly when wells were pumped and (2) that excessive injection would likely cause a decrease in natural recharge. It is this concern about excessive storage decreasing natural recharge which recently led Calleguas to lower its expectations about the quantity of storage space available,” she wrote in a personal communication after posting the comment below. I respond to her comment here.
Tags: Cadiz Inc. > Calleguas Municipal Water District > Las Posas Basin Aquifer Storage and Recovery Project > Rancho Santa Margarita Water District
High good, low bad: Mead in April 2012
Posted on | May 1, 2012 | 2 Comments
Late storms are unlikely to alleviate what is shaping up to be a crummy water year on the Colorado River. As of May 1, 2012 the federal Bureau of Reclamation estimates that the river’s headwater states have received less than 50% of normal snowpack. As for what that means downstream, click here for the closing April elevation of Lake Mead, the largest storage reservoir on the Colorado system. After a bumper 2011 water year, April 2012 marks a second month of decline, with Mead dropping slightly more than five feet, giving roughly another 49 feet before Nevada and Arizona face cuts in their water deliveries. UPDATE: Aquafornia, the newsfeed of the Water Education Foundation, carries this mid-day update from the California Department of Water Resources about Sierra water suspended as snow: “Statewide, snowpack water content is only 40 percent of normal for the date, and was only 55 percent of normal the first of April, the time of year when it is historically at its peak.” Click here to keep reading. Also via Aquafornia, a nice piece by Robert Krier of the San Diego Union-Tribune on a possible shift to an El Nino cycle.
Tags: April 2012 > chance of rain > Emily Green > Lake Mead elevations
“American Canopy” on the past of U.S. forests
Posted on | April 27, 2012 | 1 Comment
Every book has its quirks. In the case of the newly published history “American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation,” the prevailing eccentricity is that it’s not primarily about trees. The leitmotif of author Eric Rutkow is wood, chiefly how North American virgin forest gave rise to a new nation, and how the U.S. has reduced that resource from close to a billion acres of ancient woodland to what is now more like 750 million acres of often young trees.
Click here to keep reading the review of the fine new history of American forestry in the Los Angeles Times.
For a look at the future of Western forests, click here for an interview by environment reporter Ilsa Setziol with Ronald Lanner, the presiding expert on Sierra conifers.
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