From the Pubisher: Water and Fish

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Arnold G. York

Two months ago, we were all asking, “When is it going to rain?” Well, our prayers were answered — in fact, only too well. We’ve had two-and-a-half times normal rainfall so far this year. Just about every dam and reservoir in Northern California is overflowing and all the structural weaknesses are beginning to show. After five or six years of drought, machinery stops working, maintenance gets sloppy, concrete breaks and cracks appear in the levies once they are put under stress. When you travel through the Sacramento Valley, there are earthen levies that hold back the rivers. Some are nearly a century old, many built by Chinese workers who also built the railroads in the late 1800s. California has had a history of massive rains and massive flooding. LA used to flood regularly until they built the LA River, which is really just a big storm drain. In the Valley, Hansen Dam off Chandler Boulevard holds the water back and the area all around it is one big spillway in case authorities have to release some of the water. The wet weather appears far from over and we can expect our mild little creeks to turn into rivers if the rains continue and some of the hills start sliding. Cities have to save their funds for a rainy day and it looks like that day may have arrived.

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The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has just come out with the federal version of the EIR related to the proposed removal of Rindge Dam in Malibu Creek. The dam was completed in 1926 by the Rindge family and the dam itself is old and decrepit, but behind is almost a century of silt that has built up and hardened enough to drive a pickup over it, if you were so foolish. The Army Corps and the State of California are hot to remove the dam for several reasons, despite the fact that the report estimates the cost of removal at $161-$166 million (which, as a practical matter, probably means $250 million since projects of this magnitude invariably run 50 percent over budget). Part of it is that dams are very much out of favor in the environmental world. The fashion in the enviro world is renovate, revise and restore. Restoration generally means “back to its natural state.” Along the coast it’s called retreat; that is, move everything back from the water. In the case of the Rindge Dam, there are two principal reasons given. First, they want to restore the Southern California Steelhead Trout runs, and taking down the dam would add perhaps four miles or so to the run. Now, why the fish can’t just fool around below the dam I really don’t know, but I assume their experts have sound reasons. When I was a young man living in Brooklyn, you never wanted to date a girl living in the Bronx when there was so much opportunity around the neighborhood. So, why the steelhead with equally enticing opportunities below the dam would feel compelled to swim an extra four miles up the creek mystifies me, but then maybe steelheads look at it differently. 

Secondly, environmentalists believe all this hardened silt behind the dam would ultimately end up as part of our beaches once they get it down to waterside and there are several plans to do that. In any event, the removal is going to take years and require thousand of truckloads of silt be removed with all of the wear and tear that’s going to take on the roads and canyon traffic.

There is something about the steelhead trout restoration that confuses me. Whereas the Southern California Steelhead Trout are considered an endangered species, the Northern California steelhead trout are not. In fact, a few years ago, we were in a market in Sonoma (and there is no place more environmental and granola than Sonoma), and there was a big sign in the market that said steelhead trout were on sale. I was shocked. I thought they were committing some sort of environmental crime, but it was explained to me that, “No,” the Southern California Steelhead Trout were genetically the same as their northern cousins but they were from something called a different “cluster,” which appears to relate to where they live and, apparently, you can be endangered in one area but not another. To put it another way for us Homo sapiens who live in Malibu, we are part of the Malibu cluster while people living in Reseda would be part of the Reseda cluster. Maybe I just didn’t get it right so if anyone out there can explain why Southern California steelhead trout are endangered while Northern California steelhead trout are not, please write in and explain the difference.

In case you want to get in your opinion on the dam removal, there is a public hearing on Wednesday, Mar. 1, from 6 — 8 p.m. at the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District at 4232 Las Virgenes Road in Calabasas.