Part II of a series of stories that examines efforts to bring back the Southern California steelhead trout and the effect on the flora and fauna, as well as people’s lives, in Malibu Canyon.
By Ann Salisbury/Special to The Malibu Times
State, federal and local agencies are preparing to conduct a $1.5 million – $2 million study to try and determine if the Rindge Dam in Malibu Creek should be torn down in order to save a run of what they believe are 10 to 75 steelhead trout.
The plan to reintroduce the steelhead trout, which was declared an endangered species in 1997, to area streams, may have been originally initiated simply to bring back an at-risk species. But efforts to restore the fish in Malibu Creek have evolved into a wide-scale water quality movement.
Recently, water quality and pro-fish groups have joined forces to reintroduce the steelhead trout. The steelhead need clean water to survive, and programs to cleanse water will apply to people as well as fish.
The linchpin, or the hammer as some describe it, is the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which makes it illegal to harm the fish or its habitat. If steelhead are living in Malibu Creek, then no one can put anything into the water that’s bad for the fish.
Under ESA rules, households and businesses near an endangered species’ habitat must curtail use of anything harmful to the species, such as pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, farm and ranch waste, horse manure, general trash and street run-off, and unnatural excess water flow. Environmentalists say that 100,000 houses are within Malibu Creek’s watershed boundaries, meaning that much of the western San Fernando Valley and the eastern Conejo Valley, as well as Malibu, could be impacted by the reintroduction of the steelhead trout into Malibu Creek.
All of which might comfort environmental protection organizations such as Heal the Bay, which regularly gives “F” ratings in water quality to Surfrider Beach. Citing a series of water quality studies, including UCLA’s highly publicized 1999 report (indicating high levels of bacteria, nitrates, and some viruses in lower Malibu Creek and Lagoon), surfers say they contract eye, ear, skin and respiratory infections from polluted water.
Meanwhile, representatives of local water-quality groups are realizing that steelhead fish restoration can be a legal and financial bonus because the effort attacks pollution at its source and can take advantage of governmental money directed at species restoration.
For example, when the Tapia Water Treatment Plant was constructed by the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District at its Malibu Canyon site in 1972, the prevailing assumption was that Malibu Creek would serve as a natural viaduct to carry treated water to the sea. In years since, however, Malibu Bay water quality has deteriorated and studies demonstrated that treated water with unnaturally high levels of some substances, such as nitrates, could distort natural environmental conditions. Two years ago, the state Regional Water Quality Control Board (RWQCB) ordered Tapia to reduce nitrates from 13 milligrams per liter to 8 milligrams per liter.
Now, the Tapia plant must make some difficult concessions to the fish and the facility is in a serious dilemma: Diverting excess water away from the bay is costly, but not to do so, environmentalists say, causes a series of complicated land-use and health problems.
“When water levels rise, breaching the berm, all kinds of contaminants flow into the bay,” said Bob Purvey, a member of the Malibu Creek Watershed Executive and Advisory Committee’s Lagoon Task Force and a local environmental activist. Purvey charged that “One person contracted that flesh-eating disease, someone got pneumonia in December, and a few years ago, a man died of uremic poisoning caused as a result of an E. coli infection and subsequent heart failure.”
So as surfers and environmentalists fight to prevent discharges of excess water and other pollutants into Malibu Creek, and as they work to design a water-level management plan for Malibu Lagoon, water-quality advocates are taking full note that the area below Rindge Dam contains one commodity that is very precious to their cause: an estimated run of 10 to 75 fish that is one of the southernmost runs of steelhead trout in North America.
More helpful to their cause are estimates by some environmentalists that before the dam was constructed in 1929 a population of 1,000 steelhead spawned in the vast Malibu Creek watershed.
How to bring back the fish? One method would be to re-create a natural setting by removing or modifying artificial barriers that settlers have constructed over the past 200 years, including roads through streambeds, man-made waterfalls, and the Rindge Dam.
Environmentalists are focused on the removal of Rindge Dam, which could cost up to $40 million, along with taking down smaller barriers along other streams. (See Part 1 in the Feb. 15 edition of The Malibu Times.) For several years, dismantling the dam has been discussed as a way to allow fish into the upper reaches of the Malibu Creek watershed, which is the most extensive watershed in the Santa Monica Mountains.
“A local agreement is being prepared with the Army Corps of Engineers to conduct an environmental impact study determining how to do this,” explained Suzanne Goode, senior resource ecologist with the California Department of Parks and Recreation. “It will be a three-year study involving public participation, and we will look at numerous options, including removing the dam and the sediment and other alternatives,” she said. State Parks and Recreation spokesman Roy Stearns added that if the department approves the estimated $2 million study, it will be funded by State Parks, the RWQCB, the Army Corps of Engineers, L.A. County supervisors, and the California Coastal Conservancy. Should the study recommend destruction of the dam, the final approval on executing the dam project itself would rest with Mary Nichols, secretary of the State Resources Agency.
But removal of the 100-foot-high concrete dam is questioned by a number of people, including Serra Retreat area residents Ron Rindge, grandson of May Rindge, in whose name the dam was erected in 1929, Judge John Merrick, who authored a book with Rindge, and other individuals, including local Realtor Louis Busch. Busch points out that the dam is a historic site which, in 1977, was included in the National Registry of Historic Places.
Removing the dam, located 2.5 miles inland, will accomplish nothing, said Busch.
“I have a photograph of people fishing there,” he explained, adding that the photo shows a 10-foot, naturally occurring waterfall that was at the site before the dam was built.
“The steelhead never could get into Malibu Canyon above the dam,” he said. “The photo proves that the fish never could have jumped the falls.”
But Goode said that the dam, decertified in the 1960s, serves no good purpose and also could harm beaches by retaining sediment meant to be deposited along the coast. Releasing the sediment naturally might have prevented erosion at Las Tunas Beach, she said.
Also among those favoring dam removal is Jim Edmundson, conservation director of Caltrout, who points out that a project enabling the fish to find upper reaches of the river need not be done all at once and can involve compromise.
“It can be done over a period of 20 years,” he explained, noting that experts now favor notching the dam in increasing yearly increments to allow a gradual dispersion of accumulated sediment. As a salute to May Rindge, he points out, the spillway could remain.
Faster methods that were once considered, such as having the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dig out the sediment and truck it away, or demolishing the dam, might release sediment too quickly, cloud the lagoon and smother trout eggs.
“The fish are trapped right now,” said Edmundson. “We want to get them out of there and into the upper reaches of the creek where they thrive.”
Beyond striving for water purity, a second concern of environmentalists, biologists and steelhead proponents is to maintain a more natural, or more normal, flow of creek water.
Almost two years ago, local state parks officials said they would like to expand the lagoon to accommodate additional water coming through Malibu Creek from the Tapia Wastewater Treatment Plant and from landscaping on increased inland development.
“The lagoon needs to be larger because there is more water in the watershed,” Goode said then, as state parks officials toured the site. She suggested the state may acquire property in the Malibu Colony in order to widen the area of the lagoon.
Today, however, efforts are being focused on reducing water flow. While in 1997 the RWQCB ordered Tapia to eliminate water discharges into the creek from May 1 through Oct. 30, only two years later, in December 1999, the board carried its ruling one step further, expanding the period by extending it from April 15 through Nov. 15.
Reintroducing the steelhead now goes beyond merely putting fish into the water or creating structures to help the steelhead on their annual migratory journey to spawn upstream.
The effort involves more than 60 local civic, governmental, private and volunteer entities concerned not only with eliminating pollution in the 100-square-mile Malibu Creek watershed but also with monitoring activity at Tapia Plant.
Among other organizations studying the restoration of water quality and reintroduciton of the steelhead are: the National Marine Fisheries Association; U.S. Department of Fish and Game; the Southern California Steelhead Coalition; Sierra Club; Caltrans; the Resource Conservation District, a special State Department of Conservation subdistrict; the California Coastal Conservancy; and the Malibu Creek Watershed Executive and Advisory Committee, which was formed 12 years ago and now represents 54 governmental environmental, and volunteer groups and agencies.