Category: Los Angeles River

Los Angeles River

Lower L.A. may get its own fish passage

During the past 10 years, the Los Angeles River has moved from object of dumpster humor to a symbol of urban rewilding. According to the city’s LARiverWorks, there are nine projects worth $500 million in the pipeline, from funded design stage to construction. Although two fish passages are envisioned, one in downtown Los Angeles, the Lower LA River Channel Restoration and Access stands out for conservationists.

“The LA River restoration effort is not about fishing, and it’s not really about trout,” said Bob Blankenship, of TU’s South Coast Chapter, who along with another TU board member, Karen Barnett, spearheaded the effort. “It’s about helping local people reimagine their local river, with global exposure that will jump start other restoration efforts.”

According to the LA Master Plan, many histories of the LA River focus on two central narratives: the devastating floods of the 1930s, and the rapid development in the first half of the 20th century that led the United States Army Corps of Engineers and the LA County Flood Control District to channelize and line LA’s main inland waterway. Now, designers, engineers and conservationists are reimagining how 51 miles of mostly concrete that cuts through neighborhoods, many of them underserved, can be knitted back together. 

The idea of “urban rewilding” is one that has gained traction in other major cities, both in America as well as Europe. The Associated Press reported

Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium and the nonprofit Urban Rivers are installing “floating wetlands” on part of the Chicago River to provide fish breeding areas, bird and pollinator habitat and root systems that cleanse polluted water. Or the Rewild London Fund that plans to spend more than $850,000 dedicated to increasing, for example, water voles in freshly restored waterways, as well as helping swifts and sparrows to again flourish in the city. 

Back in Los Angeles, working with grant money of $300,000, the South Coast Chapter’s project team, as well as the City of Paramount, and the Odyssey STEM Academy, completed a conceptual design for the Lower LA River that incorporates seasonal public access and open space in a naturalized river channel.

David Johnson, Community Services Manager for the City of Paramount, put it well.

“Paramount residents live in a highly urbanized, built-out environment. A reconstructed natural river segment here would provide an amazing opportunity to connect with the natural environment in our own backyard,” he said. “It is important for residents to look upon the Los Angeles River as something that is functioning and crucial to protect, particularly for any impacts downstream where it flows to our local beaches and ocean.

Trout Unlimited basically turned the design element on its head, by involving local residents — most notably students from the Odyssey Stem Academy — then from that input, nudging the design professionals to technically stretch to meet the neighborhood’s criteria. A prime concern is in any river reimagining is the possibility of a 100-year flood event. In the case of the lower river project, that means a fish passage that allows returning steelhead to rest and regenerate in its pools and shade, also must be able to move enough water through the channel to avoid flooding.  

Nicole Bottomley teaches in the STEM (science, technology, engineers and mathematics) curriculum at Odyssey Stem Academy, a public school in the Paramount Unified School District. Senior capstone projects were interdisciplinary, which included advisers in math, English, science and Spanish. 

“I am so grateful for this organization to have given this to our community and these scholars,” Bottomley said. 

Gerardo Silva, was graduated last year and is currently studying biology at Cerritos Community College with the hope of transferring to UCLA. He and his partner choose biodiversity and its effects on aerosols as their seamster-long project. To compare how rewinding a place contributes to healthier air, they chose to compare Glendale Narrows, an area of the river north of Paramount, that still has a soft bottom section, with the area around Dills Park and a housing development unique to Paramount called the “Sans” neighborhood, because each street is named for a saint and begins with the word “San.”

The riparian area of the Narrows is home to dozens of bird species, including snowy egrets, great blue herons and migrating Canadian geese. They are drawn to the flowing water, as well as to the native plants here that include native Arroyo willows and water cress. It’s also one of the best places to imagine what the migration of the endangered Southern California steelhead was like, when thousands of these fish returned to the San Gabriel Mountains several dozen miles away to spawn.

“The majority of our project was tons and tons of research to back up our hypothesis and claims,” Silva said.

Although Silva intimately was unable to prove his hypothesis because of lack of time, when you speak with him you get the feeling this project will help propel him into a science career. And one day he may see the Lower River Channel Restoration realized, along with an urban community’s dream of a greener future. 

See you on the river, Jim Burns

This piece originally ran in TROUT magazine, summer 2023

Los Angeles River

New York Times: ‘Remaking the river that remade LA’
WHEN OUR river gets angry, watch out. (Credit: Bob Blankenship)

FEBRUARY 1938 WAS a wet month in Los Angeles. The ground, where it hadn’t been paved over, was saturated, which meant rain had nowhere to go except into the streets, canals and washes. On the 27th, a storm arrived. During the following days, the city received its second-highest 24-hour rainfall in history. Reservoirs overflowed, dams topped out and floodwaters careered down Pacoima Wash and Tujunga Wash toward the Los Angeles River. By the time the river peaked at Long Beach, its flow exceeded the Mississippi’s at St. Louis. “It was as if the Pacific had moved in to take back its ancient bed,” wrote Rupert Hughes in “City of Angels,” a 1941 novel that climaxes with the flood. In an instant, the Lankershim Bridge in North Hollywood collapsed, and five people were swept away. Sewer and gas lines ruptured; communications were cut; houses were lifted straight off their foundations and sank into the water. In all, 87 people died. Read More.

Los Angeles River

Could water-hungry cities starve the LA River of treated waste water? The answer could mean bad news for habitat renewal
What most Angelinos don’t realize is that 90% of the Los Angeles River’s water comes from treated waste water from Los Angeles, Burbank and  other local municipalities. (Credit: Bob Blankenship)

Read the entire article from the Los Angeles Times:

Just north of downtown — and a stone’s throw from the growling 5 Freeway — the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River gives way to soft earth and an explosion of riparian life: Cottonwood and sycamore trees push skyward, while fish dart beneath the swooping shadows of cackling waterfowl. The scents of mulefat scrub and sage hang in the air.

For many, it’s a vision of what the Los Angeles River looked like before it was transformed into a massive flood control channel. It also serves as a rallying point for those environmentalists who want to see the river returned to a more natural state.

But what few Angelenos realize is that for much of the year, this thriving river habitat is sustained by a constant flow of treated wastewater.

Although melting snowpack and torrential rains send water coursing along the river from time to time, most of the water originated from the sinks, dishwashers, bathtubs, toilets and washing machines of millions of homes and businesses before it was treated in sewage plants and released into the river.

Now, as climate change stokes recurring cycles of drought, cities are increasingly looking to recycle this treated wastewater even before it reaches the river’s graffiti-marred concrete. With Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti pledging to recycle 100% of the city’s wastewater by 2035, and the cities of Burbank and Glendale also looking to increase wastewater recycling, the 51-mile river has suddenly become a battleground between environmentalists and wastewater recycling advocates.

Los Angeles River

Exclusive: A banner day for steelhead restoration
Someday, steelhead will return to our area’s rivers. (Jim Burns)

Yesterday two big steps occurred for bringing the endangered Southern California Steelhead back to the waters of Southern California:

First the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the San Gabriel and LLA River and Mountains Conservancy (RMC) established a cooperative agreement for the creation of the Los Angeles River Fish Passage Program. It seeds that program with $13 million of funding from Proposition 1 bond monies.

Second, from the same meeting,  a Trout Unlimited proposal for a conceptual design of the lower river channel access adjacent to Dills Park, bordering Compton and Paramount through the Los Angeles River Fish Passage Program also received more than $300,000.

I’ll be writing a broader piece about what this means for conservation in the coming weeks, but I wanted to spread this good news right now.

See you on the river, Jim Burns

Los Angeles River

House passes Rim of the Valley legislation

Los Angeles River

Mia Lehrer, ‘landscape urbanist’

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Mia Lehrer (Courtesy Arid Lands Institute)

A fascinating story from Curbed Los Angeles, about Mia Lehrer, a landscape architect who considers herself a “landscape urbanist,” and co-drafted the 2007 Los Angeles River Revitalization Plan. Thanks to John Rowen for spotting this piece:

 

 

“I’m getting a little impatient because it’s so clear that you can’t go back 100 years,” she says. “I think that the term that gets more people centered for a moment is ‘urban ecology.’ There is no such thing as ‘full restoration.’ If you were to do a restoration project and it happens to be in an area that’s 20 degrees hotter and the water in that particular area is reclaimed water with a lot of salt, what do you do? You work with ecologists and biologists to sort of figure out what are the critical factors. You try to be very supportive of the ecological factors and also the habitat, but to also take it to another level.”

 

Los Angeles River

Council for Watershed Health receives $1.4 million for LA River fish passage study

SteelheadAt its recent quarterly meeting, the Wildlife Conservation Board  approved approximately $28.7 million in grants to help restore and protect fish and wildlife habitat throughout California, including one for the Los Angeles River, according to its website.

A $1.4 million grant to the Council for Watershed Health for a cooperative project with the city of Los Angeles, the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, the Friends of the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco Foundation for a planning project to provide designs, permits and environmental review for addressing impaired mobility for southern steelhead trout and other native fish along more than four miles of the Los Angeles River in downtown Los Angeles.

See you on the river, Jim Burns

 

Los Angeles River

New local mag lauds the LA River

From theLAnd, Vol. 1, Issue 1:

LARiver

… there’s beauty in the river — the way its brutalist structure creates harsh edges and shadows, the way nature manages to thrive in the soft bottom areas, too wild to be tamed by cement. Most importantly, there have always been people who use and inhabit this space, from the Tongva who built their civilization around the bountiful waterway to Los Angeles residents who used the river as their main source of water for decades. That is, until they found water elsewhere and the river’s unpredictable boundaries became a threat to the city’s growth.

See you on the river, Jim Burns

Los Angeles River

Sunnynook stumps …

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From Trout Unlimited’s Bob Blankenship:

“They’re in the process of increasing the flood capacity of the river near Griffith Park and removed a bunch of boulders and some trees too. Also they hacked out a bunch of arundo but that’ll be back soon enough … .”

Los Angeles River, News

As storms move out, water continues to surge

rain in la
Even after the rain stopped falling Wednesday, the pedestrian bridge pilings in Atwater Village cause a mean curl. Because the LA River has little-to-no permanent structure, expect your favorite fishing spot to be radically changed for your next visit. (Courtesy Robert Blankenship)