Los Angeles River refreshes, even during a drought
LOS ANGELES – Even in these times of record drought, a river runs through Los Angeles. You may have to look hard to find it, though.
The Los Angeles River, most of it rendered into a concrete storm drain by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers decades ago, has long been treated as an urban eyesore, attracting trash, graffiti and the homeless as it winds to the Pacific Ocean, often hidden behind industrial buildings, gritty warehouses and wire fencing.
It's known mostly, if at all, as an occasional movie set. Water flow is often a mere trickle through a gully in the center, and miles of flat cement river bottom and steep banks have served as drag strip and getaway path in movies from The Italian Job to Grease.
Mayor Eric Garcetti wants to transform the river into a more visible urban asset. He is trying to build support for a $1 billion plan by the Corps of Engineers to restore parts of the L.A. River from blight to a real river.
They propose to rip up the concrete in an 11-mile stretch and return it to a natural riparian state, with mud bottom, dirt banks and freshwater marshes that would attract wildlife and provide recreation while still doing occasional flood control duty.
"Restoring the river is a critical part of moving our city forward,'' Garcetti says. "New life on the river will bring new life to the neighborhoods and businesses around it.''
The idea gained momentum in May, when the Army Corps of Engineers formally proposed the restoration plan over less ambitious alternatives. The cost, over a decade, would be split between the city and the federal government.
Getting Congress to go along may take a while, so conservation groups have been trying to build public support with kayak and canoe tours of two parts of the river that the corps never paved over.
"I have wanted to be able to say I've kayaked the L.A. River, and now I've done it,'' says a beaming Melody Abers, who grew up close to one of the natural stretches of the river in a neighborhood called Frogtown, north of downtown near Dodger Stadium.
She rode the river one day recently in a Paddle the LA River tour sponsored daily in summer by the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, a non-profit group that provides education, training and jobs for at-risk youth.
Its tour follows the river upstream from the Sepulveda Dam near Burbank before floating back downstream, a 2.5-mile trip that feels like paddling into the wilderness.
Herons, egrets, ducks and other birds fly and perch amid the willows, sycamores and cattails that protect the banks. Water ranges from ankle depth to 8 feet in narrower spots. Shredded plastic bags hang from branches overhead, marking past flood levels.
"This river is why L.A. is where it is,'' Ignacio Garcia, the lead tour guide, tells the dozen or so kayakers accompanying him. "Los Angeles was founded because of the L.A. River.''
The river stretches for 51 miles from the San Fernando Valley eastward, then south, passing through downtown L.A. and scores of neighborhoods and smaller cities as it drains an 870-square-mile watershed, meeting the sea at the Port of Long Beach.
It was a water and food source for Native Americans and Spanish settlers in centuries past and often changed course in floods. After a deadly flood in 1938, the Corps of Engineers encased most of the river in concrete.
The river is often dismissed as a polluted industrial waterway, but the water is actually pretty clean, Ignacio tells his kayakers. It's not drinking quality, but the source of much of the flow is a city reclamation plant that sends recycled water into a lake and the river above Sepulveda Dam near Burbank and Encino.
That was all the invitation Sergio Villa, a video editor originally from Miami, needed. He took a plunge from his kayak into the river and came out refreshed.
"I got baptized by the L.A. river," he says, "and it felt good.''
