Posted on 05/13/2007 12:38:35 PM PDT by Lorianne
Embracing an ambitious and expensive vision, the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday approved 12-0 a long-awaited blueprint for revitalizing the much-maligned Los Angeles River.
The plan -- which itself cost $3 million -- calls for spending as much as $2 billion over the next half century on more than 200 projects along the 31 miles of riverbed within Los Angeles' city limits.
It took five years to frame the details, but the roots of the proposed river restoration go back to a fledgling group of environmentalists who in the late 1980s began insisting that the river could be much more than a concrete-lined flood control channel.
"This is a great step," said Lewis MacAdams, founder of the activist group Friends of the Los Angeles River. "One of our first slogans was when the steelhead trout returns to the Los Angeles River, then our work is done, and to see an acknowledgment of steelhead in the plan -- well, I like that."
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
“...when the steelhead trout returns to the Los Angeles River...”
never gonna happen, and I’m not real sure there were ever any in it unless it was during the melt following the last ice-age
City officials are working with private industry to stage 50% more movie car chases in the river.
“We will bring the river back to its glory days of Chinatown,” said the mayor.
Yes, that Sewer that they call the Rivierwalk works quite well to capture the dollars of tourists.
First they have to solve the problem of those moose-sized ants.
“First they have to solve the problem of those moose-sized ants.”
“Them”, not “those”.
I had fun as a kid, walking the LA River, getting hog-nosed snakes and the like.
Where will we find the water for the river, it is dry, dry, dry.
We do have lovely mountains and rural areas surrounding the city though and to somehow integrate this within the city would be a great move in the right direction.
Salt walter bad for glass.
How Cool!!! Now that is a reality I can get behind. If we can bring back a world in LA where a kid, such as you once were, could do such a thing I am all for it. Thanks for sharing this memory. It warms my heart to envision such an adventure here in Los Angeles :-).
Yeah, bad for the glass.
The LA River in a heavy rainstorm carries more water than the Colorado. It goes from a concrete ditch to a river that is over 100 foot wide and 25 feet deep moving at 20+mph in nothing flat. All the storm drains in the San Fernando Valley and a lot of the rest of the City of LA as well as the cities of Glendale and Burbank drain into the river channel as well. Anything in the river bed would be scrubbed clean after one of these storms. We’ve had dry years recently but we’ll get normal winters again along with some really wet ones.
The last time the LALA Times published something about the LA River after a rain they indicated that the Army Corps of Engineers wasn’t sure that the concrete channel was high enough to protect against the 100 year flood which is what the channel was originally designed to protect against (along with serving as an emergency highway to move tanks during WWII). The reason is the increased amount of paving, building and housing in the LA basin that prevent rain from soaking in. They’ve also removed some of the earth filled flood control dams like the Lower Van Norman Dam because of EQ damage and the threat of damage in a future EQ. A lot of the concrete dams upstream of the main channel like the one in Big Tujunga Canyon have reduced capacity due to their age and susceptibility to EQ damage. In the last Northridge EQ that dam nearly failed. We were lucky it wasn’t carrying anywhere near it’s design capacity of water.
From:The River Project: Know Your Watershed: http://www.theriverproject.org/lariver.html and this is a sympatheic site to returning the river to a more “natural state”.
“The Los Angeles River is not like other rivers in the United States. At only 52 miles long, the L.A. River is 45 times shorter than the Mississippi, but drops 795 feet in elevation from the headwaters in the San Fernando Valley to its end in Long Beach. That’s 150 feet more than the Mississippi drops in its entire 2350 miles, meaning our river is short but steep.
In times of peak flow, the river carries 183,000 cubic feet of water per second out to the Pacific Ocean (the equivalent of 40 million garden hoses going full blast) - 14 times the flow of NY’s Hudson River. The LA River has no “average” flow, varying widely from a bare trickle in drought years to a raging torrent in years of heavy rain.”
I’ve been to River Walk and it’s a real nice place to visit but the flow in the San Antonio River doesn’t even come close. The biggest flood in history in the San Antonio River basin had a maximum flow rate of 79,400 cubic feet per second at the Loop 410 (where ever that’s at) in San Antonio and most of the other stations reported significantly less. A couple stations near the end of the river reported higher flows Cibolo Creek at Selma had a flow of 98,100 cubic feet a second and 93,300 at Leon Creek at IH-35, in San Antonio (half the flow of the LA River and the flows indicated above for the LA River are not the current figures for the 100 year flood). Per:http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/FS-147-99/#table%201
“half the flow of the LA River and the flows indicated above for the LA River are not the current figures for the 100 year flood”
They forgot to ask someone who was there in 1918.
According to my father who came up from Del Mar, the water was up to the ties on the tressel that used to cross Fletcher and Riverside drive which was about 70’above the intersection and where our office is was under 80’ of water.
All of Atwater, lower Glendale, and Eagle Rock was under water because it couldn’t get out between Elesian Park and Mt. Washington which is about 1/2 mile wide.
So was Van Nuys. If you go to the LA Public Library site and look in their Photo Data Base you’ll find some great pictures of flooding here in LA. The website is http://www.lapl.org
Here’s a picture in the San Fernando Valley at Vineland Avenue being washed out by the North Hollywood flood. View is north from Ventura Blvd. http://jpg3.lapl.org/pics17/00028268.jpg
Before the flood control channel was built the worst flooding wasn’t in the San Fernando Valley or in the areas your father mentioned rather it was in the South Central areas of Los Angeles and Compton. Even after they built the flood control portions of the LA River these areas still flooded when it rained because the City of LA and of Compton didn’t put in proper flood control systems and storm drains (to the LA River). I can just hear the uproar after these liberal environmentalist get their way and these areas flood once more. These are low income minority areas (Black and Hispanic). With this being a media center the uproar will make what happened after Katrina look like nothing. As will the demands for $$$$.
Most of the LA River was culverted, like the Rahway River here in Jersey, because it kept FLOODING prime real estate/industrial land.
Under the advice of the "Citizens for Access to the River", Noah Cross, Chairman.
All the lood control you could think up wouldn’t handle that rainstorm and flood.
What is now the top of the L.A. River channel was under 80’of water.
I can remember myself many times that it was within a foot of going over the top in Atwater, I used to go down there and have sat on the top edge of the bank with my feet in the water when I was a kid.
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