River park’s time has come

NATURAL PERSPECTIVES

Rivers can be beautiful features of a landscape. They can be

dangerous, too.

Early residents of this area were plagued by floods during years

of unusually heavy rain. For example, during the winter of 1861-62,

storm after storm pounded the coast for nearly four weeks. The Santa

Ana River became a raging torrent that flooded land in three

counties, with water standing four feet deep up to four miles away

from the river.

The Great Flood of 1938 was the most damaging in county history.

Heavy rains fell for five days and sent a wall of water 8 feet high

sweeping out of Santa Ana Canyon. The swirling flood waters claimed

45 lives, left more than 2,000 people homeless, destroyed dozens of

bridges and deposited thick layers of silt on thousands of acres of

farmland. An area 15 miles long and seven miles wide was inundated up

to house roofline level.

Faced with this unacceptable risk to life and property, the U.S.

Army Corps of Engineers took out the kinks in the meandering

waterway, laid waste to the vegetation, and forced the river into a

straight concrete channel.

The lovely Santa Ana riverbed, once rife with willows, cottonwoods

and sycamores, home to bears, cougars, deer and waterfowl, was

stripped of its beauty, strangled by a cement straitjacket and turned

into an open sewer to carry away the detritus of human civilization

and dump it into the sea.

There are ways to control flooding without such wholesale

destruction of the environment, but society didn’t know any better

back then.

Fortunately, nature is amazingly resilient. Sixty years after

completion of Prado Dam, some portions of the riverbed again sport

dense thickets of willows and majestic stands of sycamores. Some of

these groves can be seen in the Talbert Nature Preserve below

Fairview Park in Costa Mesa. Small patches of open space such as this

are all that remain of the once vast river flood plain.

The river needn’t be a hidden treasure. Increasingly, cities are

developing parks on the flood plains of the rivers that run through

them. The land can’t be used for structures because of the risk of

flooding, but it can still serve as a refuge for wildlife and as a

place for human recreation.

A group called the Friends of Harbors, Beaches and Parks is

leading the effort to form Orange Coast River Park. This proposed

1,000-acre park would encompass several existing parks and nature

reserves along the lower portion of the Santa Ana River.

The River Park would extend up the east side of the river to the

inland boundary of Fairview Park near Adams Avenue. Along the coast,

the park would extend on the inland side of Pacific Coast Highway

from approximately Brookhurst Street in Huntington Beach south to

Superior Avenue in Newport Beach. River Park would rival San

Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in size.

Included within the proposed boundaries are the sand dunes and

wetlands that stretch from Brookhurst to the Santa Ana River mouth in

Huntington Beach, an area called the Huntington Wetlands. The federal

restoration project at the river mouth, as well as the West Newport

marshlands, Sunset Ridge and Superior Park in Newport Beach would be

included.

In Costa Mesa, the freshwater wetlands, riparian regions and

vernal pools of Fairview Park and Talbert Nature Preserve would be

included. Also proposed for inclusion is the Banning Ranch property

in Costa Mesa, much of which is used as an oil field. If the property

can be acquired, Banning Ranch and several other small parcels would

be added to River Park.

The park concept includes extensive restoration of the riparian

corridor with native plants, and completion of restoration of the

coastal salt marshes and dunes. A hiking and biking trail system

would bring this wondrous area within reach of hundreds of thousands

of people who live nearby.

Goals include restoration of an ecological gradient of vegetation

along the river for the benefit of wildlife and a seamless passageway

to the coast for inland residents who would prefer to walk or bike to

the beach rather than drive. It would create an oasis of tranquillity

within a high-density urban area for the benefit of wildlife and

humans alike.

This will be no easy task. Parts of the park would lie within

three cities and unincorporated county land. The various parcels are

currently owned by 12 different entities, public and private, and 18

different agencies have some form of regulatory authority over the

area.

Some areas, such as Banning Ranch, are still proposed for

residential and commercial development. Obtaining these parcels to

complete the park, developing a comprehensive management plan and

bringing all of the various groups to a consensus are big hurdles.

Although the Friends of Harbors, Beaches and Parks have put together

the proposal, no umbrella agency has been formed to coordinate these

efforts and implement the plan.

Seventeen different environmental groups have endorsed the river

park concept. Intense lobbying effort by these groups will be

necessary to ensure creation of a joint powers authority. That is

what is needed to create and oversee this park.

If you’d like to support the Friends of Harbors, Beaches and Parks

in their ambitious effort to form Orange Coast River Park, visit

their Web site at www.ocfohbp.org or call them at (949) 399-3669.

* VIC LEIPZIG and LOU MURRAY are Huntington Beach residents and

environmentalists. They can be reached at [email protected].