STEELHEAD SHOULD BE THE CALIFORNIA STATE FISH

The Golden Trout is the California state fish but it should be the steelhead - because steelhead are rad. Golden trout are gold and that is symbolic of the single most (r)evolutionary event in California history - the Gold Rush - but steelhead are badass. They are rainbow trout born in coastal rivers that migrate out to sea, get bigger, stronger and smarter while dodging sea lions and sharks and orca and a hundred other perils. Those fish that survive are supersized as big as 30 pounds of fighting muscle and will to live.
Supersized and super-powered. Steelhead have been tracked swimming as many as 10,000 miles in their lifetime - from the mouth of the Columbia River to Russia and back. After a couple years of surviving in the ocean steelhead somehow have the wit to swim through the deep and dark blue ocean, find their creeks, rivers and freshwater birthplaces and swim sometimes incredible distances inland to breed. 
Unlike salmon, an anadromous fish that breeds and then dies, steelhead can do this cycle multiple times.
And because the steelhead encountered in rivers and streams are survivors who have escaped a hundred perils at sea and can swim inland and upstream for  hundreds and even thousands of miles, they are the most prized freshwater fighting fish. Hard to fool, hard to catch, tricky to get in the net. 

Steelhead will swim right at you, wrap around logs, leap like Baryshnikov, do anything and everything to not get caught, complete their mission and head back to sea. 

So yes, steelhead are radass fish and should maybe be the California state fish as they represent resilience, vigor and strength by land and sea. But like a lot of wildlife in a state of almost 40,000,000 humans, steelhead are endangered - and especially so south of the Hollister/Bixby line at Point Conception. The southern steelhead which used to thrive in the Santa Ynez River and Malibu Creek and the Los Angeles River and San Mateo Creek (Trestles) and even into parts of Baja, are - like the snows of winter -  fading from this earth.

WAS MALIBU CREEK EVER A GREAT STEELHEAD CREEK?

While writing a story called Unbuild It And They Will Come for Fly Fish Journal back in December of 2009 I poked around in The Los Angeles Times’ online archive and found an article dated May 17, 1916 that brought Malibu Creek roaring back to life and transformed that dying fishery from skull and crossbones to oncorhynchus mykiss Valhalla. The headline to the story was scandalous: 

Scandal 

BEST STORY NEVER TOLD 

Record Steelhead is Caught Without a License 

Fine Fishing Reported in the Malibu Region 

The gist of the story is a mug named William S. Saltor winning a mug for landing a 32-inch steelhead (!) in Malibu Creek. Saltor kept the fish, put it on display in a sporting goods store somewhere in Los Angeles, and soaked up the accolades for what is, even by modern standards = a moose.

Out of Malibu Creek, in 1916.

All well and good, except Saltor didn’t have a fishing license and he had been warned about the consequences. He was assigned a date with Justice Frank Shannon of Malibu Township.

And then this description of a dawn patrol fishing session on Malibu Creek - exactly where is unknown: Above or below where the dam is now? But there was no dam then.

 Deputy Harry Pritchard took his limit before 8 o’clock opening day all on the old reliable worm… Fish and Game Commissioner Connell stuck to the fly, and had good sport. In the 200 yards Pritchard fished in getting his limit, was a fine, long pool very deep, and most of his fish came out of that one place. In another spot were three great steelheads, and while trying to get them up to a fly, the salmon-egg fraternity appeared… So it always goes. Good fishermen get trout, but as a rule they do not use salmon roe; when bait is the necessary thing, it is a couple of red worms; and that failing, a spinner or with clear water and fish feeding high, the artificial fly. 

Long fine pools, very deep: Enticing, but where on Malibu Creek were they? Above where the dam is now, or below? And it’s funny to read that salmon-eggers were persona non grata even way back when. 

But it’s also true that Rindge Dam didn’t immediately destroy the steelhead run on Malibu Creek. Way back in December of 2009, while researching and collecting for that story in Fly Fish Journal, Mark Capelli of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association sent a half-dozen photos showing fishermen pulling big, healthy steelhead out of Malibu Creek, going back to around 1947 - two decades after Rindge Dam was constructed - and then one happy angler with a healthy fish circa 1972. And as recently as 1996, a Malibu Creek steelhead measuring up to a ruler at about 24 inches.
Nice! Malibu Creek!

Few people hate a dead river or love a steelhead more than me, but will the USACE plan to remove Rindge Dam and liberate Malibu Creek result in a Malibu Lagoon chockablock with salmonids fiending to head upstream and spawn in those “fine pools, very deep?”

THAT WAS THEN. THIS IS ALMOST NOW

Looking ahead in this three-part story: If you judge by the very similar removal of San Clemente Dam on the Carmel River, the answer to that might, sadly, be “No effect.”  But that’s to come in parts Two and Three of what is a long, deep, complicated and expensive story

SEDIMENTAL JOURNEY: PART ONE

EVERYTHING’S OKAY UNTIL IT ISN’T.

The Montecito Thomas Fire Floods of 2018 are a Cautionary

Way back in March of 2018, Your Humble Narrator rode shotgun with Steve Woods to a Port Hueneme meeting of the Coastal Commission to hear arguments about the removal of Rindge Dam and the possible downstream effects. 

This meeting was well attended: Lawyers for both sides, engineers, steelhead fetishists, concerned residents of Serra Retreat, Malibu Colony and Malibu in general. Because here was another plan to fool with Mother Nature - or at least to put back together what man had put asunder: To remove almost 800,000 cubic yards of sediment trapped behind Rindge Dam, take down the venerable Rindge Dam, restore the downstream flow of cool clear water and ideally bring back the upstream parade of steelhead that nature always intended.

Admirable, but sketchy. A lot was said that day. Your Humble Narrator didn’t take notes but Emily Sawicki did and reported in  The Malibu Times the residents of Serra Retreat were more than a little concerned: 

“Residents from the Serra Retreat neighborhood, which rests in the floodplain of Malibu Creek, are concerned about increased flood risks to their homes and roadways, including the Cross Creek Bridge—and they were hoping for solutions now, not several years down the line: “We’re hopeful that this is not something that simply gets kicked down the road in terms of determining what mitigation measures will be taken,” said John Waller, legal counsel for several Serra Retreat homeowners. 

He added, “The real concern amongst my clients, and I think amongst the residents of Serra Retreat as a whole, is that their issues be addressed now, not at some unspecified point in the future. We want to find some means to protect everyone, including the steelhead trout, but we need to have that done before this vote is taken, not after.”

Ken Ehrlich, legal counsel for the Serra Canyon Property Owners Association, suggested that the commission would not look so favorably upon the project had it been presented by a private developer.

“We submit that if this were a private developer trying to do this project before you, there’s no doubt your staff would require all of these geotechnical and geological and landslide studies to be done now before this commission analyzes the project,” Ehrlich said.

“Consistency determination is different from a coastal development permit,” Simon explained, meaning this approval was not a blanket green light for the project. He also explained how the process was designed to move forward, beginning with approval from the commission.”

The Coastal Commission approved the project for a start time in 2025. 

Woods and I sat through the whole thing, weighing the Yin and Yang of it all based on what we know about California weather, rain and spending a lot of time around Malibu Creek.

And then to put a big, thick exclamation point and question mark on that meeting, immediately after we took a wide-eyed tour around Montecito where we saw the unbelievable destruction to this fancy-pants area after the Thomas Fire flooding only three months before, in early January of 2018.

For a startling gallery of images from the Montecito Flood, go here:

https://www.edhat.com/news/montecito-mudslide-photos/

Dam! I mean: Damn! I’ve lived in California my whole life. I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain. Earthquakes, tropical storms - earthquakes during tropical storm - flooding, firestorms. I saw the San Lorenzo River go berserk and the damage to Santa Cruz during the El Nino winters of the early 1980s. I know how hard it rains here and how hard creeks and rivers can flow. 
But Montecito looked like a movie set. It didn’t look real. You had to see to believe the incredible destruction caused by a Perfect Storm of rain - a half inch mega-microburst in five minutes at 3:30 AM -  and fire-slickened terrain and an accidental dam release. Creeks much narrower than Malibu Creek and down as far as 10 feet below ground level did a reverse tsunami through Montecito - mud flows as high as 15 feet and moving fast enough to destroy solid-built homes. 

And kill 23 people. In California. In the 21st Century.

I have photos of steel beams ripped from bridges and bent around palm trees. Steel girders. There were Range Rovers and BMWs smashed as flat as picnic tables. There were houses cut in half exposing bookshelves with books still intact. Homes had tons of debris and what looked like asteroids deposited in their yards.

Loco!
Truly, it was hard to believe how much damage one rainstorm could do. But seeing that megilliah completely justified the concern of the Serra Retreat residents over messing with Rindge Dam. 

Everything’s okay until it isn’t in the Malibu. This 21 Miles and 13,300 acres of Scenic Beauty - the California Riviera -  has the most benign weather in the world 98% of the time, and then the Murder Winds howl and transmogrify heaven into a pretty good representation of hell: Fire tornados, black skies. Unstoppable destruction and sometimes death. You know.

And the same can be true with the destruction left behind by rain - as we have seen the last two winters - and remember the winter of 2004/2005? The Hundred Year Winter where 37.25 inches of rain fell at LAX - four times more than the normal level?  

The residents of Serra Retreat are justifiably concerned about any attempt to mess with Rindge Dam. If the USACE plan moves forward, the people of Serra Retreat will most likely live up to the understated motto of Malibu: “The national pastimes of Malibu are screwin’ and suin.” 

Serra Retreat will sue, and maybe also the Sierra Club as they sued The Edge for his development on SweetWater Mesa. And the residents of Carbon/Billionaire Beach almost might take exception to  the USACE plan for transporting 278,000 cubic yards of sediment - 20 cubic yards per truckload - all the way up to Ventura Harbor, where they will dump load it into dump scows and bring it all the way back down the coast to dump it… where.

Along Broad Beach, where it’s needed? Along Broad Beach where citizens have spent millions of dollars on sediment that washed away? No, they’re going to dump it east of the Malibu Pier - a 90 mile round trip to dump almost 300,000 cubic yards of sediment in a spot maybe three miles from Rindge Dam.

Do the math: 278,000 cubic yards / 20 cubic yards = 13,900 truckloads up and out of the depths of Malibu Canyon, rumbling along Malibu Canyon Road and then to Ventura County Harbor. Each dump scow can take 1500 cubic yards of sediment so that’s 278,000 / 1,500 cubic yards =  185 dump scow trips.
And the cost? Forgetaboutit. You don’t wanna know. But taking all that sediment on a 90 mile round trip up to Ventura Harbor by truck and then back down to Malibu is just a part of a total cost estimated at well over $250,000,000 - all that to restore Malibu Creek and bring back the steelhead - maybe. Hopefully.

Will the residents of Carbon/Billionaire Beach have something to say about the onshore effect of a couple hundred thousands of sediment dumped east of the pier?

Those are just some of the environmental, legal and economic glitches in the USACE plan to remove all that sediment behind Rindge Dam, and remove the dam.

But if remove Rindge Dam they must, which would be safer? Removing the sediment and Rindge Dam and letting Malibu Creek flow? Or removing the sediment and leaving Rindge Dam up, to store 190,000,000 gallons of water in a city, county, state and world that needs every drop?  Restore Rindge Dam as a barrier to out of control water flows? Create an artificial steelhead breeding redd at the base of Rindge Dam and provide a steady flow of cool, clear water for steelhead to sprint up stream three miles, take care of business, then head back to the lagoon, and back to sea.

Those are outside the box ideas, but worth considering.

Like everything else associated with all this thinking outside the box: “I guess we’ll probably never know.”

PART TWO (2011 words)

DIG WE MUST

Should humans invest hundreds of millions of dollars and literally move mountains to (maybe) restore steelhead habitat? That is the idea behind the effort to displace almost 800,000 cubic yards of sediment trapped behind Rindge Dam, then remove the dam and (maybe) restore Malibu Creek to the beautiful steelhead stream it once was.

FOUR SCHEMATICS SHOWING HOW MUCH SEDIMENT IS TRAPPED

BEHIND RINDGE DAM AND HOW IT WILL BE REMOVED

Except that the United States Army Corps of Engineers’ plan to move all that dirt and remove Rindge Dam and restore Malibu Creek is ambitious and admirable in some ways but unwieldy, damaging and whack in other ways.  
And astonishingly expensive in both carbon footprint and American dollars.
The California Coastal Commission Consistency Determination No: CD-0006-17 is a 47-page staff report filed to recommend a consistency determination for the Malibu Creek Ecosystem Restoration Project in Malibu Creek State Park, Los Angeles County. 

The Staff Report was filed October 2017 for a Coastal Commission hearing date in February of 2018. The Staff Report begins with a Project Description on the title page which sums it all up in around 112 words:

From November 2020, The Malibu Creek Ecosystem Restoration Final Integrated Feasibility Report (IFR) with Environmental Impact Statement/ Environmental Impact Report and Appendices is another 45-pages of detailed information with colored glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one. 

Of all the numbers in that report, the most eye-popping is the total projected cost of $264,999,000 - $329,944,00.  A quarter to a third of a billion dollars to free Malibu Creek and bring back the steelhead - maybe, hopefully.

This project could rattle Malibu Canyon Road to dust, will definitely create a carbon footprint you can see from space, might endanger downstream stately homes in Serra Retreat and Malibu Colony, alter the flow of sand in Malibu Lagoon and along Surfrider Beach - with all of that rattle and hum possibly having zero effect on bringing steelhead back to Malibu Creek. 

These are the days of miracles and wonders and thinking outside the box. Oppenheimer is winning Oscars and Elon Musk is shaking up the world with his cars and his rockets and his satellites and Twitter/X: It’s cool to think outside the box, so here is an out of the box overview of the existing USACE plan to remove the dirt and take down the dam.

This is equal parts factual and fantastical, with some wild suggestions on how to do it differently, and make it fit into the bigger picture of Malibu: Past, present and future.

SEDIMENTAL JOURNEY

According to the USACE, there are 787,000 cubic yards (CY) of sediment trapped behind Rindge Dam, which will be trucked out 20 CY at time, with 502,000 CY of it going to a landfill in Calabasas and the remaining 278,000 CY trucked up to Ventura Harbor to be loaded on dump scows and floated back down the coast to Malibu: a 90-mile round trip by truck and scow to deposit sediment less than three miles from whence it came, just east of the Malibu Pier along Carbon/Billionaire Beach.
Lawsuits there most likely, and some would note the sediment is not being dumped where it’s really needed: Along Broad Beach.

Breaking down the USACE plan into digestible numbers, it starts the party off right with this: 40,000 CY of sediment, “will be used to construct two access ramps at the upper end of the Rindge Dam impounded sediment area to provide equipment access from Malibu Canyon Road to the work site, allowing for the removal of existing mature vegetation on the surface and temporary diversion and control of Malibu Creek to allow for needed work space for mining and other actions.”

WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

If you’ve ever ventured down those sketchy cliffs to Malibu Creek above Rindge Dam - as four of us did in November of 2009 -  you know that “existing mature vegetation” is a thick, tangled upper crust of jungle which will not be easy to remove. 
You can kind of see that thicket on Google Earth, but you have to be down there to realize how jungley it is. Before they remove the dirt, that top layer of flora will have to be scalped and scraped away. So the question is: How to trim and remove many decades of trees and brush and overgrowth and… shrubberies?

A controlled burn? Sketchy.

How about unleash hordes of brush-eating goats? Those furry little bleaters are tres effective. I’ve seen them mow through four feet high and ten feet deep of poison oak and blackberries. Went through it like locusts! Like piranha fish! 

Not one leafy green remaining. Poison oak and blackberries. At the same time!

TIME LAPSE OF BRUSH-EATING GOATS BEING EFFECTIVE

An armada of brush-eating goats could give that Amazonian jungle tangle at the bottom of Malibu Canyon a Brazilian buzzcut in no time - organically and cost effectively: Goat droppings aren’t nearly as ozone-damaging as diesel fumes.

And reducing the carbon footprint of this whole Megillah wherever possible is just good citizenship. Earthship.

Those two access roads will be used for a seemingly endless, Desert Stormish, thundering procession of diesel trucks and smokey heavy equipment to descend down, down, down to an ever-lowering dirt level in Malibu Canyon to strip it all down to bedrock and expose those long-buried steelhead pools to water, sky and sun.

Odin knows what else they will find in all of that jungle and sediment. Wonderful things, maybe. Maybe not.

MADAM THAT'S MY DAM 

Backstory to Rindge Dam: Mrs. Rindge finished building the dam in 1926, using steel pulled up from the railway she built in the early 1900s. While most of the Rindge shenanigans were covered in great detail in The LA Times going back to the turn of the century, details on Who, When, Why, How Long and How Much of Rindge Dam are hard to find.

And I’ve looked through it all, believe you me.

On November 1, 2024 - the day I posted this story on my website - Erin Rode posted a story on SF Gate titled: A Completely Useless Dam is Finally Coming Down. That story filled in some of the blanks on this but didn’t shed much light on the construction of Rindge Dam: “Unlike some high-profile dams, the Rindge Dam wasn’t initially conceived as a giant public works project but as private infrastructure built for the sole benefit of one family. “We’re cognizant of the understanding that this was a private structure built by a wealthy family to feed water to a couple ranches up in the headwaters,” Marlow said.”

However, from 1918 - 1921 an arch dam similar to Rindge Dam was built on the Carmel River. The San Clemente dam was paid for by Samuel Morse of Del Monte Properties, designed by J.A. Wilcox and constructed by Chadwick & Sykes Inc of San Francisco. 

Taking down San Clemente Dam on the Carmel River. A similar construction and deconstruction to Rindge Dam.

San Clemente Dam is a winding 11 miles as the drone flies - and much more as the steelhead swims - from where it empties into the Pacific Ocean - compared to three miles for Rindge Dam. Where Rindge Dam is 150 feet long and 100 feet high, the San Clemente Dam on the Carmel River was 106’ high and 300’ long. Construction cost 1921$300,000, the equivalent of 2024$5,211,940.98 in modern dollars. So one can assume the construction of Rindge Dam was similar. 

Rindge Dam began to fill up with sediment in the 1940s and was decommissioned in 1967 then taken over by the State of California. Just as San Clemente Dam was built before Rindge Dam, it was also taken down first. The numbers for the removal of San Clemente Dam look like this: The original storage capacity of San Clemente Dam was 1,425 acre⋅feet = 464,337,675 gallons - water that was used to irrigate and evolve the Monterey Peninsula. 

Dam water probably sipped by Steinbeck and Doc Ricketts, back in their day.  .

In 1966 California American Water paid 1966$42 million for the dam and reservoir - the modern equivalent of 2024$327 million. In 1991 the California Department of Water Resources (CDWR) issued a warning of potential dam failure and sought alternatives. In 1992 the California Water and Telephone Company were required to upgrade the dam for safety which included a US$1 million project which drilled holes in the face of the dam to relieve hydrostatic pressure. 
As of 2008 there were 2,150,000 cubic yards of sediment trapped behind the dam and the storage capacity was down to 70 acre feet, from the original 1,425 acre feet. 

In 2008, the California Department of Water Resources approved a plan to reroute the Carmel River and demolish the dam. A channel of one-half mile was built to re-route the Carmel River around the dam and back into the Carmel River, below the dam. A total of 380,000 cubic yards of sediment was excavated from San Clemente Creek to a permanent holding area upstream, on the Carmel River. The total project cost to remove Carmel Dam was $84 million - with $49 million coming from California American Water, $25 million from the State of California and the remaining $10 million coming from Federal and other sources. 

SAN CLEMENTE DAM REMOVAL PROJECT OVERVIEW

This is from https://www.sanclementedamremoval.org/project-overview The final line on this page reads: “Now the Carmel River is free-flowing and the transformation of the Carmel River will continue as the river “re-wilds” itself. Steelhead numbers in the upper watershed appear to be slowly increasing as steelhead are now able to travel upstream to more of historic spawning grounds. In 2019 over 127 made it to Los Padres Dam, located five miles above the former dam site.”

The demolition began in 2013. The Carmel River was diverted in December of 2014, the San Clemente Dam was removed in November of 2016 and the project was completed in 2016.

They got ‘er done, for considerably less than a quarter to a third of a billion dollars. But the question is: Did the removal of the San Clemente Dam on the Carmel River breathe the steelhead run back to life?

Steve Park is the president of the Carmel River Steelhead Association and he had a good answer to that question:

Has the removal of the San Clemente dam benefited the Steelhead since its deconstruction? Of course, that is the logical answer. In the real world where boots on the ground count - nothing noticeable yet. Well wait one we have now seen Pacific Lamprey spawning in the upper reaches of the river. They could not make it up the torturous San Clemente dam ladder.

This year’s Steelhead run  does not appear to be a strong one, if the count at the other dam (Los Padres), is any kind of an indicator. Three fish so far compared to an average over the last couple of decades of say fifty a year. The Steelhead swim up a ladder into a trap, where they are removed and transported over the dam, thus being counted. Our redd surveys in the upper watershed tributaries this season are not too promising, especially considering that the river has continually flowed into the ocean for the past three months.

So what do the boots on the ground think? It’s been almost ten years since the dam removal. We think the Steelhead population is stable but barely advancing. We base that assumption on our current rescue totals which are as good as any year in the past fifty year
Is it too soon to tell if the dam removal made a BIG DIFFERENCE?

Probably. And that conclusion is totally confused by what’s going on out in Big Blue. Last winter and this year’s have been generous in the water that they delivered to our watershed. However, those wet winters were preceded by three years of super dry winters.

The Carmel River is the most southern reach of steelhead rivers in the state, that still have an annual run of Steelhead worth mentioning. What once was reported to be thousands is now averaging less than a couple of hundred. However, as you know, Steelhead are an iconic animal capable of incredible adaptation, unbelievable stamina, resourcefulness and the list goes on. Return their habitat to its once uninhibited state and they will come.

Hope I have not over-answered your initial question. Sometimes I find myself a little bit too romantic and robust about these SEA RUN RAINBOW TROUT.

The east wing wall of the dam is still left in the mountain with the newly created river spilling down through newly created jumping ponds. Imagine Malibu Creek having this opportunity.

The answer to that is crucial to the Buhaha about Rindge Dam. And the answer appears - 10 years after San Clemente Dam was removed - to be “No!”
So what does that mean for Malibu Creek, and the removal of Rindge Dam and restoring the steelhead run?

PART THREE  (1569 words)

RINDGE DAM NOW

 KEEP ON TRUCKIN’

The trucks that will remove the sediment transport 20 cubic yards per load, so that’s 780,000 CY / 20 CY a truck load = 39,000 (??!!) truck loads rumbling up and out of that ever-deepening crevasse and onto Malibu Canyon Road.

That stretch of road isn’t fragilistic and dangerous enough without thousands of trucks pulling into and out of the work site?

The plan is to move 502,000 CY of sediment to the Calabasas landfill and 278,000 CY all the way up to Ventura Harbor. 

So that’s 502,000 / 20 cubic yards = 25,100 truck trips to the landfill in Calabasas and 278,000 / 20 cubic yards = 13,900 truck trips to Ventura to offload that sediment into dump scows to be transported back down the coast to east of the Malibu Pier.

The quote from a few years ago was $530+ per truckload. So even at the low estimate, that’s 787,000 / 20 X $532 = $20,934,200. That’s just to truck it out. 

As of April 3, 2024, the tipping charge at Calabasas Landfill is $75.40 per ton according to Carlotta Contreras, the Customer Service Specialist - Solid Waste Operations for the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts: “The conversion on 20 cubic yards to tons is roughly about five tons.  So, the rough cost estimate would be $377.00 per truck.”

So with a dumping fee of $377 per truck the math is 25,100 truckloads at $530 per truckload = $13,303,000 for removal and transportation, and then the dumping fee is 502,000 cubic yards / 20 cubic yards per truckload is 25,100 truckloads x $377 = $9,462,700.

So if this math is correct, that’s close to $23,000,000 to remove ⅔ of the sediment behind Rindge Dam to the Calabasas landfill.
As David Letterman would say: “Twenty three million here and twenty three million there and pretty soon you’re talking real money!”

But there’s more!

Hump it and dump it. That all kind of makes sense, but then there’s this: The remaining 278,000 cubic yards of sediment will be driven 20 CY at a time all the way up to Ventura to offload it into dump scows and then bring it back down the coast 50 miles to dump it three miles away from the source at Rindge Dam.

Say what? That’s kinda whack, no? 

Why do a 90 mile round trip with all those trucks and tug boats burning all that diesel just to dump it three miles away - in a location along Carbon/Billionaire Beach where it might not be wanted or needed, and not along Broad Beach where it could very much be wanted and needed?

So that’s 278,000 / 20 = 13,900 truckloads of sediment out of Malibu Canyon, along what’s left of Malibu Canyon Road, onto the 101 and all the way up to Ventura, to load it onto the charmingly named “dump scows.”

Doing the math, each dump scow is 185 feet long by 48 feet wide by 64 GRT and can haul 1,500 cubic yards of sediment. They will remove and move 278,000 cubic yards of sediment to Ventura, so that’s 185 dump scow trips at who knows what environmental and financial cost.

According to ???, each dump scow trip will cost ??? so that’s another 185 X $??? = $???

So what do we have so far, using numbers that are many years old?

Remove 787,000 CY of sediments / 20 CY per truckload x $532 per truckload: $20,934,200.

Dumping fee at Calabasas is 25,100 truck loads x $53 = $1,330,300.

Dump scow trips to transport 278,000 / 1500 CY = from Ventura to Malibu: 185 x $????

But then there’s the cost to employ all these heavy equipment workers, insurance, permits and who knows how many other costs.

For a grand total of $280,000,000+ - because it’s always more expensive than the estimate.

As David Letterman used to say: “A quarter billion dollars here and a quarter billion dollars there and pretty soon you're talking real money.”

RESTORING BROAD BEACH: SEDIMENT X JETTY = BARRIER

Is there maybe a place in Malibu that needs sand? A place that’s been dumping huge loads of sand - and millions of dollars -  for outside sand that just washes away after one season? 

Think hard: How about Broad Beach? Why not dump all those tens of thousands of cubic yards of sediment there? Where it’s needed.

Broad Beach isn’t as broad as she used to be and the homeowners there have been tearing their hair out and spending millions to create a protective barrier between the ever-increasing value of their homes and the ever-increasing destructive force of the Pacific Ocean.

In November of 2012, Gary Baum of the Hollywood Reporter reported in a story titled Malibu’s $20 Million Sand War:

The source of the conflict: the residents’ ambitious $20 million proposal to dramatically reshape the area by dredging in 600,000 cubic yards of sand from one of several targeted “borrow sites” at the bottom of the ocean. (They have ranged from Ventura Harbor in the north down to Dockweiler Beach and Manhattan Beach in L.A. County.) Homeowners have hired engineers, scientists and other consultants to devise a plan to bring in large quantities of replacement sand by barge. In a process called “beach nourishment,” the project would, like a plastic surgeon wielding a Juvederm filler syringe, carefully sculpt the more voluptuous shoreline of yore. If successful, the plan would be the ultimate Hollywood reboot, a transformative feat of engineering and chutzpah that, despite its size and scope, would require only a few months to complete, expand the waterfront for all beachgoers and be fully financed by taxes the residents are ready to levy on themselves. “We’d be restoring the beach to what it looked like decades ago,” says their attorney, Ken Ehrlich, “and we’d be providing 100 times more public access to the beach than exists right now, since it would all be public beach seaward of the dunes. It’s a tremendous benefit to the public — unprecedented in the state.”

Anyone who knows the ocean - and especially people who live along the beach in Malibu - knows that dumping sand along an unprotected beach is just a waste of time, money and sand. The ocean will eat, move and displace that sand faster than you can say “Coastal Commission.”
Did it work? What do you think?
Screwin’ and suin’.

On October 21, 2020, KBUU.com ran a story under the title: After $21 Million And 6 Years, Broad Beach Sand Replacement Project Still Rocky

After six years and $21 million dollars spent on engineering and legal fees … the Broad Beach sand replenishment project is still at least two years away from placing one grain of sand. And if the legal meeting yesterday is any indication … the 30 million project may be bogged down in a morass of lawsuits  and other huge problems.

Three lawsuits challenging the project . .. which is funded by a tax agency set up by the city … and paid for by the Broad Beach homeowners. The west end of Broad Beach wants to pay less than they’ve been assessed … because no sand can be placed on the beach there due to fish habitat. The east end of Broad Beach wants to pay less than they’ve been assessed …. because they didn’t get protective rocks and won’t get much sand.

Some homeowners in the middle say the proposed open-ended commitment to rebuild Broad Beach may end up costing 100 million dollars … over 10 years.

Already … homes are being taxed up to 60 thousand dollars a year for sand that has not arrived … and that cost is going to go up … way up.

A third group of homeowners has also sued … they want to put a limit on the amount of sand trucked in.

George Novogroder speaks to their frustrations.

“Are we fighting a losing battle?

“if we put in 300,000 cubic yards of sand and it washes away?

“Certainly none of us hope for that.

“Certainly our engineers and consultants hope that it will work.

“However, if it doesn’t … it may be time to give up.”

That third group has already won a first court decision … that the cost assessments for the sand project were not applied correctly.

The Broad Beach Geologic Hazard Abatement And Assessment District … the “Gee-HAD” …  is starting over again on that issue.

Years ago … the state allowed the homeowners to place protective rocks in front of their houses on the condition that the rocks be covered up with sand …

And the district thinks the best source of sand is bringing it by truck from way up in Ventura County.

A lot of sand … and a lot of trucks: 22,000 truckloads the first year … possibly more than 85,000 truckloads of sand over the 10 year lifespan of the project.

The problem is  … if that sand washes away … the state will require that those existing rocks be moved closer to the Broad Beach houses.

And … a beach access trail on top of that … right next to the pricey houses. 

The dissident group wants to place that coastal access trail behind their houses and across the street … along the north side of Broad Beach Road.

Would the Coastal Commission walk away from the current plan and approve that??

A real question.

Probably not ,,, says the district’s lawyer.

Meanwhile … residents of a small neighborhood at Trancas are largely unaware of the possible arrival of 85 thousand truckloads of sand in their little corner of the Malibu.

The Broad Beach plan is to unload the sand next door … in the parking lot at Trancas Beach.

Front end loaders would pile up the sand … and load it into small haulers for a ride up to Broad Beach.
Mike Messina lives down at Trancas Beach … and despite the fact that this project has been in the works for nine years … no one ever contacted him to tell him that 85 thousand dump trucks of sand are to be unloaded and transshipped in front of his house.

“For 12 hours a day during the workweek … I usually would be at the (movie) studio where I work.

“But given COVID I work from home.

“So that’s a further impact. “

“It’s not solely going to be an impact on my quiet enjoyment of my property when I’m here, but when I am working during the day as well.”

The huge expense and nasty environmental issues of trucking in nearly 23 thousand truckloads of sand in two years … and maybe 85 thousand over 10 years … may kill the sand replacement project.

Lawyers for the district are negotiating with the city of Los Angeles to get sand barged in from off the shore of L-A-X … as a replacement for the replacement sand.

Upshot from Sunday’s meeting … after 21 million dollars and six years … the proposed project has major …  major problems.

Meanwhile … out on Broad Beach … mild summer winds and currents have allowed a small sliver of Broad Beach to reappear.

This editorial note.

This reporter lives at Trancas and participated in the meeting. 

This creates an obvious conflict of interest … which also confers a responsibility to acknowledge that conflict of interest.

And to be fair and accurate to all persons on this issue.

WHERE IS THIS AS OF 2024? WAS SAND DUMPED? DID IT STICK AROUND?

HELLO JETTY

Groins - for lack of a better word - work. Groins are good. Groins trap sand. You build a 50-yard jetty/groin at Trancas - on the west side, so the creek still flows sand to Zuma -  and dump all that Rindge Dam sediment there and it will stay put. 

I think. Anyone who tells you they know what sand will do and where it’s going to go is selling you something. Indulging themselves in a canard.

Surfer Dog, in the middle of Castle Beach, protected from the ocean by 50 yards of sand built up behind the Big Jetty of the Santa Cruz Harbor.

I used to sell hot dogs on Castle Beach in Santa Cruz, also known as Seabright Beach. Way back in the first half of the 20th Century, the ocean used to swoosh all the way up to cliffs from the San Lorenzo Rivermouth to what was Woods Lagoon. The USACE had their eye on Woods Lagoon going as far back as 1879, then from 1958 to 1964, they dredged the lagoon and created a channel with an 1100+ foot long jetty on the west side of the channel.

Look on Google Maps and you’ll see the Big Jetty created a permanent barrier of sand that is 700+ feet wide at the east end, and 320+ feet at the west end. From selling hot dogs on the beach and surfing Rivermouth and the Harbor for many years I can say with confidence that only during extreme tides and storms does the ocean nibble at those cliffs it used to maraud.

Jettys, for lack of a better solution: Work. Jettys can be good.

Applying that to Broad Beach, people would tear their hair and rend their clothes and say that placing a jetty on the west side of Trancas Creek would strip Zuma Beach of sand. But looking at Santa Cruz, that isn’t true, as Twin Lakes Beach on the other side of the Harbor has plenty of sand.

A hundred years ago, Mrs. Rindge owned all of it, and could do whatever she wanted: Build a railway, build a dam, build a world class pottery - Mrs. Rindge might have done the obvious and just built a jetty to trap sand and create a barrier to protect Broad Beach.
What was easy then is heresy now, but that could be a fairly simple solution to the ongoing Battle of Broad Beach: Build a 50 yard jetty just west of Trancas Creek, so that sandflow to Zuma isn’t interrupted.

A 50-yard jetty could create a 50 yard sand barrier that not even the mighty ocean would eat away.

Would that jetty strip away sand from Zuma Beach up to Westward Beach?

In the words of Kanye West: “I guess we’ll never know.” Because any attempt to build a jetty at Broad Beach would result in howls of derision from the Coastal Commission and Save the Bay and a couple dozen other organizations and create a court battle somewhere between what Mrs. Rindge went through in Rindge vs. LA County, as heard by the Supreme Court, and what The Edge endured for 14 years when he tried to build five houses on Sweetwater Mesa.

A jetty might just be the solution to Broad Beach’s woes, and the sand to fill it in could come from behind Rindge Dam.

Again, just thinking outside the box here. I guess we'll never know.

PART FOUR  (1312 words)

RESTORE THE STEELHEAD

Everyone seems determined to remove Rindge Dam and restore the steelhead habitat. No one wants to see the steelhead come back more than me and no one hates a dead river more than me. 

When I ride my Ebike from Third Point along Colony Beach in the winter, I always look at where Malibu Creek flows into the sea and do you know what I see? A steelhead creek. Malibu Creek is a steelhead creek with one major flaw: There ain’t no steelhead in it.

Steelhead are a rugged sturdy fish with an Achilles fin. If you mess with their habitat enough they disappear. Which is what has happened on Malibu Creek. That’s a tragedy, and there might not be a solution, but how about this?

Some people argue that Rindge Dam should be kept in place as a historical monument. In this era of Women’s Power, that dam could be a tribute to Mrs. Rindge, a resilient, early-20th Century woman who could have just chucked it all, cashed in an estate worth half a billion dollars in modern money and moved to Paris after her husband died, but instead hung tough, built a railway, and a dam, a famous pottery and battled cattle wrestlers, arsonist, neighbors, squatters and anyone who challenged her up to Uncle Sam

Talk about Girl Power. Mrs. Rindge was gnar. She used the steel from the 15-mile Hueneme, Malibu & Port Los Angeles Railway to fortify the dam. She probably built Rindge Dam to last forever, and maybe she was right.

So if this story isn’t heretical enough, how about this: Remove all the sediment from behind Ridge Dam down to bedrock. But leave the dam up. 

What? 

Reinforce it if it needs reinforcing. Don’t want another San Francisquito disaster that takes out Serra Retreat.

190 MILLION GALLONS OF WATER IS A BIG GULP

Rindge Dam was designed to store 600 acre feet of water.

Do the math: 600 acre feet x 326,000 gallons per acre foot = 195,600,000 gallons of water. That’s a big gulp in a city and a county and a state and a world that is constantly stressing about lack of water.

According to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, “LADWP’s Water System is the nation’s second largest municipal water utility, and serves a population of 3.9 million people within 473 square miles. The Water System supplies approximately 191 billion gallons of water annually and an average of 524 million gallons per day for the 674,000 residential and business water service connections.”

That 524,000,000 gallons of water per day for all of Los Angeles County is a drop in the bucket - so to speak - in the 38,000,000,000 gallons of water California uses - wait for it - every day. Thirty eight billion gallons of water a day.

How much water does Malibu use a day, and a year? According to the LADWP, the average residential use for LA County is 131 gallons per day, so if there are 10,000 people in Malibu, that’s 1,310,000 gallons of water a day for residential use alone, never mind commercial use, landscaping, fire fighting, car washes, gardening, etc.

The Adamson House had a special spigot for “Dam Water” and so could Malibu - probably wouldn’t be good for drinking, but landscaping, toilets, fire fighting, etc.

Create a safe space to land/hover the fire-fighting helicopters in Rindge Reservoir the next time a firestorm breaks out - if that is safe. Gets windy in there.

Could Rindge Dam be shaped into a recreational area for swimming, fishing, standup paddling etc? Probably not. But there are a lot of reservoirs - like Crystal Springs up north - where swimming is kapu.

Steelhead are a lot like Mrs. Rindge: Resilient, proud, sturdy, stubborn. We have already shown how strong steelhead are and how far they can swim.

When I was learning to surf in Santa Cruz in the early 1970s I would walk across the train trestle made famous in the movie The Lost Boys. Looking down the Lagoon of the San Lorenzo River was chock-a-block with salmonids. Steelhead and salmon.

That was then and this is now and the San Lorenzo River isn't quite as barren as Malibu Creek. I would love to see Malibu Lagoon chockablock with steelhead fiending to head up stream and spawn. I’m sure it was that way a hundred years ago.

Leaving Rindge Dam up would block access to Malibu Creek above the reservoir: But do the steelhead really need that?

A SINGLE’S BAR FOR SPAWNING SALMONIDS

So it’s a cakewalk for steelhead to swim all the way to Thousand Oaks or wherever the tributaries of Malibu Creek lead - but they don’t have to. Why not turn the area at the base of Rindge Dam into a customized steelhead spawning area. 

A single’s bar for salmonids, if you will.

To paraphrase that vulgar Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz who got fired in the 1970s, all steelhead need are loose gravel, steady water flow and a clean place to breed. It would be an excellent community project to build that habitat at the base of Rindge Dam and then restore - if that word isn’t poison by now - the lower three miles of Malibu Creek from Rindge Dam down to Serra Retreat. Clean it, scrape it, remove all the crashed cars, dead bodies, shopping carts, marijuana hoses and God knows what other accumulated gack is down there. 

Clear a path for that cool, clear water to flow down and the steelhead to swim up.

Three miles from Malibu Lagoon to the base of Rindge Dam is a sprint for a steelhead - a fish that can swim three to 24 miles a day. They could get ‘er done in a day or two, procreate, then head back to the deep and dark blue ocean to continue dodging sea lions and orca and whatever other perils are out there - and get stronger to return again.

RENEWABLE ENERGY: H20 IS THE GO

Still here? Not calling your lawyers and/or The Sierra Club and/or Trout Unlimited yet?

 Then how about after removing all that sediment and restoring Rindge Dam and filling the reservoir with all that cool clear water and creating an artificial steelhead habitat at the base of Rindge Dam - why not add a hydroelectric plant?

Make Malibu renewable. RenewaBu!

Norway and Uruguay both have 98% renewable grids, mostly from hydroelectric energy. It works. So if Malibu really wants to be progressive, how about building a small-scale hydroelectric plant at the base of Rindge Dam and put all that potential energy to good use.

I suck at math as bad or worse than I stuck at catching steelhead with a fly.  I have questions for a hydrodynamical engineer:

1. How much potential energy is stored in 190,000,000 gallons of water with a drop of about 80 feet. 

2. How long would it take to fill Rindge Reservoir to the brim with 190,000,000 gallons of water? A tremendous amount of water flows down Malibu Creek when it rains around here. Would one gully-washer storm fill it up that fast? A year? Two years?

3. What would be the ideal hydroelectric plant to place at the base of Rindge Dam, and could it be built to one side, where the spillway is now?

4. Is there a similar medium-scale hydro plant in California or somewhere that would be similar to Rindge Dam?

5. What is the cost/benefit of building a hydroelectric plant at the base of Rindge Dam?

6. How much would it cost?

7. How much energy would it produce? How much energy does Malibu use?

8. How much of Malibu’s energy needs would that small hydro plant provide?

Does Pepperdine have a School of Engineering? Sic them on this. Cool project.

HOW MUCH POTENTIAL ELECTRICAL ENERGY IS STORED IN A 100,000,000-GALLON RESERVOIR WITH A 50-FOOT DROP?

Where Rindge Dam could store as much as 190,000,000 gallons with a 100-foot drop, we conservatively asked Chat GPT how much potential electrical energy is stored in a reservoir with 100,000,00 gallons of water and a 50-foot drop.