California voters on Tuesday approved Proposition 84, a $5.4 billion bond measure for clean water and coastal protection that I would have pushed hard for were I not playing journalist these days. And I was worried about it -- 84 had been polling inauspiciously.
Coincidentally, the story I wrote about Jessica Hall and her search for L.A.'s buried streams is on the cover this week. Money from 84 could go to some of the projects discussed in this story: It's been earmarked for projects that prevent toxic runoff from entering the ocean -- which in many ways means returning natural waterways to as close to their natural state as possible. Nature already did what infrastructure continually fails to do. I began researching this story thinking that Hall's ambitions were sort of far off and visionary, but over the six months I spent figuring it out, daylighting streams began to seem like an utterly sensible way to fix our urban water problems. I'm hoping people get that from the story.
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Wait a minute - I see my name in print!
Thanks, Judith, for carrying the torch on this subject. Of course I have to chime in - your early impressions have validity - there are many places where daylighting is technically daunting, but, as you noted, there are other areas where daylighting a buried creek is relatively easy. Here's a few of the technically "easier" ones:
-Lafayette Park, Wilshire and Hoover
-Lincoln Park, the former Arroyo de las Pasas on the Eastside, near Mission and Valley
-Edward Vincent Park, Centinela Creek's headwaters, in Inglewood
-in Long Beach, where "Willow Gulch" is being incorporated into a ballfields plan. Through extensive community environmental input, this will include a stream feature - hopefully the daylighted stream. I've not read the latest environmental documents to verify that.
-Ladera County Park, near Slauson and La Brea. This was a tributary to Centinela.
-Sycamore Grove Park, the North Branch of the Arroyo Seco, at Figueroa and Sycamore Terrace
-Chester Washington Golf Course, Devil's Dip Creek, at El Segundo near Western Ave
-Brentwood Country Club, Kenter Creek
So many of our roads - or stretches of them - were creeks. Hard to imagine us doing without roads. Yet Portland ditched one or two miles of an expressway for River revitalization efforts, and Seoul, South Korea, in perhaps the most radical of stream daylightings, removed part of a freeway through a dense downtown area! So even my wildest ideas are within the realm of the possible in other places. Personally, I'd be happy if we could just agree to ditch a few parking spaces alongside existing concrete channels to regain floodplains.
Posted on January 23, 2007 8:01 PM by Jessica Hall