Residents in one Laguna Canyon neighborhood hard hit by a 100-year flood in 2010 are taking hard-earned lessons from one disaster to prepare for another.
“If you look at my door you can see some discoloration where the water level reached,” said John Albritton, whose home was inundated by an overflowing creek, partly blocked by a shipping container and a Porsche washed into the watercourse.
“Unfortunately, five years later from a storm water management perspective, our neighborhood and the city are still at the mercy of poor run-off controls,” he said.
Touring the Sun Valley Drive neighborhood five years removed from flooding caused by a stalled storm cell, residents are understandably unnerved by this winter’s storm predictions. Walking up some 300 yards from Albritton’s property, the excavated remains of a private dump that contributed to the blockages and flooding along Sun Valley now blends into the terrain of the surrounding canyon walls. “The city did a great job when they assumed control of this area and cleaned it up,” said Albritton, though he pointed out that many other measures suggested in the aftermath of the 2010 flood remain uncompleted.
Another Sun Valley Drive homeowner, Olivia Batchelder, already has amassed sandbags along her property line in preparation for the coming rains. “Huge amounts of water, knee high, took out our lawn in 2010,” she said. Her house also filled with water and sediment. “We could not move back in for four months.”
In preparation for a predicted wet winter, Batchelder installed custom-built wooden floodgates, which she says can protect from water rising as much as 30 inches. “When the wood gets wet it forms a tight seal,” she said. Additionally, she is designing a faux dry creek in her yard that will act as a functioning swale to hold back the real creek if it overflows at the border of her property.
Sandbags are commonplace around the homes, stacked to different heights and designs all with the intention of keeping water at bay. “A neighbor, Scott Hamilton, who got an enormous amount of water in 2010, has sandbags stacked four high,” said Batchelder.
Retired veterinarian John Hammel, who owns the Animal Hospital on Laguna Canyon Road near Sun Valley Drive, is also getting ready. “I have been through a lot of flooding events,” he said. “We have tried a number of things, but also came up with the simplest solution. We place heavy duty plastic on all the doors, secure it with plywood and then sand bag it. Very little water gets in; it’s darn near waterproof.”
Sun Valley Drive residents and four other homeowner groups that comprise the Canyon Alliance of Neighborhoods Defense Organization (CANDO) all recognize the potential impact of an overflowing creek as well as run-off flowing along the inclining Laguna Canyon Road, off canyon walls and from the Laguna Coast Wilderness Park.
“So what you have here is a confluence of many upstream canyons where all the water ultimately bottlenecks in the neighborhood of Sun Valley Drive,” said Larry Fanning, a Costa Mesa engineer and geologist who has worked on several projects in Laguna Beach. “This is a natural drainage area; it is the perfect storm.”
CANDO representatives met with the city’s emergency operations coordinator, Jordan Villwock, and code enforcement supervisor Fred Fix in September to discuss steps they have personally taken to prevent a repeat of 2010. “The meeting was productive and we discussed what the property owners have been doing to ensure that the creek area is free of debris,” said Albritton.
Last month, Villwock also tested the city’s readiness to cope with a flood during a three-hour drill where personnel played out their roles in the city’s emergency operations center. “The functional exercise strives for realism, short of actual deployment of equipment and personnel,” Villwock said.
What steps residents can take to protect themselves from El Nino flooding will be presented in a 6 p.m. workshop Thursday, Nov. 5 at the Susi Q Center, 380 Third St. Meteorologist Alex Tardy will describe the latest El Nino forecast.
Much like Batchelder’s floodgates, city officials also encouraged merchants on Monday, Oct. 26, to take time to learn to set up their own storm doors in order to protect their businesses. “Flood gates are fairly simple to install and the idea of the day is to simply remind business owners that they have the devices and to train their employees on how to use them,” Community Development Director Greg Pfost said.
With the flood of 2010 and other El Niño years, managers of local businesses appear battle ready. “We have employees who know what to do,” said Susan Van Eerdan, manager of Laguna Drug. “We have the gates at every entrance and are very savvy at putting them up.”
Ed Leatherwood, manager of Coast Hardware, indicated the same sentiment. “We have multiple people here seven days a week who can put up the gates. We have a lot of experience,” he said.
The solutions to protect Sun Valley Drive from flooding are less straightforward and involve expensive infrastructure improvements and different agencies.
Based on the region’s geology, “no one should be surprised that flooding occurs in an area where a road exists where a river was in the Pleistocene era,” said Fanning. Retention walls, basins and check dams could make a significant difference in preventing another inundation in canyon neighborhoods, he said, suggested improvements all raised in the wake of the 2010 flood. “These have the effect of slowing the water and limiting the rate and timing,” he said. Additionally, expanding catch basin capacity along El Toro Road “can divert water and reduce the speed of the flows,” he said.
But not in time for this winter.
Even if Sun Valley residents manage to escape El Niño rains without serious damage, Albritton contends that, “We need to be pro-active on flood control planning and deal with our lack of run-off controls.”
