Myths of the Los Angeles River
U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson on Wednesday declared the entire concrete-lined Los Angeles River channel "traditional navigable waters," a designation crucial to applying Clean Water Act protections throughout its 834-square-mile urban watershed. "We're moving away from the concrete," Jackson told more than 200 residents and government officials on the banks of one of the river's heavily polluted tributaries, Compton Creek.
Los Angeles Times: July 8, 2010
Film buffs might recognize the Los Angeles River as the gigantic concrete gutter used for car chases in "Grease," "Terminator 2" and other movies. But the river is something else for U.S. EPA: "a traditional navigable water." EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's declaration of the cement-lined channel today as "navigable" is aimed at allowing her agency to enforce Clean Water Act protections throughout the river's 834-square-mile watershed.
New York Times: July 9, 2010
The decision by EPA is an effective veto of an earlier finding by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that one four mile stretch of the Los Angeles River qualified as such. The Corps, due to complicated reasons (that make little sense), normally determines which waters in the country are protected by federal Clean Water Act. The recognition after a careful analysis by EPA that the LA River meets the mark as a "traditional" river is good news for rivers in the West. Recent Supreme Court decisions have cast some doubt on whether western rivers and their tributaries, which sometimes naturally have little water, are deserving of federal clean water protection.
Natural Resources Defense Council: July 8, 2010
There was a time when the Los Angeles River ran freely along a flooded plain, and the lands surrounding it were lush and fertile. It was the primary water source for the Los Angeles basin, the reason our city was able to grow and thrive. Now, as you all know, the river is barricaded by concrete, stifled by pollution, and surrounded by skyscrapers, highways, and traffic. It doesn't have to be this way. Today marks a historic step in our efforts to return the LA River to its former glory. It was my honor to be with Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to announce that the EPA now views the river as a national resource.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa: July 7, 2010
Reporters, urban explorers and environmentalists have been canoeing down the Los Angeles River since at least 1958, often as a jaw-dropping stunt to draw attention to the contrast between concrete jungle and undeterred nature along the waterway.
LA Weekly: July 8, 2010
Cliches have to start somewhere: Rafting (or canoeing, kayaking, etc) the Los Angeles River is one of the old standby L.A. feature stories that some journalist will propose every few years, thinking it's a fresh idea. Charlie LeDuff of the New York Times was the last to try that I recall, and he got in a little trouble. Anyway, Larry Harnisch at The Daily Mirror posts the evidence that reporter Charles Hillinger and a photographer did it for the Times way back in 1958.
LA Observed: April 29 2008
The question of whether the Los Angeles River is a river or not, and of what constitutes a river, has sparked a debate that has reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and could well determine whether miles of river-adjacent land in Los Angeles are made more green, or more asphalted, in the coming decades. . . . (O)pinions connected to a 2006 ruling by the Supreme Court, in a case titled Rapanos vs. United States, added two new legal definitions that waterways must fit in order to earn Clean Water Act protection. According to Joan Mulhern, an attorney for Earth Justice, Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion added the term "traditional" to the "navigable waterway" phrase. In a separate opinion written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court removed the automatic protection of "tributaries" from the act, requiring the Army Corps of Engineers to study whether a tributary being proposed for protection has a "significant nexus" with the waterway it feeds. "If all of the tributaries that are feeding into the river aren't protected, then of course the river becomes more polluted," says Mulhern. She says the real "game" afoot is an effort to remove from protection parts of the L.A. River that are already polluted so that they needn't be cleaned up, as well as to strip protections from areas "where somebody is proposing to fill in and destroy streams for development purposes."
LA Weekly: July 31, 2008
A bad flood at Los Angeles: Owing to a heavy rain-storm, telegraphic communication with Southern California has been interrupted since Sunday night. Dispatches received last evening . . . state that a dam on the Los Angeles River broke Sunday night, producing the most disastrous flood ever experienced. The lower part of the city was completely inundated, and 40 buildings were swept away. Hundreds of families were obliged to abandon their homes and seek shelter on the hills.
New York Times: February 21, 1884
Early Thursday morning there was a cloud burst in the mountains, and the Los Angeles River rose with frightening rapidity, going two feet above the flood of 1884.
New York Times: January 24, 1886
Your story is false. This levee question concerns the whole city of Los Angeles and strangers should know it that this whole city is liable to an inundation in the future that will embrace even the business blocks of our best streets unless we wall up and properly control the Los Angeles river
Letter to the editor, Los Angeles Times: October 2, 1886
Having thus secured a large body of land which is at the mercy of the Los Angeles River, (the developers) went to Council and said: "Gentlemen, it is a necessity that the west bank of the river be securely leveed. At present the lack of a levee exposes many hundreds of homes to yearly danger of flooding."
Los Angeles Times: June 6, 1887
The heavy rain of the past few days continued last night, and the levees on the Los Angeles River have broken through in a half a dozen places.
New York Times: December 27, 1889
A submerged dam in due time will be placed in the Los Angeles River, which will be the means of affording motive power for many large manufacturing plants.
Los Angeles Times: January 1, 1891
A gold-mining company for the purpose of working the bed of the Los Angeles River has been organized, and claims covering over 100 acres of river bed have been located and recorded. The company feels confident that placer mining will be successful.
Los Angeles Times: September 24 1897
Some seed trout have been distributed In the Arroyo Seco but not at the Los Angeles end of that raging torrent. Were trout to be sown at the Junction of the Arroyo and the Los Angeles River they would wear their scales to a frazzle hunting for water.
Letter to the editor, Los Angeles Times: August 7, 1903
(The city's) corporate territory is situated on the Los Angeles River, an unnavigable stream which rises in the San Fernando Valley.
California State Supreme Court Reports: LOS ANGELES v. HUNTER, 156 Cal. 603 (December, 1909)
Over 100 Homes Destroyed: More than one hundred homes were destroyed in Los Angeles alone by the torrents that rushed through the Los Angeles River and the Arroyo Seco. Long Beach is cut off from communication with cities in the north by a new channel which the Los Angeles River has cut for itself across the Long Reach Railroad just north of the los Cerritos bridge. This channel is more than 100 feet wide at present.
Los Angeles Times: February 21 and 28, 1914
Long Beach residents forced to use boats: Tonight residents in the vicinity north of State Street and west of American Avenue telephoned that the Los Angeles River, full from bank to bank, had turned their neighborhood into a vast lake. It was impossible to pass Willow, Hill, State and other streets running east and west.
Los Angeles Times: January 30, 1915
The head of a woman, whose headless armless and legless body was found in the Los Angeles River April 4, was discovered partly imbedded in the quicksands of the river bottom at Florence Avenue in Bell yesterday.
Los Angeles Times: May 19, 1929
"The Los Angeles River," he laughed. 'Well, well, well. Don't you feel that you re mighty presumptuous to call that dusty place down there a river?"
Los Angeles Times: June 14, 1931
In the brush which lines the banks of the Los Angeles River, under the mud banks of washed over streets and against houses, bodies were found and identified. Ordinarily a dry arroyo, the Los Angeles River at the height of the flood was a raging torrent.
Los Angeles Times: January 1, 1934
The Los Angeles River, usually little more than a dry wash, was carrying 18,000 second-feet of water. Evacuation of homes was necessary in a section of Long Beach when flood waters reached a depth of four feet and in many cases reached the window sills of first floors.
Los Angeles Times: February 15, 1937
Construction of flood-control protection walls along the upper reaches of the Los Angeles River, costing approximately $6,500,000, will begin about July 1 by United States Army engineers, according to information received yesterday by the Board of Supervisors.
Los Angeles Times: June 17, 1937
Bids for construction of the $7,000,000 Sepulveda Dam and reservoir have been called for by the War Department. Closing date for the offers is December 14 at noon in the office of Lieut. Col. Edwin C Kelton of the United States Engineer Corps.
Los Angeles Times: November 19, 1939
Farther ahead in the race to whip floods, man has improved on Dame Nature's handiwork on the Los Angeles River as far south as Huntington Park. Thence, on the US engineers' long-range charts, the artery becomes a mere dotted line.
Los Angeles Times: July 28, 1947
Hard on the heels of Supervisor Raymond V. Darby's suggested use of the Los Angeles River as a high-speed highway came Supervisor Leonard J. Roach's proposal yesterday that a 15,000-foot length of the river area be made into a $38,600,000 downtown airport.
Los Angeles Times: August 23, 1947
Basically, the Los Angeles area gets its water from three sources-the Los Angeles River, the Owens River Aqueduct and the Colorado River Aqueduct.
Los Angeles Times: July 10, 1949
Automobile traffic was light along the concrete bed of the Los Angeles River yesterday after authorities complained that motorists were using it as "a poor man s freeway." City Councilmen were told that drivers trying to beat the traffic on the Arroyo Seco Freeway.
Los Angeles Times: July 23, 1954
Open Sewage Perils Children, Uhl Warns: This was the warning given yesterday by City Health Officer George M. Uhl, who said the Los Angeles River, Ballona Creek and other waterways are the "playgrounds" of thousands of children who are too young to realize the grave menace to their health.
Los Angeles Times: March 28, 1955
Flood control work on the Los Angeles River will be completed in 1958, it was reported yesterday by Col. Arthur H. Frye Jr., Los Angeles District Engineer, Corps of Army Engineers.
Los Angeles Times: Feb 22, 1956
About 24% of Los Angeles' water came from the Los Angeles River underground basin and other local sources, 69% from the city-owned Los Angeles Owens River Aqueduct from the High Sierras, about 7% from the Colorado River Aqueduct of the Metropolitan Water District.
Los Angeles Times: September 4, 1956
This includes the 50-mile Los Angeles River paving, recently finished after 23 years at a cost of $101,000,000,
Los Angeles Times: April 2, 1958
In 1769 an expedition from Mexico under Gaspar de Portola halted near what is now the Los Angeles River. Father Juan Crespi noted in his diary, "It has good land for planting all kinds of grain and seeds and is the most suitable site of all that we have seen for a mission."
Los Angeles Times: April 26, 1959
The image on this page was taken by flickr user Joel Carranza. It is used under a Creative Commons License.