By Doug Curlee | Editor at Large

Entire region asking permission to clean channels and creeks

The first round of what may be many rounds of El Nino-created storms this winter did exactly what we knew it would; cause massive flooding in all the areas where heavy rains always cause flooding.

The Alvarado Creek running through Grantville had a lot of cleanout done previously by the city of San Diego and the Metropolitan Transit System, but a lot wasn’t nearly enough.

Once again, businesses along Mission Gorge Road and Mission Gorge Place were inundated with water and mud, almost as though nothing had been done.

Property owner Dan Smith helped his tenants clean out the area and is more than a little frustrated.

“It happened so fast, and there was so much water, that none of the cleanup really does this area any good. The real problem is under the bridge over the creek at the Mission Gorge Road off-ramp from the [Interstate] 8.”

We’ve been talking a lot about Alvarado Creek in the past months, but it’s far from the only problem that needs to be attacked, and quickly.

Every mayor in San Diego county is worried about the possibility –– perhaps inevitability –– of massive flooding if the El Nino experts say is coming actually arrives.

There are creeks and channels all over the county, many of them in San Diego, that will flood when the rains come, and all of them did so.

From the Tijuana River Valley to the Orange County line, there are creeks and channels that will flood with even normal rains. Now that El Nino is hitting, those channels are simply overwhelmed, bringing property damage and injury, and possibly death, to people caught in the path of the waters.

The county’s mayors, along with Supervisors’ chairman Bill Horn, sent a letter to the governor, asking for a complete suspension of all state environmental laws governing what can be done to clean out clogged and blocked channels before the floodwaters hit.

They are not likely to get all of what they want, and they are not likely to get that help quickly.

Kelly Huston of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services said, “Any such requests are usually handled after the fact of flooding and damages, not before or during. There’s a chance that emergency waivers could be granted for some things, but that won’t happen fast.”

Dave Gibson, head of the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, said an emergency declaration from the governor is seldom a blanket order, like the mayors want.

“It’s not like the order will simply waive all the environmental laws. Each individual case will probably be considered, and decisions made depending on what the needs of the individual agency are. It’ll be left up to the agencies to ask for what they need, and we’ll see what happens. What the emergency proclamation will do is drastically speed up the process of getting applications processed by us and the other state agencies involved in the process.” Gibson said.

“What now can take months might be accomplished in weeks, or even days, if it’s a true emergency. Bodies like the Coastal Commission, for example, will be able to move quickly to okay permits to do work quickly. We’re ready to move as soon as the order is issued.”

Governor Brown is the only person who could order state laws suspended. Gibson said he suspects such a proclamation is right now sitting on the governor’s desk, with blanks to be filled in as needed. He thinks there’s also an executive order waiving legal responsibility on the part of local agencies.

Such a proclamation from the governor would accomplish quite a bit, but it would not affect the federal agencies concerned with the environment. To suspend the federal laws, Governor Brown would have to get help, likely from the White House. That may be difficult, but it could happen.

What that federal declaration would do is open up the possibility of cleaning out much of the blockage in San Diego’s two biggest flood control channels –– the San Diego River and the Tijuana River Valley. That would come under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which says it’s ready to help, having seen what has happened in the past in Mission Valley and Tijuana Valley and other stretches of the river.

So, who needs help?

La Mesa public works director Greg Humora says La Mesa itself doesn’t have a major flood threat from its part of Alvarado Creek, but that other agencies in the area do.

“Actually, CalTrans has probably the biggest problem in our area, because of the water that drains off the freeways through our area. Other area agencies have their problems, too, but La Mesa is in pretty good shape”, Humora says.

Some Alvarado Creek supporters might take issue with that, but Humora is standing fast on his appraisal.

San Diego State University and the Metropolitan Transit System own part of the Alvarado Creek problem, too.

SDSU doesn’t plan any immediate remediation work right now. MTS actually did hire the Urban Corps to clean out about 900 feet of the creek in the Mission Gorge-Mission Gorge Place area of Grantville, but absent an emergency declaration, all the Corps could do was what could be accomplished with hand tools.

It looks a lot better than it did a month ago, but it doesn’t work a lot better. It needs more work with some heavy equipment.

Gibson’s belief is that it’ll take some severe storms and flood threat to cause the governor to issue that emergency proclamation.

If the weather forecasters are correct about even more El Nino storms, we might see that proclamation soon.

We don’t have it yet, though.

We might get it if there are some more rains like we just, had, but it’s not guaranteed. What is guaranteed is that more rains will flood Mission Valley and the Tijuana River bed, just as they always do.

We’ve seen it too many times.

––Doug Curlee is Editor-At-Large. Write to him at [email protected].