This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Folks Still Pointing Fingers Over the 2010 Flood

The $14 million Sirous & Sons rug gallery lawsuit against the city is ridiculous. Rejection of the 2002 flood control project was the smart choice.

The blame game continues over the December 2010 flooding of Laguna Canyon and the downtown business district.

Looking for a deep pocket, we now have a local business, Sirous & Sons, that knew better. They should have protected their store themselves and are now suing the city for $14 million.

In December of 2010, there were a lot of knee-jerk reactions by those directly affected, but you can’t fault egreged people in the midst of a damaging calamity when venting out of frustration and loss is intuited. You can fault Sirous & Sons for erroneously typifying the primary causal factors and filing a totally bogus lawsuit.

Find out what's happening in Laguna Beachwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

There was also finger-pointing towards City Hall back in 2002 when the council voted to reject a county-funded improvement. Unfortunately that project barely improved flood control capacity or other structural conditions that lead to these periodic calamities. The proposal had no expectation of even coming close to meeting the industry-mandated standard of a minimum 100-year flood protection.

And I know about fingers. Cheryl Kinsman, a Laguna Beach City Councilmember at the time, wagged hers and chastised me vigorously in chambers back then.

Find out what's happening in Laguna Beachwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Our city’s task force created after the December deluge didn’t completely divulge and didn’t fully explain the true historical context regarding why that project 10 years ago was rejected. The committee did get the conclusive elements correct: It had the ironic potential of becoming an environmental disaster while being implemented, more alarmingly a fiscal black hole for our city that could have driven it into a fiscal quagmire.

In a déjà vu moment, the only one who got it partially right when the 2010 flooding occurred was Kinsman, who, in a local online media outlet, blamed me as the ringleader of an ad hoc group that successfully lobbied the council to reject the project in 2002.

Just to set the record straight, Kinsman’s quoted memory is faulty: We never promised to come back later with a 100% guaranteed solution. In fact, our presented conclusions, I think reflected in the minutes, were identical to what our city task force concluded in their report to the council: Unless someone can magically levitate ALL of downtown (historically a floodplain) about 10-15 feet, then instantly plop it back down fully intact and functional, Broadway itself is the only overflow device alternative. The environmental and financial aspects I’ve mentioned were commensurate with the findings of the task force, and became our main focus in late 2001.

The four-man ad hoc I convened was composed of now-deceased hydrology/wastewater engineer and head of the Laguna Beach Taxpayer's Association Gary Alstot; Coastal Engineer for the Surfrider Foundation, Rick Wilson; plus the top water quality engineer for the Exxon/Mobil petrochemical plant in Torrance, who was at that time on the board of my activist non-governmental organization, Clean Water Now. I’ll leave his name out of it—I’m sure he and his family don’t need the harassment.

The city report issued recently doesn’t have the details that I can now clarify, but maybe the plaintiffs will want to add some fingers and our names to their litigation?

Mea culpa—I was the one in late 2001 who rang the alarm bell in town when I realized that we were on the verge of a very big mistake. I quickly organized a pretty savvy group of experts after reading the final environmental impact report (EIR) and investigating the far-reaching ramifications of the agenda bill before the council.

In the city’s haste to get the $10 million from the county upfront, the eventual costs were murky, indeterminate, and could stretch into the tens of millions—way, way beyond the $1.8 million our city was budgeting.

Yes, the disruption and inconvenience to downtown businesses and the traffic nightmares were part of my group’s concerns. Tearing up downtown couldn’t be done in or around the summer, our peak season, without serious revenue impacts—and it was estimated that it could take at least two off-season stages (October-April), which put us into the rainy season for each phase. As these periods are unpredictable, a few consecutive El Niños could have prolonged the disruption beyond two years, possibly even three or four. No one knew.

While the section rehab at Main Beach was taking place, Coast Highway traffic would not only be jammed, but adjacent arteries too. We’d finally have our own smog. Coast Highway travel would be diverted up and onto the beach side near the boardwalk for several blocks, perhaps for months.

Like a store, if you break it, you buy it. Remediation is no different—whoever breaks ground is on the hook to clean up the subterranean mess. According to the Final EIR generated by county flood control and the US Army Corps of Engineers I read, the groundwater and soil where the project was to take place (Forest Ave. to the Pacific Ocean) were highly contaminated with a gamut of pollutants, mostly petrochemical in origin.

The culprits? Our own fuel reservoir near City Hall, the abandoned 10,000-gallon emergency diesel tank below the old GTE annex building, plus all of the former and current service stations at Coast Highway and Broadway. I write "current" because MTBE, a Volatile Organic Compound (VOC) now banned, was and still is in the aquifer. It was an additive that due to its chemical properties and dilution dynamics, it disperses (unfortunately) very well through fluid media like water.

It was marketed by Exxon/Mobil to increase octane after lead was banished, and that corporation’s station is still sitting there today. Having one of their top engineers assisting the ad hoc as a concerned private citizen was critical in source-tracking the origins of that particular contaminant, not to mention professional expertise in remediation costs and logistics.

Now maybe locals have a better understanding of why several lots in Laguna have never been developed below ground level:

  1. The big corner parcel in North Laguna near Crescent Bay, at the corner of Cliff Dr. and Coast Hwy., was a gas station, or Retail Gas Outlet (RGO).
  2. The lot at Fairview and Coast Highway was also an RGO. Now you understand why that FOR SALE sign might sit there awhile.
  3. The lot south of , where Montage Resort employees park their cars, was once a Union 76 station. It too was never developed as a commercial space with subterranean parking because of the enormous costs due to full remediation logistical elements, hence they just covered it up with gravel.
  4. And who can forget the infamous, hastily abandoned Texaco station on the ocean side corner of Pearl and Coast Highway, the one that sat dormant for years after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) closed it down? The amount of fuel that seeped downgrade and oozed out of the beach bluffs below was a natural tiki torch at night for locals with a match—that’s how bad it was.

 

In all four cases, locals need to look to the hills as groundwater replenishment sources as well as simple transport devices. RGOs are some of the most difficult—at times the most expensive—to remediate, subjects of ongoing significant EPA fines to this day. Residents should understand that the incredible volume of groundwater beneath their feet exerts huge amounts of pressure as gravity and sub-surface composition (especially porosity) facilitate the inevitable watery march to the sea. The perched sub-surface water acts as a conveyor belt and contaminants hitchhike along with it.

Now consider the million of gallons of contaminated water and adjacent soil beneath downtown Laguna Beach—it’s all four of them to the nth power. All of that water AND adjacent contaminated soil would need to be remediated—in this case purged, cleansed and/or physically removed offsite, disallowing or minimizing any exposure to the atmosphere or receiving water (Pacific Ocean) discharges. The hundreds of cubic yards of soil that couldn’t be cleaned on the spot would need to be carted away to a hazardous waste landfill.

And folks, that’s expensive. 

A stand-alone wastewater treatment facility needed to be installed for the duration to reduce and/or remove Pollutants of Concern (POCs) down to acceptable regulatory levels before cartage or transport offsite took place. That’s a very, very expensive strategy. Any volumes that couldn’t be cleaned of carcinogens would go basically God-Knows-Where, to whoever would take them, maybe contaminating some destination acreage in Nevada next to that nuclear waste.

The huge mounds of soil were to be de-watered (dried out) at the Act V lot for both health and weight-reduction purposes, tying up that critical parking for six months every year during destruction and reconstruction. Cartage fees alone would be humongous. The large trucks constantly circulating downtown would also clog up Canyon traffic, not to mention belching diesel fumes that would settle on the residences in the low spots, as gases do.

Downtown is also a mixing zone of fresh and mineral-laden saltwater drainages, and after every significant rainy event, after every extreme high tide, the aquifer is replenished (recharged osmotically) from both upstream and oceanic subterranean sources. This means that the contaminants are redistributed and re-dispersed over and over, in this case maybe in an infinite loop.

Because of the toxic constituents of the contaminated aquifer, diversion to the South Orange County Wastewater Authority (SOCWA) Coastal Treatment Plant in Aliso Canyon was unacceptable to Cal/EPA. Then, too, our city system couldn’t transport the potential volumes each day that pumping out required anyway. No one had solved that quandary in the final EIR.

So, as the project progressed, the Gordian Knot of contaminants would be moving targets—might become reduced in the short term, but could keep getting reinserted and redistributed in an endless cycle as the aquifer constantly refilled. You can see the same effect by digging a hole in the sand at the beach far from the water: The groundwater refills the hole as the up-gradient land sources migrate towards the low point—the ocean. Simple hydraulics.

As the lead agency, we would have to fund the balance of the costs until the project was signed off as completed. No one ever created a good risk benefit analysis, but it didn’t take that proverbial rocket scientist to wonder if the trenching and subterranean excavations might add to our woes and become catastrophes unto themselves. One serious cave-in could have cost lives, buildings could have collapsed/settled, and I’m sure the personal injury attorneys would have had a field day picking our pockets empty on that one. As for insurance, we underwrite ourselves as far as I know.

The serious timeline setbacks, civil court proceedings and injunctions over such unfortunate, unexpected calamities or problems would also have made costs soar. Our City Engineer Steve May stated at the Laguna Beach City Council hearing back in 2002 that we might get some outside financial help, but no one ever put that Pollyanna guarantee in writing, so we were still on the hook to pay the remainder of the bill.

Translation: Between the rain falling directly onto the downtown district during the project and the groundwater constantly recharging (resulting in unknown costs for remediation), what looked all bright and shiny and full of promise was in fact a dangerous gamble, with no defined price tag or date-specific endgame.

No favorite of city hall, I once again commend the 2002 council: You listened to reason, you heeded expert testimony and—though poised on the verge of approval—you wisely pulled back from a fiscal precipice that could have impacted and jeopardized every capital improvement project subsequently in Laguna Beach, and might have even sent us into a financial fugue, spiral, or verge of bankruptcy.

I’m still convinced that my unpaid ad hoc group did the right thing at the time. There were too many unknowable final expenses for the city, and it was beyond mere human speculation, more akin to Russian roulette.

In my field, Economic Feasibility and Technological Possibility are legitimate measuring devices. This project was nebulous, the devil WAS in the details that weren’t being fully addressed or appraised, and it evaded the use of either analytical tool anyway.

There is irony here because Cheryl Kinsman—a bean-counting Certified Public Accountant, a fiscal conservative who trumpets budgetary prudence by governance—still wanted to proceed and roll the dice with this city’s future fiscal health. This was, and still is, shooting the messenger.

We didn’t expect a medal for our intervention, but neither did we expect to be subsequently vilified for being conscientious and looking out for our community’s best interests. We just stepped up, unpaid, and contributed our knowledge to the dialogue about a potentially serious and significant risk to a place we love.

So I look forward to the knock at my door with a subpoena, and go ahead, blame me.

Roger E. Bütow is a builder of both residential and commercial projects in Laguna Beach, residing here since 1972. He’s also a 15-year environmental consultant in South OC specializing in hydrology and water quality.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?