Winding Its Way Through Trouble : Ballona Creek Has a Storied Past, but It’s the Polluted Present That’s the Problem

“We came across a grove of very large (trees), high and thick, from which flows a stream. The banks were grassy and covered with fragrant herbs and watercress. . . . We pitched camp near the water.”

--Explorer Juan Crespi, observing La Ballona Creek, near present-day La Cienega Boulevard, in 1769

From its underground “headwaters” in the Mid-City district to its mouth in the Pacific Ocean near Marina del Rey, Ballona Creek is the most disparaged body of water in Los Angeles.

Transformed by public works projects spanning half a century, the 9.1-mile stream that Juan Crespi described in his journal meanders through residential neighborhoods, past grimy factories and beneath busy thoroughfares on its way to the sea.

Unlike graceful canals in Amsterdam and San Antonio, the concrete-lined Ballona serves as a gargantuan gutter, draining 126 square miles of storm-water runoff between Downtown Los Angeles and the coast.

In heavy rains, such as last week’s, the creek pours up to 10 billion gallons of water a day into the ocean--enough to fill the Forum in Inglewood 33 times.

And the runoff, unfortunately, is not simply water. It’s a toxic mix that includes oils from the vehicles we drive, household chemicals, yard waste, illegal and accidental spills from businesses and industrial plants--indeed anything that lands in any of more than 100,000 street gutters or enters the 315 miles of drainage channels that serve as the creek’s tributaries.

A recent study by the American Oceans Campaign found significant levels of at least 50 toxic chemicals consistently present in the creek, including several carcinogens.

“We think that may be the tip of the iceberg,” said Robert Sulnick, the environmental group’s executive director, who says further chemical testing of the creek’s contents is desperately needed.

*

Ironically, much of the creek’s negative public image stems largely from a problem that may no longer exist.

Nine times during the past seven years, partially treated sewage discharged into the creek by the city of Los Angeles led to much-publicized beach closures by county health officials. The largest of the spills--66 million gallons--occurred on a single day in 1992.

Last summer, after a false start the year before, the city finally placed into service a new sewer line that is expected to render major spills a thing of the past.

That’s the good news. Environmentalists say that even with the sewer problem apparently solved, Ballona Creek remains the largest source of pollution for Santa Monica Bay.

Now, as federal, state and local officials grapple with how best to combat storm-water pollution in what has rapidly become a new frontier in the effort to clean up rivers, lakes and urban waterways, Ballona Creek again figures prominently.

“The creek is symptomatic of a national problem,” said Mark Gold, staff biologist with Heal the Bay. The Santa Monica environmental group has made La Ballona a centerpiece in its call for more stringent water quality standards.

Despite its environmental shortcomings, Ballona still holds an allure for many.

Joggers and sweethearts stroll its banks at Culver City and Playa del Rey. Rowdy teen-agers claim its subterranean tributaries north of the Santa Monica Freeway as turf.

As unlikely as it may seem, there are even recreational users.

Fishermen cast from the Pacific Avenue Bridge at Playa del Rey despite warnings against eating anything caught there.

“The fish look pretty good to me,” Michael Smith, a regular at the bridge, said on a recent afternoon, showing off half a dozen smelt he had reeled in.

*

Not far upstream, where rowing teams from UCLA ply the murky waters for practice and competition, women’s team coach Andrew Morrow appeared resigned.

“There’s really no other place we can go,” he explained. “It’s a long commute to Castaic Lake.”

Long before it became an urban drainage canal, the creek was a wild and scenic waterway.

The stream that Crespi observed in the 1760s was fed by natural springs and emanated from las cienagas (Spanish for “the swamps”) near where present-day La Cienega Boulevard skirts the Los Angeles-Culver City border.

A great flood in 1815 caused the Los Angeles River to change its course near Downtown and flow into the ocean by way of Ballona Creek. The river switched back to its current course, which empties near Long Beach, in 1825.

The swamps remained, however, and La Ballona continued to figure in the area’s development in other ways.

During the Civil War, the Union Army placed 1,500 soldiers along its banks east of the present-day San Diego Freeway to keep Confederate sympathizers in check.

In 1886, a real estate developer with backing from the Santa Fe Railroad promoted a plan to develop the estuary at Playa del Rey as a major seaport. Nothing happened, and by the time the idea resurfaced during World War I, ports at San Pedro and Long Beach made the notion of a Port Ballona seem impractical.

Then along came the movies.

*

If it were not for the creek, Culver City might never have become a center for motion pictures.

In 1915, after Harry H. Culver began building houses near La Ballona, film pioneer Thomas Ince, while shooting an early Western, sent several canoes filled with actors dressed as Indians paddling up the creek.

Culver, after witnessing the shoot, hit on an idea.

He offered the filmmaker a prime piece of property to move his Inceville studio from north of Santa Monica to a spot on Washington Boulevard near the creek, becoming the first of three major studios in Culver City.

Over the years, a veritable fantasyland of movie history sprang up on the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer back lots near the creek--a Moorish fort, a Western town, an Italian abbey and an African jungle.

“When Atlanta burned in ‘Gone with the Wind,’ you could smell the ashes over La Ballona,” said Carl Pitti, 77, of Hemet, who grew up in Culver City and spent 40 years as a stuntman at MGM.

He recalls that while dove hunting along the creek in the 1940s, in an area now dotted with factories, he came eye to eye with a tiger. The cat was on the other side of a tall fence where the studio kept animals for its Tarzan movies.

Although earthen levees had been built to help tame the unpredictable Ballona near the estuary in the 1920s, the creek’s transformation to storm drain didn’t begin until 1935, when the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration approved massive dredging by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The engineers began their channeling near the mouth, alongside property later bought by eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes as a site to build his Flying Boat, or Spruce Goose.

Hughes is said to have picked the property partly because the creek could be used to float the huge aircraft out to sea. Instead, it was assembled piecemeal and trucked to Long Beach Harbor.

*

Much of the remainder of the creek began to be encased in concrete after World War II, and the once-natural streams flowing down out of the Hollywood Hills were converted to submerged storm drains.

Today, no one is more familiar with the creek and its tributaries than the workers who clean and maintain them.

“Nothing you see down there really surprises you,” said Jim Canter, a county Public Works employee who has helped maintain the waterway for 35 years.

He once discovered a wooden “dope den” complete with carpeting, a mile into one of the tunnels that feed the creek’s upper reaches.

Canter and his colleagues found a car inside another of the tunnels. Thieves had used the passage as a hideaway to strip the vehicle for parts.

Occasionally, the tunnels become the scene of search and rescue efforts.

Last year, a pet Labrador retriever belonging to Los Angeles Rams owner Georgia Frontiere disappeared into a Beverly Hills manhole and was lost for three days.

“We tracked him four miles nearly all the way to the creek,” recalled maintenance worker Charlie Sherman, who found the pooch hungry but unharmed.

Some of La Ballona’s human victims have been less fortunate.

John Parker, who works for a lumberyard beside the creek, recalls the time a man in a wheelchair committed suicide by throwing himself off a bridge into the creek’s rain-swollen waters. “We were told they found his body floating in the ocean,” he said.

Sanitation workers, who have had to contend with rattlesnakes and rats, say they worry more about young hooligans who claim sections of the creek as personal territory.

In the Mid-City district, where the channel is enclosed by vertical walls 20 feet high, workers have been pelted with rocks and bottles so often that guards are posted before crews enter. Several workers narrowly escaped injury two years ago when some young toughs tried to hurl a sofa on top of them.

Environmentalists, meanwhile, warn of a farther-reaching threat--the toxic pollution that the creek sends daily into Santa Monica Bay.

The Clinton Administration drew praise when it announced earlier this month that it plans to extend the reach of the 1972 Clean Water Act, a move aimed in part at easing pollution in urban streams such as Ballona Creek. But skeptics note that legislation passed in 1987 promised a similar effort but has gone largely unenforced.

The 1987 law requires local governments to find ways to prevent pollution from entering storm drains. Critics say the agency charged with enforcing the measure locally, the state Regional Water Quality Control Board, has failed to do its job.

“The regional boards have become absolutely toothless,” said state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who would like to see the panels reconstituted or abolished.

Robert Ghirelli, the regional water board’s executive officer, dismisses criticism that his agency has become lax, insisting that it is doing its best with limited resources. “Our board feels we will get more bang for the buck working with people than hitting them over the head,” he said.

*

Until now, the regional board has had only one qualified enforcement specialist devoted to storm-water pollution for the entire 4,500-square-mile area it serves in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, Ghirelli said. It is in the process of training five others.

The situation is no less woeful with other governmental entities. Los Angeles County has two such specialists, and the city of Los Angeles, which depends largely on maintenance workers to help spot storm-water polluters, hopes to hire eight people later this year.

“Practically speaking, there is virtually zero storm-water enforcement anywhere in the (Los Angeles) Basin,” said Gold, the Heal the Bay biologist.

Officials say that in La Ballona, it is hard enough to pin down where illegal pollution comes from, much less catch environmental bad guys.

A joint survey conducted by the city and county two years ago determined that there are 312 pipes and other openings ranging from four inches to six feet in diameter entering the aboveground portion of the creek. Officials say they have no idea where at least 40 of the conduits originate.

“It would be nice to do a Hawaii Five-O, and say ‘Book ‘em Dano,’ but it’s not that simple,” said Chuck Ellis, a spokesman for the Los Angeles storm-water management division. “Because we’re strapped for resources, we’re only now getting to the point where we hope to do some enforcement.”

Still, Ballona watchers say some progress has been made to help clean up the creek.

At the urging of environmentalists, governments within the Ballona watershed have agreed to stop dumping chlorine on sewage leaks entering storm drains whenever pipes burst, noting the chemical’s harmful effect on marine life.

County storm-water managers recently set up an anti-dumping hot line, and last June installed a net across the creek at Culver Boulevard that has snared 15 tons of debris that otherwise would have ended up in the ocean.

*

They are small gains compared to the damage the creek’s pollutants regularly visit upon Santa Monica Bay.

In the ocean at the mouth of the creek, 500,000 cubic yards of lead-contaminated dirt and sand lay hidden barely beneath the waves, making it tricky for pleasure boats to negotiate the southern approach to Marina del Rey.

Two years ago, the Army Corps of Engineers tried using huge dredges to flatten the nasty stuff along the bottom in a procedure known as a “knockdown,” after the federal Environmental Protection Agency determined that the debris was too toxic to dump at sea. But the sediment has returned.

La Ballona is nothing if not relentless.

On the Cover

A truck driven by a Los Angeles storm-water management worker speeds down Ballona Creek near Overland Avenue. The creek, which drains 126 square miles of urban runoff between Downtown Los Angeles and the coast, is the biggest conduit of toxic pollutants into Santa Monica Bay.