Rindge Dam REMOVAL

As planning moves tofinal stages, hauling sediment becomes weighty issue



DOWNFALL—Rindge Dam, considered unsafe, has been off limits to visitors since 2014. Eventually the 90-year-old dam will be destroyed in an effort to restore balance to the Malibu Creek Watershed. Courtesy of Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains

DOWNFALL—Rindge Dam, considered unsafe, has been off limits to visitors since 2014. Eventually the 90-year-old dam will be destroyed in an effort to restore balance to the Malibu Creek Watershed. Courtesy of Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains

The Rindge Dam is a 90-year-old speed bump in the middle of Malibu Creek, a concrete hump that keeps the stream from flowing freely to the ocean.

RELIC—The dam was built for farmers and cattlemen in the 1920s. Today it’s considered a public safety and environmental hazard. Courtesy of RCDSMM

RELIC—The dam was built for farmers and cattlemen in the 1920s. Today it’s considered a public safety and environmental hazard. Courtesy of RCDSMM

Long recognized as an impediment to the watershed, the 100-foot-high dam will be removed— if plans can be finalized.

The demolition of Rindge Dam is a joint effort by the California Department of Parks and Recreation and the United States Army Corps of Engineers.

Jamie King, an environmental scientist with the parks department, said the two agencies are close to an agreement over how the work should proceed.

“We released a draft environmental impact report early in 2017 for public review. The public and local agencies had an opportunity to review the plan and provide comments,” King said.

“ Now we and the Army Corps have, over the last year, been looking at the comments and reviewing the document to tighten it up. We’re getting close to finalizing the plan within the next couple months.”

King said the plan has been developing since the 1990s. Progress has been slow because multiple agencies and organizations are involved in the planning.

Because the waters that drain into the ocean are federally protected, both U.S. and state agencies must coordinate their efforts.

The removal project is expected to cost more than $100-million dollars.

Alex Farassati, the City of Calabasas Environmental Services supervisor, said he’s been involved in meetings because the demolition and cleanup calls for almost half of the 780,000 cubic yards of creek sediment that has accumulated behind the dam over the years to be removed and transported through Calabasas.

Some 300,000 cubic yards of the sediment will be driven through Calabasas and north to Ventura, where it will be turned around and shipped south to Malibu via barge. The sediment will be dispersed on the city’s beaches to protect them from storms. The rest will be put in the Calabasas Landfill.

“Our concern was traffic—how many trucks per day, during what time, what period,” Farassati said. “The route they want to take, Lost Hills Road, it’s very busy during the morning rush hour going toward the beach and in the afternoon going back it’s very busy.

“We have a middle school in the area and a lot of kids are dropped off in the morning, and we wanted them to be mindful of our traffic,” Farassati said.

King said the decision was made to take the sediment to Ventura and float it to Malibu for practical reasons—having trucks carry the sediment down the canyon road directly to the beach would create too much traffic in Malibu.

“At one point we looked at going through the city to take the material just to the east side of the Malibu Pier,” King said. “We were concerned about the impacts on recreation by having trucks come and using a very important parking lot the public uses for access to the beach. We felt that wasn’t in the best interest of the larger community as a whole.”

King said removing Rindge Dam will restore Malibu Creek to a more natural state and encourage the return of wildlife, particularly the southern California steelhead trout, an endangered species. Another reason for taking down the dam—it’s starting to break up and is a public safety concern.

“All structures ultimately fail. This is an old structure that’s been in place since the 1920s and nonfunctional since the 1940s,” King said. “It’s defunct, it has some issues and we would rather remove it with a plan versus just waiting for it to have problems in the future.”

Built by the Rindge and Adamson families in the 1920s for cattle and farming, the dam is not intended as a recreation area, but that hasn’t stopped cliff jumpers and hikers who are attracted to the dam’s 100-foot drop and deep, year-round pond. Multiple people have been injured there and, in 2011, a 21-year-old Agoura Hills man took his own life by jumping from the top of the dam.