Sunday, August 20, 2006 Bolsa's biological rebuilding Newly restored wetlands are set to meet the sea this week for first time in more than 100 years. By PAT BRENNAN The Orange County Register A 30-year argument. Deal-making. Epic-scale engineering. In just a few days, it will all come down to this: a gentle sheet of water moving quietly across sand. If all goes well, the ocean will meet the Bolsa Chica wetlands for the first time in more than a century Thursday, signaling the near-completion of a $147 million restoration project and the end of more than three decades of often bitter debate. The 600-acre restoration area includes a 367-acre tidal basin and the opening of an ocean inlet, recently cut from the shoreline to the wetlands and armored with jetties of rock. Sometime in the wee hours Thursday morning, a tractor-treaded excavator will gouge out a chunk of a sand dam, the last barrier between the ocean and the inlet which, along with the tidal basin behind it, was partially filled with pumped-in water in advance. But there won't be any flashy pyrotechnics or violent destruction. No explosions, hammering, smashing or crushing. Just a trickle of water at first, in the dark. "This is the opening of the door," said Jack Fancher, project manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. "It's the beginning. Day zero of the biological recovery." The excavator, perched on the dam itself, will steadily work its way backward, using its long shovel arm to whittle away the dam before it bit by bit. As the work nears completion, perhaps around sunrise, the tide will begin to rise, and later will merge with the water of the tidal basin. Bolsa and the ocean will finally make their much-anticipated connection. In the coming weeks, months and years, the full-strength action of tides is expected to bring back life-forms unseen in Bolsa Chica since a duck-hunting club sealed off the wetlands in 1899. Dozens of species of fish along with wetland plants and birds should begin to appear. "Almost immediately, you're going to get a couple dozen species that will take advantage of it," said Bob Hoffman, biologist and project manager with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Organization.
In a few years, the wetland will again play host to a variety of habitat types and creatures that, for decades, grew increasingly rare along the California coast as development erased coastal marshes. Surfers worried about changing wave profiles when the plan proposed; now some say the inlet flow has improved surfing. It didn't always look like it would turn out this way. A century's worth of shifting plans for Bolsa Chica reflected the obsessions and passions of their times. The Bolsa Chica Gun Club built berms and closed off the wetlands from the ocean to make their hunting experience more pleasant; to them, that seemed like the best way to make use of what some might have viewed as a disagreeable swamp. That was, of course, before oil was discovered in Huntington Beach, and the means invented to extract it. Soon skeletal oil-pumping towers crowded the coastline. Boom times in Orange County came and went. After World War II, bedroom communities sprang up. In an early anticipation of the future wetland project, inner Bolsa Bay was restored in the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in 1978. It's still there, but its water, which meanders through Huntington Harbour, is not linked to the larger wetland. It will remain as it is, a "muted" tidal wetland with some species of fish and shorebirds, a favorite haunt of birders and nature lovers. In the 1980s, the property owner, Signal Landmark, had big plans: a 1,300-slip marina with hotels, restaurants and 5,700 homes. That plan fell apart in 1989 and was scaled back to 4,884 homes and a 775-acre restoration project. In 1993, mergers gave the developer of the wetlands a new name: Koll Real Estate Group. A few years later, the planned number of homes was scaled back further: to 3,300, 900 in the lowlands. That plan gained state Coastal Commission approval but brought a lawsuit from the Bolsa Chica Land Trust and other environmental groups. By now, "swamps" had become wetlands, and their loss a cause for alarm among conservationists. Coastal salt marshes were not only home to exotic bird life, but nurseries for a variety of commercially important fish species. Activists fought Koll hard, year after year, with court challenges and public protests, which gave development foes faith that believed the wetland would not be developed. "I always thought we'd persevere," said Flossie Horgan, a former biology teacher who helped found the Bolsa Chica Land Trust in 1992. "We worked until we got what we wanted."
The breakthrough came in 1997. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach needed to grow. But they had to destroy existing marine habitat to do it. To make up for the loss, they wanted to strike a deal: purchase Bolsa Chica from Koll, and pay for a large-scale restoration of the wetlands. The $79 million deal went through. Koll, which became California Coastal Communities, focused now on the Bolsa Chica mesa, a shelf of land overlooking the wetland that the company still owned. The number of homes dropped more: from 2,400 proposed on the mesa to 1,235. Down below, in the damaged wetland with its web of dirt roads, the real work began. Sixty-four oil wells, most still commercially viable, were bought out and capped. The soil around them was cleared of contaminants. A chunk of coastline for the inlet was chosen, bridges built and the inlet dug out. Earth movers reshaped the wetland to allow new basins for water. Enormous sheets of impermeable plastic were driven into the ground on the northeastern boundary of the wetland, to protect homes on the other side from groundwater that might seep to the surface as the tides came in and out. Expanses for wetlands with lesser tidal influence were shaped and tide gates were installed. And funds were set aside for a "future" tidal wetland: a 250-acre area in the eastern part of Bolsa where oil will continue to be pumped until it's no longer worth it to do so, perhaps decades from now. Then, that area will join the full tidal wetland. On the mesa, the final tally for homes to be built was 356. The company sold 103 acres of the mesa for restoration in order to do it. Controversies continue over small pieces of property that might or might not be added to the preservation area. But in the end, the activists and scientists who spent much of their lives fighting to preserve Bolsa Chica won that old argument. "Yes, it was saved," said Orange County historian Jim Sleeper. "The developers didn't get it all. But my goodness, it made a lot of lawyers rich, I'll tell you that."