Record March Rains Could Have Done More : Freeman dam: The diversion project might have saved 60% more water last month had design modifications been adopted during planning stages.

With relatively minor improvements, the Freeman Diversion Improvement Project on the Santa Clara River could have saved almost 60% more water last month than it did, water district officials said this week.

But concerns raised by public agencies, sport fishermen and environmentalists during the design and public hearing phases of the Freeman Diversion Dam pressured the United Water Conservation District to limit the capacity of the $31-million project, engineers said.

“Everybody knows about water nowadays with the drought,” said G.I. (Irv) Wilde, general manager of United when the project, dedicated in February, was begun in the early 1980s. “But back then, you didn’t have the support you would have liked. So you did what you could.”

The water that might have been saved by a different design would have added a valuable 9,000 acre-feet to the 16,000 acre-feet the Freeman diverted during March’s record-breaking rainstorms.

Nine thousand acre-feet is enough water to serve 18,000 families for a year, and would have made a significant contribution toward replenishing depleted underground water basins in the Oxnard Plain, where encroaching seawater threatens fresh supplies.

Estimates were not available on how much water flowed to sea last month, but at the peak of the storms the normally dry Santa Clara River was transformed into a wide channel flowing into the ocean.

In a normal year, about 100,000 acre-feet of water are expected to flow beyond the Freeman and down the Santa Clara, according to a 1985 environmental study. That is 10,000 acre-feet less than the annual loss before the concrete dam replaced an earthen structure that was partially washed away with each good storm.

Because the Santa Clara River valley is broad and flat, engineers say it is impossible to build a dam that could have captured all of the water that flowed down the Santa Clara last month in a muddy rush five feet deep.

A traditional storage dam to trap the entire runoff would require a five-mile-wide structure spanning from Sulphur Mountain to South Mountain that would flood the city of Santa Paula, Wilde said.

‘You have a situation of diminishing returns once you get past a certain point,” he said.

Freeman now has the capacity to divert and store 55,000 acre-feet of water per year. United is seeking to nearly double that capacity, with $4 million to $6 million in improvements to enlarge underground pipelines and increase storage capacity.

But to increase diversions, United must obtain a revised permit from the state Water Resources Control Board, which United officials say could take as long as 10 years. The process will require a lengthy review covering many of the same issues that were debated during the original permitting process of the mid-1980s.

United could have included its request to increase diversions in 1983 with the original permit, but chose instead to get the project approved in steps, said James T. Gross, ground-water resources manager at United.

If the district had applied to increase the diversions from the Santa Clara, the Freeman would probably have been dead in the water, he added.

“My understanding is that there wouldn’t have been a project,” Gross said. “It would have been killed.”

Steve Chase, a county environmental resource planner between 1979 to 1985, was among those who early on opposed increasing the dam’s capacity to divert water beyond that of the old earthen dam.

“I didn’t like it as it was designed in 1983,” said Chase, now assistant city manager of Ventura. “It would have caused substantial degradation of the river.”

Chase, along with environmentalists and other governmental agencies, including the California Coastal Commission, said the dam in its original design would have prevented sand from traveling its natural path down the river to replenish the beaches of Oxnard and Port Hueneme.

United at last agreed to fill in the upstream side of the dam so that sediments would continue to travel over the top.

“I went through the wars on Freeman,” Chase said. “Today, the system works and it’s diverting badly needed water.”

Strong opposition to the concrete dam now in place also came from the state Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

They argued that the remnants of the steelhead trout population, which once thrived in the river, would be destroyed because they would be blocked from their trek upstream to spawn.

After storms blew out the earthen dam, fish were able to swim upstream to fresh water in the Sespe Creek near Fillmore, the biologists said.

Gerald Orthuber, president of the Sespe Flyfishers, called the dam “a certain death sentence on the steelhead population” in his 1985 letter that became part of the environmental impact document.

Ultimately, United capitulated and agreed to build a $2-million ladder for the spawning steelhead and a screen to prevent fish from being swept into the diversion canal.

Charles Marshall, a fisheries biologist at the Fish and Game Los Angeles, said it was essential to maintain one of the last populations of steelhead in Southern California.

“If we hadn’t got the fish ladder, it would have eliminated the entire steelhead run,” he said. He would not comment on the possible effects of increasing the amount of water to be diverted. He said that would be the subject of a new environmental study if the project goes forward.

The 55,000 acre-feet a year that the new Freeman is designed to divert annually is 12,000 to 15,000 more than the old earthen dam.

The project’s centerpiece is the 60-foot dam with an aboveground 28-foot-tall face that stretches 1,700 feet across the river. On the south side of the river are Freeman’s intake gates, which divert water into a 1.5-mile-long concrete canal.

The canal carries the water to a desilting basin. After the silt is removed, underground pipelines carry the water another three quarters of a mile to spreading grounds in Saticoy or another two miles to spreading grounds in El Rio.

The spreading grounds are about 200 acres of flat ground surrounded by a short dirt berm where the water pools up and percolates into underground water basins.

Whether United receives permission to increase its diversions, sentiments are likely to be largely with the district in this fifth year of drought, said Roger Johnson, chief of the water rights branch of the Water Resources Control Board.

But the state will still take a long and thorough look at the issue, he said.

“It might be different today than it was back then,” Johnson said, referring to the public mood. “But the basic law and administration of water rights hasn’t changed.”