Some may remember how the 2023 rainy season began. A few gentle rains in October and November and by News Years we had a nice manageable germination of weeds happening across all our project sites. Conditions were very favorable, and we assumed we would be starting early on many of our projects. We planned a very ambitious back country schedule on both of our existing grants. We negotiated an ambitious plan on the Santa Clara River with our project partners to treat a wide spectrum of weeds that had capitalized on the void created by our previous year’s Arundo removal. Our cash flow projections were grand, and we were prepared to mobilize on what would have been one of the greatest revenue years in our history…
And then it got wet, wetter, wettest.
The Santa Clara River peaked at a flow rate of about 100,000 cubic feet per second. The ridges above the Santa Ynez River watershed received a good year’s rainfall in 48 hours. And every few days it would rain again. Every road to the remote areas we had planned on accessing had dozens of landslides covering them. Every wet crossing was dangerous. Rivers changed course and devoured the landscape. We were experiencing a devastation that was unprecedented. Many of our job sites were now in Federal Disaster Areas.
What was to be a very well-planned year was suddenly a chaotic triage of reacting to daily reports of devastation and deluge. Here is a partial list of the damage directly affecting CIR work sites:
Our Santa Clara River project in Santa Paula had the river shift 400 meters to the south and washed away at least 40 acres of our intended work area. It is still too dangerous to enter and accurately assess what remains to work on. In April, we found that a large mudslide across South Mountain Road had deposited enough fine-grained mud on our storage area that we almost got our truck stuck.
The Santa Ynez River experienced a scouring event that left only bedrock showing in many places and debris piles 25 feet high. In much of our project site there is literally nothing left in the riparian zone. The Los Padres National Forest (LPNF) refused to allow us to enter even to survey.
Highway 33 was the best access to our Sisquoc River project but it is still closed due to landslides and a big section of road washed away. The road up Santa Barbara Canyon has several massive slides covering it, and the north facing slopes are still snow-covered.
I was able to survey our Piru Lake worksite and the scouring event there removed roughly 50% of the land on which our targets were located. 47 landslides covered the Piru Ranch Road we used to access our farther upstream sites. But none of that matters as the lake is overflowing and everything we were working on is underwater for the first time in decades.
Our revenue projections for the year were so completely devastated we went into crisis mode. Holly Wright, Field Projects Administrator, and I began to contact every past project contact and soon small jobs began to materialize. Holly spent most of January and February in daily conversations with LPNF and the National Fish and Wildlife Service (NFWS) trying to develop an alternative plan for the grant monies that were due to expire in the next 14 months or less. Due to the excellent relationship we have with LPNF and NFWS we learned at the beginning of April that we can shift the project sites to more manageable areas. Other work materialized and went from concept to accepted bid stage in record time. This was the hardest I have worked since joining CIR.
Our job in Operations is to predict what we want to happen and react to what nature decides is going to happen. It is often that variable that makes this work exciting.
There is always an element of surprise and discovery, even in the most mundane work areas. The entire crew loves this aspect, loves the challenge, loves nature. There were dark periods during this time where even my eternal optimism was challenged. We are not over this crisis yet, but we have a plan, we have a challenge and every person in Operations is looking forward to meeting this challenge as soon as it is safe to get back out there.