The past couple of weeks have provided an overabundance of rain (and local snow). This last storm series really challenged the Los Angeles River control system. The San Fernando Valley Circle Burners home field is in the Sepulveda Flood Control Basin--we just call it The Basin. But when the downstream river (something less than 40 miles of it) can't take any more flow without overtopping the channel and wiping out neighborhoods, the water is held back in the Basin. The gates are set to limit the outflow to something like 16k cfm I believe. To do that during a heavy rain event, the normally dead dry, completely empty Basin begins to fill up. Our circles are in the 1% storm contour; said another way, a hundred-year event. We got our hundred-year event this past week. Of course, our previous one was only about 10 years ago….
Although the park was closed, and especially the Apollo XI Field, I got in on Friday to survey the situation. It was not good. Our circles are adjacent to Woodley Creek which overflowed. I think the water backing up behind the dam would have gotten us anyway. We had at least 4-5 feet of standing (flowing!) water over the top of the circles. It completely filled our storage shed. And it left between an 1/8" to 1/4" of very fine silt on top of everything.
One of the videos on the news showed a chopper rescuing a guy from the top of his car in the Basin--that may have been on Woodley Avenue next to the flying field?
I rescued some lawn equipment from the shed (need to flush, clean and try to restart the engine) on Friday, but today the club went out in force to start tackling the mud, now mostly dried to a state of impervious ceramic plate--until you break it up and get clouds of choking dust.... Believe it or not, it helped that a good part of the day it was blowing, with gusts in the 20-25mph range. About 8-10 guys cleared about a third of one circle (ok it might not have been that much, but felt like it!) We have a lot more to go, but are hoping for some help from the city with a water tanker with spray head. They were using that to try to clear the parking lot which is lower than our circle and had as much as 4-6" of silt in places. If they can get the bulk of it, we can spend the next few months trying to get the rest of the “fine lapping paste” out of the asphalt—and we’ll be back in business!
I want to thank all the guys who showed up and really worked hard!