Creeks - History of Bay Area Creek Restoration

by Susan Schwartz

A meandering history of Bay Area creek restoration

Creek restoration has come a long way since the 1960s, when trash clean-ups began focusing attention on long-neglected urban creeks. An Ecology Center cleanup in 1969 took 200 pounds of glass and a half ton of scrap metal out of Codornices Creek in Berkeley. On many urban creeks today, a scout troop would have difficulty finding enough litter to justify an outing. Some creeks, of course, are still dumps, and creek clean-ups remain an appealing way to interest people in the environment, but restoration has metamorphosed from that larval form and, like many aquatic insects, gone through several stages since.

In the 1970s, interest in urban creeks grew along with the general environmental movement. Failures were beginning to appear in the post-World-War II approach of turning creeks into concrete superhighways for water. An example is Corte Madera Creek, which flows from the east slopes of Mount Tam to a salt marsh west of San Quentin. In the '70s, as suburban development impinged on the creek's natural floodplain, the Army Corps of Engineers channeled the creek between concrete walls designed to carry floods up to the size likely to occur only once every 250 years. But as Carol D'Alessio of Friends of Corte Madera Creek Watershed points out, "it never worked." The channel silted up, and vegetation and wear roughened the walls, slowing the water. Today even minor floods are likely to exceed the channel's capacity.

In the '70s, though, little actually happened to help the creeks. For example, Berkeley's 1977 master plan (still in effect) does not mention creek restoration. The early and mid '80s saw a takeoff of sorts. Oakland halted plans to bury Sausal Creek, its only large creekside parkway. In 1983 Berkeley passed a moratorium on culverting of creeks. Six years later it would become an ordinance banning culverting and requiring that buildings be set back at least modestly from creeks. The ordinance has been copied and improved on by cities around the Bay. At the tail end of Governor Jerry Brown's administration, the state Department of Water Resources began offering grants to restore urban creeks. The Sierra Club's Urban Creeks Task Force, organized by Judith Goldsmith and others, gradually morphed into the Berkeley, East Bay, and finally Bay Area Citizens for Creek Restoration.

In the '80s several large pioneering projects were launched.

• On lower Wildcat Creek in Richmond, Ann Riley, then a Department of Water Resources employee, joined low-income North Richmond residents to block construction of a concrete straitjacket for the creek. The result, with meanders, pools, and marshes, can be seen along the 1.5-mile Wildcat Creek trail in Richmond.
  
  
• Where a culvert crossed the abandoned Santa Fe Railroad right-of-way in Berkeley, Carole Schemmerling, then chair of the city's Parks and Recreation Commission; and landscape architect Doug Wolfe, then a Parks Department employee; spearheaded the first significant "daylighting" of a creek in California. The result was Berkeley's gracefully contoured Strawberry Creek Park.
  
  
• The East Bay Regional Park District began restoration, aimed mostly at preventing erosion damage and improving fish habitat, on Upper Alameda, San Leandro, Redwood, and Wildcat Creeks.
  
  
• On the UC Berkeley campus, a small grant from the chancellor kicked off restoration of Strawberry Creek, the creek whose clean year-round flow had drawn the campus to the spot a century before.

These projects had lasting effects, as sources of inspiration and information. Riley and Wolfe, along with Wolfe's business partner Gary Mason, became internationally known consultants in creek restoration. Schemmerling founded the Urban Creeks Council of California, which has nurtured most of today's creek groups.

Small projects, all over

But strikingly few "big" projects have followed. One reason is undoubtedly money. The expense of the urban land needed for creeks and creek life is a formidable barrier. Restoration projects have been done on a shoestring, but these are the exception. A striking example was the daylighting of several hundred feet of lower Codornices Creek in Berkeley in the mid-1990s with a $20,000 grant obtained by the Urban Creeks Council and with volunteer labor-from shovels to bulldozing-recruited by Urban Ecology. And projects generally daylight only fairly short stretches of creek-a half block at Berkeley's Thousand Oaks School, a block at El Cerrito's Poinsett Park.

Creek-restoration efforts did not so much mushroom as metamorphose, into increased citizen efforts, often on a smaller scale. The new phase began in the late '80s, with efforts to improve the water flowing into creeks and the Bay. Emblematic was Berkeley environmental activist Richard Register's campaign to stencil sidewalks with symbols showing where creeks were buried. Stenciling storm drains became an international volunteer effort to lessen pollution in urban runoff, which generally flows untreated into creeks and salt water.

In the early '90s Lorette Rogers, a San Anselmo elementary-school teacher looking for a project involving endangered species, found that an endangered shrimp lived in the creek near her school. The restoration program she started grew into a major Bay Institute program training teachers to lead their pupils in creek-restoration projects -planting native trees along overgrazed, eroded rural creeks and removing invasive non-natives from urban ones. The project's students worked on an estimated eight miles of stream bank in the last year.

Runoff enters the equation

This new trend did not spring just from the grassroots. In 1987 the Supreme Court, ruling in a suit brought by the Natural Resources Defense Council, required the federal government to regulate storm flows and urban runoff under the federal Clean Water Act. The repercussions, echoing downward to state and local governments, began to be felt about 1991. Local governments now had to obtain permits showing that they were doing something about urban runoff, and they began getting federal money to do it. As a result, local stormwater agencies began to change their engineering approaches. In some new suburbs, runoff began to be channeled to holding areas, often temporary wetlands, rather than going straight into creeks.

Agencies became supporters of local creek groups, which were to serve as a constituency and as volunteer watchdogs. They worked together to educate the public about how individuals could reduce pollution in urban runoff-ideas such as using less fertilizer and fewer pesticides, or washing the family car at a carwash.

The change is especially marked in Marin County, where a creek naturalist, Liz Lewis, now heads the Marin County Stormwater Pollution Prevention Program. Creek groups are enthusiastic about the result, which involves, for example, sampling aquatic insect larvae as a real-life test of water quality in 30 creeks. "They may not give us a huge amount of funding, but they lend a lot of support," said D'Alessio of Friends of Corte Madera Creek Watershed.

In Alameda County the Alameda Countywide Clean Water consortium of local agencies helps fund the Aquatic Outreach Institute (AOI), headed by Kathy Kramer, who had earlier helped organize Friends of San Leandro Creek and Friends of Sausal Creek, Oakland's most active creek group. Like the Bay Institute, AOI also offers workshops for teachers to spread the anti-pollution message on themes such as Kids in Creeks, Kids in Marshes, and Kids in Gardens. Teachers then receive small grants to involve kids in creek projects in creeks near their schools.

Success by entanglement

Another trend spurred by federal legislation is that after almost a century, burying creeks in culverts has become rare. Even straitjacketing them in steep, hard banks is increasingly difficult. Starting with Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1860s, planners had urged preserving Bay Area streams as urban greenways. They were almost universally ignored. In the Bay Area's older cities-San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley-most creeks disappeared into pipes underground. A few, such as Codornices and Cerrito Creeks, survived largely because of the complications created by their forming boundaries between cities or counties. Today the sheer complexity of getting permits for creek work favors preservation. "CEQA [the California Environmental Quality Act] had a gigantic effect on how developers looked at land," points out Pam Romo of Walnut Creek's Friends of the Creek. "All of a sudden it wasn't just where you were going to put that water. Now all of a sudden everybody has to think about it-a lot. Even developers are seeing this."

Creek work today requires not just Environmental Impact Reports but also permits from the Regional Water Quality Control Board, California Department of Fish and Game, Army Corps of Engineers, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and, if threatened or endangered species such as steelhead or red-legged frogs are involved, the National Marine Fisheries Service. It is probably a sign of progress that today's battles over creeks in proposed developments usually don't involve proposals to bury creeks in pipes. Instead the battle is over the breadth of riparian corridors and buffer zones. Or (as at Orinda's controversial Gateway project) over filling in a creek's deep hillside gullies and re-creating gentler, more golf-friendly creeks on top. Efforts are underway to undo, or at least soften, some of the channelization projects. For example, Marsh Creek in Brentwood was forced into a trapezoidal channel in the '60s. But a plan adopted in the fast-growing East Contra Costa city in 1991 has required developers to leave green creekside buffers and space for creekside trails as suburbs replace farms.

At the same time, a creekside trail built by the East Bay Regional Park District links pedestrians and bicyclists to other regional trails in Concord and the Sacramento River Delta. Flood-control projects increasingly involve "bioengineering"-handling flood and erosion challenges with vegetation, wide rights-of-way for water, and channels configured so that a stream can reach its own dynamic equilibrium. In Contra Costa a relative newcomer, public-works director Mitch Avalon, is gaining rave reviews for his efforts, which include re-introducing native vegetation into the silt-clogged, failed, trapezoidal flood-control channel that is lower Walnut Creek.

Four such projects are planned for suburban Alameda County, as well-at Palomares School in conjunction with a teaching trail along San Lorenzo Creek, and in Cull, Eden, and Crow Canyons.

Not that the battle has been won. Carla Schultheis, a 12-year employee of the Alameda County Flood Control District, points out that the shift toward "bioengineering" may be due less to a change of heart than to the increasing difficulty of getting permits. "Engineers are sure about concrete walls, but there's less confidence that plants are going to hold." Indeed, some bioengineering projects have failed-on upper Wildcat Creek in the '80s, and on Oakland's Seminary Creek in the '90s. Thus, she said, the district favors the approach mostly where there are few houses, and therefore minimal liability if floods should occur.

And on Corte Madera Creek, the Army Corps of Engineers' proposed cure for the failed concrete flood-control channel is more engineering-walls and a large basin that would catch sediment but that would also slow water and reduce shade needed by the steelhead that still make their way to and from the upper tributaries.

A second generation

Probably the most far-reaching change was pointed out by Pam Romo. Restoration has gotten easier in one respect, she says. "There was a shift in education. Civil engineers started being trained for something other than building with concrete. A generation of kids grew up being trained in environmental issues. Now they are adults and have jobs and their ideas are much more flexible. People hadn't been trained to look. Now they're beginning to see all the theories of ecology coming into play. It isn't just one issue-it's an interplay that deals with all kinds of things, like wildlife and water quality, and how the water table affects whether trees can grow."

Robert Hale, supervising engineer and scientist for Alameda County Flood Control, points out that while the effects of public education measures are difficult to measure, what indicators there are point to success. A 1991 - 92 survey showed that "astoundingly" few people knew that stormwater flowed directly to creeks and the Bay, he said. But by 1994 awareness was up to 70%, and by 1999 to 85%. Meanwhile, Hale says, surveys of fish life show that diversity is increasing in rural streams, and holding its own in urban ones. With the growth in human population, this is at least a relative success.

What is creek restoration?

Three main kinds of tasks are intertwined in creek restoration.

Creek-freeing.

The greatest publicity-and opposition-swirls around efforts to bring creeks out of culverts, to allow them to create their own channels without concrete and rip-rap, and to provide a streamside buffer zone with room for vegetation and wildlife. Battles spring from this aspect of restoration because it requires returning land from human economic uses to nature. Citizen groups are key in both taking stands and negotiating settlements. Some write grants and carry out the projects themselves. Protecting and improving water quality. Industrial pollution is relatively rare today in Bay Area creeks, but sewage pollution is common, from broken pipes in older areas and from septic tanks in newer ones.

Still more widespread are problems stemming from urban runoff.

As land is covered by streets, sidewalks, and buildings, rainwater can no longer soak into soil. Streams seesaw between flash-flood-like storm runoff and drought-like low flows. The too-fast storm flows steepen and destabilize creek banks, and load creeks with lethal slugs of urban pollution, including grease, oil, heavy metals, pesticides, and soap. Volunteers monitor water quality and report pollution, often working with or supported by watchdog agencies.

Restoring plant and animal life.

One of the easiest avenues for volunteer restoration is hands-on re-vegetation. Native plants provide shade to keep creek water cool, and curb invasive exotic plants that produce a sterile monoculture inhospitable to insect and other animal life. The deep roots of the natives resist erosion; require minimal irrigation, fertilizer, and pesticides (thus improving water quality); and offer food and cover to insects, fish, frogs, salamanders, birds, and other wildlife. Animal species can be re-introduced, or will come back on their own, when the first three conditions are satisfactory.

A fourth element is public access, often in the form of pedestrian or bicycle trails. Though usually sought after, access can be a complication. The 10-foot-wide strip needed for a bicycle trail can eat up most of the land available for habitat, for example. And people and their pets are a potent barrier to wildlife restoration.

The Bay Area pioneered and remains a leader nationwide in daylighting creeks and restoring channels. Some other communities have gone farther in other aspects of restoration-reducing the problems of urban runoff, using volunteers to watchdog water quality, and protecting and re-introducing native species.

Everyday things to do for your local creek

These also help San Francisco Bay:

• Eliminate or reduce your use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers.
  
  
• Use compost to provide natural, slow-acting fertilizer.
  
  
• Control pests with non-toxic alternatives such as hand-picking, traps, closing up holes, and encouraging predatory insects. Ask your local nursery or hardware store for information on less-toxic chemicals or call (510)670-5543 or (888)BAYWISE. Especially avoid products containing diazinon and chlorpyrifos, which poison aquatic life.
  
  
• Help water to filter into soil and thus reduce runoff. On your property, keep impervious surfaces to a minimum. Use porous paving or decking, and (unless you live in a slide area) landscape to let water soak in. This provides a more natural, steady flow to creeks. It lessens pollution and the sudden, erosive storm flows that can damage stream channels and destroy aquatic habitats.
  
  
• Native plants can provide good habitat and erosion control with a minimum of care. Keep native vegetation where it exists along creeks. Replace invasive non-native plants with suitable native ones. Plant to keep creeks shady so that the water stays cool.
  
  
• Don't pour or wash anything down gutters or storm drains. They drain directly to creeks or the Bay. Use your local car wash, wash vehicles and equipment with water only, or if you must use soap, wash on dirt or grass where soapy water won't run to the street or storm drains. Ask your local government about proper disposal of motor oil, antifreeze, concrete, paint, solvents, and other chemicals. Report illegal discharges.
  
  
• Drive less! Auto exhaust particles, leaking fluids, and tire and brakepad debris are major sources of Bay Area water pollution. Walk, bicycle, carpool, use transit; plan errands to reduce driving.
  
  
• Support creek-friendly local ordinances. Does your local government ban culverting of creeks? Does it require that buildings be set back from creeks? Does it require that sewer lines and septic tanks on private property be inspected at intervals and when property is sold, and that they be repaired if necessary? Does it have an effective street-sweeping program to reduce pollution that washes into storm drains? Do the building and zoning codes encourage landscaping that lets rainwater soak into soil, rather than running to storm drains and creeks?

Some examples from among dozens of Bay Area projects

Creek restoration is advancing all over the Bay Area.

• The Guadalupe River through downtown San Jose has growing salmon runs, thanks to a complex multi-million-dollar, multi-agency mediated agreement on restoring what had been a sun-baked, concrete-lined channel.
  
  
• In the San Geronimo/Lagunitas area of Marin County, the Salmon Protection and Watershed Network (SPAWN) has just completed a three-year project allowing endangered Coho salmon to pass a dam.
  
  
• Friends of Sausal Creek will soon see Oakland begin to remove concrete check-dams from Dimond Canyon. The group has held work parties there, as often as every week, for years.
  
  
• The City of El Cerrito has reached agreement with owners of the El Cerrito Plaza Shopping Center on restoring three blocks of creek, with an eye toward eventual creation of a half-mile creekside greenway linking parks and businesses.
  
  
• Walnut Creek has begun work on downtown trails and overlooks along the creeks that gave the city its name, the result of more than a decade of planning spurred by the local Friends of the Creek.
  
  
• Martinez is converting downtown parking lots into channel for Alhambra Creek, part of a four-block greening and flood-protection project urged by Friends of Alhambra Creek and financed by flood-beleaguered downtown businesses.
  
  
• Levees are to be removed from the mouth of Marsh Creek as part of the Delta Science Center, a major restoration and public-education project near Oakley. Creeks are seeing urban re-invigoration, even in built-up San Francisco.
  
  
• Volunteers are restoring and maintaining creeks in Glen Canyon and McLaren Parks, focusing on protecting the rare San Francisco fork-tailed damselfly (see photos at left).
  
  
• In the Presidio, the creek that once flowed through Tennessee Hollow to the newly restored Crissy Field Marsh is on track to be freed.
  
  
• Mission Creek Conservancy has persuaded Catellus Corporation and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency to preserve 17 acres along China Basin Channel for bird habitat, including salt marsh, tideflats, freshwater lagoon, and viewing areas in the midst of the posh Mission Bay redevelopment.
  
  
• Islais Creek, the first source of fresh water for the settlement of Yerba Buena, like Mission Creek was long ago mostly reduced to a tidal ship channel. At the urging of Friends of Islais Creek, mitigation money from the deep pockets of Caltrans, utilities, and developers is creating vibrant urban amenities ranging from a launch ramp for outrigger canoeists to a promenade modeled after a liberty ship, wildly popular with skateboarders. (No, this will not be a restored natural creek, but within the realm of the possible, it is transforming the site from a neglected urban backwater to a cared for site of water-related recreation.) Major studies and plans have been completed or are almost done for restoration and development at numerous other creeks. These include:
  • Comprehensive Resource Management Plans for San Francisquito Creek in Palo Alto and Alhambra Creek in Martinez;
    
    
  • plans to at least keep green space above mostly buried Temescal Creek in Oakland and Emeryville;
    
    
  • a study of "daylighting" Strawberry Creek in downtown Berkeley;
    
    
  • studies for restoring Corte Madera Creek in Marin County.

Directory of creek groups

Want to contact your nearest creek group? Thanks to Creeks Speak, the newsletter of Bay Area Citizens for Creek Restoration, for most of the information in the following list of creek organizations in Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, and San Francisco Counties:

Alameda Creek Alliance (Fremont)
Jeff Miller, (510) 845-4675
alamedacreek@hotmail.com

Alhambra Creek, Friends of (Martinez)
Shirley and Igor Skaredoff, (925) 229-1371

Arroyo Viejo Creek and branches (Oakland)
Sandra Marburg, (510) 635-4465

Aquatic Outreach Institute
sponsors workshops for teachers and others in East Bay, (510) 231-5655
www.aoinstitute.org

Baxter Creek, Friends of (El Cerrito and Richmond)
Lisa Viani, (510) 237-7968
baxterfriends@hotmail.com
www.creativedifferences.com/baxtercreek/

Bay Area Citizens for Creek Restoration
publishes Creeks Speak, newsletter on restoration activities around the Bay
BC Capps, (510) 231-5778
bc@aoinstitute.org

Bay Institute (Marin County)
sponsors workshops for teachers leading to restoration projects for kids, (415) 721-7680
www.bay.org

Codornices Creek (Berkeley)
see Friends of Five Creeks or (Codornices Park area) Los Amigos de Codornices
Bill Roberts, (510) 841-6889

Corte Madera Creek Watershed, Friends of (Corte Madera area)
Carol D'Alessio, (415) 457-6045, (415) 454-8608
Sandra Gueldman, (415) 456-5052
fcmcw@microweb.com
http://www.cortemaderacreek.org/

Estuary Action Challenge
works with elementary-school children, especially low-income and minority, to restore creeks
Mandi Billinge, (510) 235-3785
www.earthisland.org/eac

Five Creeks, Friends of (Codornices, Cerrito, Blackberry/Middle, Marin, and Village Creeks, Berkeley-Albany-El Cerrito)
Susan Schwartz, (510) 848-9358
f5creeks@aol.com

Glen Canyon Creek (north fork Islais Creek, San Francisco)
Friends of Glen Canyon Park
Richard Craib, (415) 648-0862

Glen Echo Creek (Oakland)
Valerie Winemiller, (510) 653-4552

Golden West Women's Fly Fishers, sponsors school projects raising native fish and frogs to transplant into creeks
Annette Thompson
annette@2468.com

Islais Creek, Friends of (San Francisco)
Julia Viera, (415) 826-5669

Lagunitas and San Geronimo Valley Creeks (Lagunitas area)
Salmon Protection and Watershed Network (SPAWN)
Todd Steiner, (415) 488-1090
spawn@igc.org
www.spawnusa.org

Lion (Leona) Creek (Oakland)
Gary Scott, (510) 845-4842
Robin Freeman, (510) 848-5713

Marsh Creek (Brentwood, Oakley)
Delta Science Center
Steve Barbata, (925) 947-1473
Shawn Guinn, (925) 634-4622

Mill Valley Stream Keepers (Mill Valley area)
Nancy Dempster, (415) 455-5818

Mission Creek Conservancy (San Francisco)
Bob Isaacson, (415) 552-4577

Mount Diablo and Galindo Creeks (Concord)
Marcus O'Connell, (925) 689-7881
marcus@value.net

Orinda Creeks, Friends of (Orinda)
Cinda MacKinnon, (925) 253-9690

Pinole Creek (Pinole)
Dr. Joe Mariotti, (510) 724-1235

San Leandro Creek, Friends of (Oakland - San Leandro)
Annie Kohut Frankel, (510) 577-6069
www.fslc.org/

San Pablo Creek Watershed Awareness Program (El Sobrante)
Shannah Anderson, (510) 231-5704
shannah@aoinstitute.org

Sausal Creek, Friends of (Oakland)
[updated, 8/29/01]Stuart Richardson, (510) 912-7792 (day), (510) 864-7175 (eve)
sausalcreekprojects@worldnet.att.net
www.sausalcreek.org

Stemple Creek and tributaries (Marin)
Gary Franklin, North Bay Riparian Station, (415) 332-1941
gary@baymodel.org
www.mywatershed.org

Strawberry Creek (Berkeley)
John Steere, (510) 849-1969

Temescal Creek, Friends of (Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley)
Bruce Douglas, (510) 655-0341
FoTemescal@aol.com
[updated 8/29/01]www.aoinstitute.org/temescal

Tennessee Hollow Creek (Presidio, San Francisco)
Douglas Kern, Urban Watershed Project, (415) 876-1804

Urban Creeks Council of California
statewide umbrella organization; most groups listed here are affiliates
Carole Schemmerling or Josh Bradt, (510) 540-6669
ucc_berkeley@hotmail.com

Walnut Creek and tributaries (Walnut Creek and vicinity), Friends of the Creek
Pam Romo, (925) 939-8979

Wildcat Creek (San Pablo, Richmond)
Alan LaPointe, (510) 234-2865
CYCLE, (510) 233-1415

Yosemite Creek (McLaren Park creeks, Gray Fox Club Creek, San Francisco)
Kids in Parks
David Graves, (415) 585-3909

Susan Schwartz is president of Friends of Five Creeks, a Berkeley-Albany-El Cerrito creek-restoration group.