Is Santa Cruz trying to kill us?
Happy Earth Day. It's time to honor our Mother Earth. When we get it right, the Earth sustains us, but when we get it wrong, the consequences can be catastrophic. Santa Cruz is an easy place to live, but not always an easy place to live with. If the Earth were trying to tell us something, it's that we are only here temporarily, no matter how much we try to find the right balance and relationship with this place. We are subject to drought, flood, fire, landslide, earthquake, crumbling cliffs, rising seas, sinking earth, tidal waves, and even a few tornados. Yet when we fall in love with the scenery we wish to be part of, we cannot express our affection more than building in a challenging location.
The Indigenous Ohlones had no ethic of permanence. They built dome-shaped frameworks for their reed-covered huts, which would be burned occasionally to sterilize the ground of fleas. If someone died, it was considered impolite to retain any of their possessions, lest it keep their spirit from moving on to the afterlife. When the Spanish came, they used frame construction of picketed split logs with a thatched roof, although what they dearly wanted were adobe buildings. The natives used similar construction for their packed-earth sweat lodges supported by a framework of logs, as a place for sacred ceremonies in the womb of Mother
Earth. Yet packed-earth and adobe-brick were subject to earthquake damage, soaking of storm and flood, and even gophers in the walls. American settlers brought wood frame construction for boomtown buildings, but these were vulnerable to displacement by flood, or destruction by fire. To make buildings fireproof, they built masonry structures with iron shutters. But fireproof is not earthquake-proof, and by 1906, reinforced masonry and concrete became popular, with bracketed cornices made of lightweight hollow-tin construction.
The inhabitants of this area have also held different philosophies about managing the land. The Indigenous inhabitants believed in controlled burns, in other words a “fire ecology” to encourage the growth of fresh grasses that attract deer for hunting. The Spanish arrived, and praised the park-like forests as the work of “the Hand of God” not Indigenous management, and introduced non-native grasses to support massive herds of livestock. Then the Industrialists came, eying the timber as untapped inventory, believing that “everything must go,” leaving behind a desert of stumps and exposed topsoil that washed away in the winter storms.
Environmentalists saw this wonton destruction, and proposed “nature is the absence of man.” So from 1864 when Abraham Lincoln set Yosemite aside for preservation and public use, to 1995 when the U.S. Forest Service reintroduced controlled burns, all fires, from cigarettes, unextinguished campfires, and lightning, were suppressed. This wasn't exactly nature without man, since this, too, was a managed forest, letting foliage grow lush. It was an era of fulgent natural beauty I was glad to have enjoyed. But the drawbacks were trees compromised by pest infections and drought, with a build-up of understory fuels leading to more dramatic wildfires.
Fire
My friends Jim and Ann Haley had built a home on Last Chance Road, a private dirt road with large potholes, deep in the woods atop a mountain. The road was supposedly named a century ago as the last chance to see a grizzly bear. But during the 1960s a group of hippies and conservative mountain folk regarded this isolated enclave as the last chance to live close to nature. The community that developed was close-knit, looking out for each other, and respecting each other's privacy. They had their own grammar school, built in a hand-carved rustic Art Nouveau style resembling a Hobbit aesthetic. The school was never locked, and kids could stop in and take books from the unattended library at any time.
The Haleys built their home to be structurally sound for the forest setting. The entire building was concrete with metal roofing, on a strong foundation. They air-lifted an 1860s Bosendorfer grand piano into their living room. Yet when they gave a Last Chance concert, they had to get a piano tuner to remove all the acorns a busy squirrel had stored in the instrument. They were also avid bibliophiles, Jim being the author of the spy thriller “Row Well And Live,” while Ann was once the owner of “Second Story Books” in Capitola Village. They had two Airedales the size of ponies, friendly as anything, but vigilant against coyotes and lions coming after their poultry and cats. They had built one of the best wells in the neighborhood and shared their water with neighbors.
The Haleys had seen local forest fires, one having traveled along the summit of an adjoining ridge, and feared high winds might spread it to their property, but it was extinguished before crossing their canyon. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had even come to the Haleys' driveway to observe the burned zone. Then Aug. 16, 2020, a lightning storm occurred at 3:30 at night. It produced thousands of bolts and set a fire near Davenport, another near Waddell Creek, and three fires to the north. These merged to become the CZU Lightning Complex, which burned for 42 days. The Haleys monitored the blaze on the computer, then one day a neighbor came up their driveway, to warn them that the fire was headed their way. They replied that they'd just collect some things, but the neighbor said, “No time! Leave now! The flames will follow you as you leave!”
Since they were on canes and a walker, they were afraid of getting trapped in their long driveway, so they hurried their four-wheel drive to Last Chance Road, for a bumpy ride out. And yet, the day was so beautiful, with shafts of sunshine as if from a cathedral window, and birds and squirrels at play, unaware of the disaster to come. It was a long exit, and soon deer were racing them to the clearing. They made it to safety wondering what would happen to their home. They had built correctly in fire-proof materials and had plenty of water in their well to fight the fire. Yet this was not a survivable situation. Nothing was left, and most Last Chance water was poisoned by melting PVC pipes and PVC tanks. Their antiques, books, manuscripts and pianos were all destroyed. They rented a place outside Watsonville, and when permitted, built a small cabin on their burned-over place, with a wheel-chair ramp. But Jim died before the house was completed. And Ann's mobility problems required hospitalizations. Yet she hated to let go of her Last Chance paradise, for no matter what nature did, it was her refuge of peace.
Water
When the 1955 flood inundated downtown Santa Cruz, the city wanted to create a flood-control basin dammed by watergates in place of the Water Street and Soquel Avenue bridges, which could increase the river's capacity before spillover during a flood. But the Army Corps of Engineers wouldn't fund anything that wasn't continuous levees. Nature had been naughty, so we had to get rid of it! The Army Corps wanted to replace the trees and river with a concrete drainage channel like in Los Angeles. Due to expense, they settled for earthen levees held in place by rocks, and placed the minimum legal width of 70 feet, to allow new real estate opportunities on the riparian corridor. This was supposed to eliminate the threat of a 100-year flood, but its narrowness reduced its holding capacity and merely limited the threat of a 30year flood.
For just 27 years later, the whole levee system was put to the test. The storm of 1982 raised the river level to near capacity. On Jan. 4, rains turned heavy, pounding the area with 19 inches over two days, and saturated the soil causing trees to lose their footing, and float down the river to Santa Cruz. Cranes were placed on town bridges for lifting trees and logs out of the river so log jams wouldn't cause an overflow. At 11 a.m., “a police officer reported the San Lorenzo had left its banks, and was creeping toward the County (Government) Center.” At one point a crane was removed from the Soquel Avenue bridge just seconds before a section of the bridge collapsed, severing phone and electrical lines. Downtown businesses were sand-bagged, and while the flooding didn't happen, a damaged pipeline left the city with only 24 hours of water, closing schools and businesses and forcing the fire department to bring in self-contained pumpers.
But this paled in comparison to Love Creek near Ben Lomond, where soil became so saturated that a quarter-mile of mountainside 33 feet deep, slid down the mountain, carrying trees, destroying 25 homes, and killing 10. The debris dammed Love Creek, forming a lake about 980 feet long that flooded several homes. There is no construction protocol that can survive that kind of soil liquefaction.
The Downtown Basin is the drainage point for the entire San Lorenzo River watershed. Because we didn't get a concrete drainage channel, San Lorenzo River water still soaks into the downtown soil, creating a high water table. River water thus extends below the surface for several blocks on either side as part of the river percolatrix, or matrix of wet soil. To build on permanently wet soil requires certain conditions, as a developer explained regarding his five-story project on Ocean Street. To create underground parking would require pumping out the water on a permanent basis. He said a fivestory building on wet soil, even anchored on bedrock, presses down like on a wet mattress, wringing out the moisture. This was observed in the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes when geysers appeared along the river squeezed out by the quake.
While we have architectural guidelines created with massive amounts of public input, they aren't used for monster buildings, because compatibility and pleasing the public is no longer a requirement. Likewise environmental impact reports no longer encumber the biggest impacts on our environment. Taiwan has frequent earthquakes, with some of the most rigorous building requirements in the world. Yet even doing everything right, on April 3, 2024, buildings in Taiwan fell over due to soil liquefaction. Our beloved Santa Cruz keeps us on our toes in many ways, but let's hope these new shortcuts aren't creating problems in an effort to solve others.