Santa Ana River

So the Riverside monster.

So and this is all according to just these two like websites that I saw that we're talking that has the stories on the night of November 8th, 1958, a 24 year old Charlie Wetzel was dry, was was driving home.

Wetzel lived in Bloomington, and he was driving along North Main Street, approaching a low crossing through the Santa Ana Riverbed.

The river was usually a little more than a broad, dry channel cutting through the landscape, but that night, water was running across the road.

Wetzel slowed down as he approached the crossing.

We pulled up alongside a neatly manicured golf course and, after getting out of our cars and saying hello, promptly turned away from it, favoring instead a narrow footpath through yellow grass and low-growing shrubs.

Soon, we came to a small concrete bridge over a narrow segment of the Santa Ana River, ducked beneath it, and were hit with the acrid odor of ammonia.

We had definitely come to the right place.

Joey handed me a pair of thermal binoculars.

Thank God I wasn't drinking coffee.

But in the 1930s, we had, I think it was 1935 and 1938 or 1934, 1938, we had two massive floods down here, Santa Ana River, LA River.

Let me back up and describe the hydrology of California.

When it rains here, very rarely, during the winter, it snows at the higher elevations, we hope.

Well, in the 30s, you had more population growth.

And so when those rivers flooded, people were killed.

Like two times we had floods in Southern California, San Gabriel, L.A., and Santa Ana rivers just exploded.

And hundreds of people were killed, animals wiped out.

They're pretty much doing the same.

in Long Beach, but Newport Beach has already approved a project to move 100,000 cubic yards of sand from the mouth of the Santa Ana River to those eroded areas that you see in that city between 36th and 62nd Street.

So they're hoping to restore some beach width and provide a larger buffer against those massive waves.

Meanwhile,

Since then, the City Council has activated its Emergency Operations Center to coordinate flood prevention.

The West Newport Beach Sand Replenishment Project is bringing about 100,000 cubic yards of sand from the Santa Ana River mouth to eroded beach areas between 36th and 62nd streets.

City crews are working to build and reinforce protective sand berms, while pumps and tide valves have been positioned in areas that are prone to flooding.

There's some low areas there or some areas that have a little beach left and before the water hits the home.

I mean, you can tell this is a dump truck, and this thing is huge.

Um, so anyway, this is right by the Santa Ana River, and, uh, and this will be our experimental facility to look at, uh, at how to upscale, uh, these, uh, these new ideas in, uh, uh, wetland treatment systems.

Another area in which we're working is out near Denver, um, sort of, uh, northwest of the Denver Airport.

This is the South Platte River that flows out of Denver, and the South Platte River in the summertime, uh, much of the year, is basically wastewater from Denver.

And we have, you know, sandbagging up in the foothills and, you know, the runoff.

And there's actually water running through the Santa Ana River and San Diego River.

And, you know, there's going to be a lot of stuff happening.

Yeah, November, I like to spend the November and then December in the desert.

There's fish there, clams there, and then also you've got fresh body of fresh water.

And every once in a while, you have the Santa Ana River that runs through there.

It's also a fault zone area.

Also, Black Star Canyon is known for dogman reports now.