If it’s dangerous, difficult, or downright impossible and it involves American infrastructure, disaster recovery, or water resources, there’s a good chance the US Army Corps of Engineers will be the ones called in to deal with it, sometimes with mixed results.
George Washington appointed the first engineer officers of the Army on June 16, 1775. Army engineers have served in every subsequent war that America has fought, but they also serve in peacetime, tackling engineering challenges at home and in more than 130 countries around the world.
In the early nineteenth century, when the government of the newly formed United States was sending teams out to explore and essentially conquer the rest of the continent, members of the Corps mapped the West. They included US Army Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark, who led the Discovery Corps. And because rivers do not start and stop at geopolitical boundaries, USACE was later given the responsibility of monitoring and maintaining federal waterways.
In the twentieth century, the Corps became the lead federal flood control agency and began significantly expanding civil works. That included building dams, lakes, reservoirs, levees and other flood control projects, but also other types of infrastructure projects, many of which have reshaped the landscape of America, and other parts of the world. USACE engineered the Panama Canal, built the infrastructure for the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, and were involved in the design and construction of the Pentagon.
The Corps still maintains and operates approximately 740 dams statewide, including the massive Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River (completed in 1938), and 11 more on the Willamette River in Oregon.
One of the most prominent local projects the USACE has been involved in is the harbor at Marina Del Rey.
A 1916 USACE study quashed the aspirations of certain railroad interests who had long desired a deep water port on the Westside to challenge the port at San Pedro, but a feasibility study released by the Corps in 1946 opened the door for what would become the country’s largest public pleasure craft marina. A federal initiative was approved in 1954. The marina opened a decade later. The federal government underwrote half the cost of the navigation features, including the construction of the jetties, the breakwater and the main channel. USACE continues to oversee dredging activities in the main channel—a major concern, because, left alone, the channel would rapidly silt up. Every five years or so, the Corps oversees the removal of an estimated million cubic feet of sediment, some of which goes to help replenish neighboring beaches, including Redondo and Dockweiler.
Many of the local projects the Corps has been asked to weigh in on in the past suggest something from Lewis Carroll. If the Walrus and the Carpenter had the political clout, the Corps engineers would have been the ones who would have had to weigh in on how many mops would be required to sweep the beach clean of sand and whether some other method would be more efficient. If that sounds ridiculous, consider the time the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors enlisted the Corps to determine the feasibility of a 12-mile-long causeway a mile offshore running from Santa Monica to Malibu in the 1960s.
Two versions were proposed: an elevated freeway on what was essentially a very, very long bridge made of steel encased in concrete located off of a highly dynamic, geologically active coastline with multiple active fault lines, and in rough, deep water, with strong currents and the potential for powerful storm swells.
A far more ambitious version of this project would have involved creating a series of islands, made by dynamiting and leveling a large section of the Santa Monica Mountains and transporting the resulting rubble offshore. New housing developments and yacht harbors would be built, with the freeway running from island to island on bridges.
By 1965, several more alternatives were added, including “widening the existing beach along this 12-mile stretch of coastline to provide space for a freeway to run along the present high tide line,” by means of using hundreds of rock and metal sand groins and millions of tons of fill; a “viaduct”—a second or even third story—over the already existing road (facilitated by by condemning all of the properties along the roadway from Santa Monica to west of Malibu Canyon); and “an inland route [that would] entail bridging a number of canyons with possibly the section through the city of Santa Monica running through a viaduct.”
The feasibility study for that last plan concluded that “large sections of Pacific Palisades might have to be condemned.”
The price tag estimates provided by the USACE for the different options ranged from $121 million to $408 million—a staggering sum of money in the 1960s, but probably a fraction of what any of these plans would have actual cost. The price tag helped quell some of the enthusiasm for the project.
The USACE report suggested that boating marinas along the lea side of the proposed causeway islands could eventually generate revenue to help recoup part of the cost, but the price of building them was another matter. That proposal was incorporated in Assembly Bill 2050, and vetoed by Governor Edmund G. Brown, at the behest of the Association to Save Our Beaches.
Congress is responsible for deploying the Corps. Local politicians with enough clout, including county supervisors, may be able to get the USACE to weigh in on a project, but they can’t control what the findings of a feasibility report will be.
The preliminary study prepared by Corps engineers for the wildly unpopular 1970s plan to build a marina at Paradise Cove in Malibu found that plans for 1,430 boat slips and a breakwater would “damage valuable kelp beds and upset the marine environment. The USACE report also pointed out that the project would destroy tide pools and the area’s unique surf break. That report helped the project’s opponents, not the politicians who commissioned the study.
A plan to build huge rock groins and a breakwater and dump sand between them at Las Tunas beach to make a new recreation area was also derailed in part by USACE findings. Opponents of the project used data from the USACE report to support the argument that county engineers were overly optimistic when they argued that periodic sand replenishment would prevent the new groins from causing sand to erode from the beaches below Las Tunas.
An USACE study of landslide activity from 1965 came in handy in 1972, when the oil industry made a push to drill for oil in Pacific Palisades in the early 1970s. The study was used to demonstrate the geological instability of the area.
But the USACE has made mistakes, too. A lot of them. Cost overruns, failed projects, and accusations of doing more harm than good have plagued the Corps, along with words like pork barrel and boondoggle. Some politicians have used the Corps for their own often ill-considered pet projects. Others, including Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and Arizona Senator John McCain, have attempted to reign in the Corps, or restructure it to eliminate waste and negative environmental impacts.
The Corps has a history of leaping—or being thrown—into big projects, sometimes without an adequate understanding of the potential impacts and the associated costs. Carter targeted some of the massive dam projects authorized by his predecessors, restructuring these projects to be more environmentally and fiscally responsible. He is credited with redirecting the Corps from a focus primarily on building to one that also includes restoration and safety. And he created the Superfund program to help clean up the nation’s worst environmental disasters, putting the Corps skills to work at environmental mitigation, but there are still problems. The Corps was blamed for faulty levee design and construction that contributed to fatal flooding in Louisiana during hurricane Katrina in 2005.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the USACE was frequently used as a tool by unscrupulous politicians to destroy wetlands and facilitate irresponsible development. The Corps played a major role in draining and rerouting the Kankakee River and one million acres of wetland surrounding it in Indiana in the 1920s. This area went from being the largest contiguous wetlands in North America to one of the biggest ecological disasters in US history.
During the 1930s, the USACE undertook massive flood control projects and worked to drain wetlands essentially for the interests of developers. Marina Del Rey is only one example.
In his book Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner writes that the Corps “has ruined more wetlands than anyone in history, except perhaps its counterpart in the Soviet Union.”
Following historic flooding in 1938, the Corps led the effort to chain the rivers of Los Angeles in the 1930s, transforming the natural network of rivers and creeks into a concrete hellscape. The Los Angeles, Rio Hondo, and San Gabriel River were completely destroyed in the process. Today, the USACE is involved in the Los Angeles River Ecosystem Restoration Feasibility Study which details viable alternatives for restoring an 11-mile segment of the Los Angeles River.
The USACE changed gears in the second half of the 20th century, switching from the mid-century push for “taming” rivers, building dams, and massive development projects like engineering the dredging of the wetlands to enable Marina Del Rey to be built, to become leading environmental preservation and restoration agency.
The USACE is a tool—a very powerful one. It engineers projects like these because Congress directs the Corps to do so, for good or ill.
The USACE is now involved in numerous natural and cultural resource management programs related to water resources projects and the Nation’s wetlands, as well as working on environmental management and restoration at former and current military installations.
Some of the projects they are currently undertaking involve efforts to mitigate mistakes made in the past, like removing dams and restoring wetland and riparian habitat. One of the Corps biggest projects is an only partially successful multi-decade plan to restore the Florida Everglades, implemented after multiple efforts to drain this historic wetland.
Currently, ACE is an active participant in the multi-agency, multi-year project to remove the hundred-year-old Rindge Dam in Malibu Canyon, and restore watershed connectivity and habitat. It’s a complicated assignment. Building the dam in the narrow, incredibly deep Malibu Canyon ravine was a lot easier than removing it. The logistical challenges are formidable, but the end result is anticipated to improve the health of the entire watershed. Before the project could begin, a detailed feasibility study conducted by the Corps was commissioned. The Corps will also be involved in plans to use clean sediments impounded behind the defunct dam to replenish the beach east of the Malibu Pier.
Suzanne Guldimann
Right now, the Army Corps of Engineers is here in force, overseeing the process of clearing debris from the Palisades and Eaton burn zones as part of Phase II of the cleanup effort. More than 16,000 structures were destroyed, more than eight hundred are right here in Topanga, Saddle Peak, Las Flores Canyon, and Malibu.
It’s an almost unimaginably massive undertaking, but that’s what the USACE does: the impossible. The Corps motto is “Essayons”, or “let us try!” And this group of military and civilian engineers lives up to it.
