Smith Canal reflects Delta's problems

By Audrey Cooper

Record Staff Writer

As a boy in the late 1950s, Bart Bird and his friends could jump into Smith Canal and swim in its waters, fish along the banks or explore the San Joaquin River from a boat.

One summer when Bird was a teenager, he looked at the canal from his back yard and noticed the water was an unusual shade of green.

"You can still drive over the canal on (Interstate) 5 and see the kelly-green water," Bird said. "One year, bang, it was there. And it just stayed.

"The generations now can't have the adventures I had," he lamented.

Today, 40-plus years later, the water of Smith Canal remains unfishable, unswimmable and virtually unusable. Bird's daughter, now grown, was never able to swim at her grandmother's house.

The picturesque ivy- and berry-covered banks belie the truth: Smith Canal is crippled.

But it's not unique. The canal is a microcosm of the worst problems plaguing the Delta.

Yet unlike the Delta, which is covered with remote farms and wildlife preserves, Smith Canal is in an older, cozy Stockton neighborhood fighting problems from water pollution to levee erosion, crime to contaminated sediment.

About 250 homes sit along or near the 2¹/_²-mile canal from the San Joaquin River to Yosemite Lake and American Legion Park.

The water doesn't move much unless a boat drives by. The stagnant water is among the reasons Smith Canal will be included on the state's new list of the most-polluted waterways. Pathogen and pesticide levels are high enough to harm humans and wildlife. The canal's low levels of oxygen in the water can kill fish.

A neighborhood group—Friends of Smith Canal—expects to have proof soon that the canal's sediment is contaminated with cancer-causing PCBs. The government outlawed polychlorinated biphenyls in 1997 because of lingering pollution problems and health effects.

Stockton-based environmental group DeltaKeeper found PCB contamination in catfish and bass to be higher in Smith Canal than any other Central Valley waterway.

Those problems are primarily the fault of central Stockton homeowners and workers.

Drainage ditch

The flow of water has changed drastically in Stockton since Bird lived there, he said. There used to be more water in the San Joaquin River and less polluted stormwater from central Stockton.

Most of central Stockton's stormwater—roughly from the San Joaquin River in the west, the Calaveras River on the north, Highway 99 to the east and the Stockton Deep Water Channel in the south—drains into Smith Canal. Along with rainwater comes nearly anything else that can get into the drains or wash off the streets, from trash to yard clippings to carwash runoff water.

Decomposing yard waste sucks oxygen out of the water; animal feces contribute to the pathogen count; pesticides liberally applied to lawns wash into the drains.

Fish often die in the canal after the first winter rainstorm flushes out dross collected in drains over the dry summer.

"People don't see the problem with washing their car on their driveway, but if they looked at our back yard after that, they would see the damage it does to the water," canal neighbor Bill Maxwell said.

Some of the water pollution is more visible. Twice a year, Friends of Smith Canal holds a cleanup event. Last month, volunteers pulled out a Dumpster-full of litter, 32 shopping carts, a pay telephone, a trailer and a side panel to a 1998 sport utility vehicle.

Trash stays in the canal until someone plucks it out, because the canal has no natural flow besides rainwater. The tides move the trash around the canal but not as far as the San Joaquin River.

"It's essentially recycled water, and until something happens to help the entire Delta, I don't think there is much hope," said Dee Adams, another canal neighbor.

Very little of the canal water is sucked into the San Joaquin River. Friant Dam near Fresno captures most of the water at the head of the San Joaquin. As the emaciated river flows north from Fresno County, farmers and cities remove water and replace it with runoff water and treated sewage.

Since the river water doesn't rage through Stockton, it doesn't have enough power to suck out Smith Canal water, neighbors say.

"I wish it could be cleaned up, but I don't think that will happen in my lifetime," Adams said. "The squeaky wheel gets greased, so I think we will have to be extraordinarily squeaky."

Slipping away

The end of Bill Ghiglieri's yard doesn't have a dock. It has a chain-link fence. The bank used to extend 7 feet beyond the fence, but now water laps nearly to the fence.

The land underneath his back yard is slowly sloughing away because of the gentle water movement caused by boats and stormwater coming out of pipes.

"The underneath of the levee is OK, but this land is like the icing on a cake. The problem is the house and pool are built on the icing," he said.

Grapevines and blackberry bushes help to hold the remaining soil in place. The chain-link fence has been reset once but still leans about 1 foot toward the canal.

The swimming pool in the back yard, added nine years after Ghiglieri's father built the south Tuxedo Avenue home in 1946, started to crack a few years ago, an indication it is slipping into the canal.

The erosion problems gained momentum in the past 10 years, and most of the concrete around the pool is starting to pull away. Ghiglieri regularly checks the three towering palm trees along the edge of the pool, watching for any sign they are tilting.

"My father planted these when I was about 7 or so. I was about as tall as the trees," he said.

A palm tree across the canal is tilting toward the water not far from where other trees have fallen.

Riprap—a wall of stones held together by wire mesh that break up the power of waves and prevent erosion—might solve Ghiglieri's problem. But getting it done is a bureaucratic nightmare.

The government

Maintaining the levees from Louis Park to Pershing Avenue is the duty of two reclamation districts. One reclamation district has put in riprap; another has not.

The levees east of Pershing Avenue have no agency looking out for them. Although those levees are contained within the county flood-control district, they are not included in any district's maintenance program.

Also, the neighborhood includes areas both within and outside the city limits, adding to bureaucratic confusion.

The residents east of Pershing have been told they are responsible for erosion control, even though stormwater drainage is causing some of the problems.

A seawall along Ghiglieri's home was estimated to cost about $30,000 to $40,000, he said. His back yard can hold up for a few more years, but just how many is uncertain.

Some of the neighbors are asking contractors for riprap estimates. After that, they will likely ask the city or county to share part of the cost, neighbors say.

It's not just the cost of the riprap that worries residents. When soil around trees is eroded and the trees fall into the river, the owner of the tree is responsible for getting it out of the water. That costs thousands of dollars.

Problems with abandoned boats, houseboats, litter or toxic spills may be the responsibility of one or several state and federal agencies. The state Department of Fish and Game, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps of Engineers, Coast Guard, Sheriff's Office, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other agencies may have jurisdiction for different problems.

Finding out what agency is responsible for such problems can be a full-time job, canal neighbor Cleve Edwards said.

Erosion is only one bureaucratic problem. Many residents want to see the canal dredged, since in some places it is only 3 feet deep during low tide. Residents who lived along the canal for more than 40 years say they have never seen the canal dredged.

That doesn't seem to be something that will happen in the near future, Friends of Smith Canal leader Peg Keranen said.

The future

Wading through water-pollution and levee-erosion solutions has been difficult, but the group says it is making progress. This year they were honored with an award from TOPPS—Targeted Opportunities to Prevent Pollution in San Joaquin County. The group is a partnership of businesses, government agencies, community groups and agricultural organizations.

Still, Smith Canal isn't the only residential canal that needs attention.

Five Mile Slough, for example, has similar problems. It also is listed as one of the state's most-polluted waterways. Likewise, the Calaveras River is polluted, and the San Joaquin River is one of the most unhealthy rivers in the nation.

"These waterways are the jewels of Stockton's landscape, and essentially we've treated them as sewers," DeltaKeeper head Bill Jennings said.

Bart Bird no longer lives along the canal but says he works with Friends of Smith Canal because of the good days he spent growing up there. His 85-year-old mother still lives in his boyhood home.

"If you lose these gems, in this day and age you can't get them back. That's a big problem we face," Bird said.

"The key is that we have to look at Smith Canal as part of a bigger problem."

* To reach reporter Audrey Cooper, phone 546-8298 or e-mail acooper@recordnet.com