Our apologies to you if your email doesn't make it into the Insider in a timely manner, or if it doesn't make it in at all. As you can imagine, we get swamped with e-notes of all sorts. Why, just this week we've won the Irish Lottery at least a dozen times, and never mind the requests to help out numerous Nigerian bank executives.
So, you can imagine it's hard to wade through all our email. This note came into to us after the big rain the first weekend of this month:
Saw in your last blog, reference of a weather station no longer at the Thompson Creek Dam. The dam is line of sight from my home in Padua Hills.
I notice that there is no water stored in the basin after these recent heavy rains. The L.A. County DPW had three trucks with crews working there mid-day on Sunday, at the outlet gated valve assembly. They appeared to be shoveling mud out. There were also several trucks there on Thursday or Friday, and lots of activity there all summer and autumn.
Last winter there was water in the basin for several weeks, even though there wasn't much rainfall.
I'm not privy to "the water authority's" policy on rain run-off retention for replenishing the groundwater table, but it seems that they should be trying to retain some of this water, and allowing it to percolate into the
underground water table.
We haven't heard why the county public works trucks were out at the dam. Perhaps clearing debris in preparation for the big rain?
We're also not sure what the groundwater storage policy is. We had heard that lower lying areas of Claremont can have problems if there is too much groundwater. College Park has an old artesian well fenced off with a historical marker, and Pilgrim Place use to have problems with groundwater coming up.
We've also been told that that's one reason why water retention at the San Antonio Dam spreading grounds is capped at a certain level.
We don't know how any of this affects the League of Women Voters' proposal to create a wetlands preserve on vacant land near the Thompson Creek trail or if the league has even looked into potential groundwater problems their project might create.
There may be a reason why nature didn't put a wetlands there in the first place.
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