Manual breach of Navarro River sandbar raises issues bigger than traffic

MENDOCINO Co., 12/22/23 — On Dec. 13, State Route 128 had been closed for six days due to flooding over the roadway. Sheldon Schultz and son Zalmon Schultz loaded up their kayak and went out to pull the plug.

The seasonal sandbar blocking the Navarro River had already begun to fail. The two men had gone to have a look two days before, and they realized it was close to flowing naturally. Why not be there to see it blow?

They dug a trench across the bar and watched while water flowed in as a trickle. Then the trench plugged up with driftwood and blobs of weeds and balls of roots. They went back to the kayak and got shovels and did it again. This time there was a fast movement of water, then faster and baboom! A massive wave from the river blasted forward with incredible force, literally pushing the Pacific Ocean back for several minutes. In a few hours, millions of tons of water had jetted out to sea. The river quickly fell off the highway and back into its banks. 

So wasn’t that a good thing? Not so, as the act was likely illegal.

“What I can tell you is that it is prohibited by law to breach a river like that,” said California State Parks Chief Ranger Loren Rex.

“Every situation is unique. But there is a potential to cause serious harm if the top freshwater layer gets flushed out the ocean and saltier [water] is left behind for the fish, which can’t quite deal with it,” said Rex.

Sheldon Schultz, director of the Albion Field Station owned by Pacific Union College, took responsibility as soon as asked about it. He now wishes he hadn’t breached the bar and says he will never do it again.

“Since arriving in Albion in 2017, I have several times observed a number of surfers and others digging out the sandbar to open the river. Because I often observed this in full daylight with a number of people around, it never crossed my mind that there would be some sort of legal issue with creating a breach in the sandbar,” Schultz said via email.

The two men had unknowingly sliced into controversy that goes back more than 150 years on the Navarro and that is increasingly an issue all along the California Coast— what to do about sandbars that cause flooding? 

Dealing with all aspects of coastal flooding is expected to be a bigger issue going forward, said Brendan O’Neil, Senior Environmental Scientist of Natural Resource Management Program at California State Parks, Sonoma-Mendocino Coast District.

“This is more than just a Navarro River closing-the-road issue,” O’Neil said. “This is going to become a bigger inconvenience and an increasingly significant challenge to our state going forward. It’s complicated by the regulatory environment that we’re working in. And it’s one that is going to challenge us to come up with solutions.”

The issue has been debated for years on the MCN Listserv, a community email listserve that has been run by the Mendocino Unified School District for more than two decades. Biologists, historians and frustrated travelers have all weighed in over the years. 

“A few days after the event I did discuss the situation with the Fish and Wildlife officer,” Sheldon Schultz said.

“I did receive a lot more education on the issue. He explained that sometimes it can have a very negative result. Apparently at times, if the sand dam breaks by human intervention, it can result in a death of marine life. When the estuary floods, you have a layer of freshwater on top and saltwater below the freshwater. The saltwater layer becomes anoxic and becomes a death zone for animals. When the dam breaks, the freshwater layer is drained off the river, and nothing is left except for the salt layer. Fish crabs etc are forced into the…more toxic water. If the river breaks naturally, it is more likely that it has done so after significant rainfall and more freshwater comes down the river. In that case there is a higher possibility of retaining a zone of safe freshwater.” Several local scientists described the reason breaches should not be done in the same terms as Schultz did.

“In hindsight I certainly wish I would have researched deeper into this topic before taking any action,” Schultz said. “While I believe that the event was moments from happening anyway my newer understanding would have stopped me from doing anything except for allowing nature to take its course. The dam formation is a natural process.”

Two people, including photographer Nicholas Wilson, saw the two that afternoon and described the situation to this reporter. Wilson arrived about 4:20 p.m to take pictures of the sandbar from the pullout on the north side of the road high above Navarro Beach on Highway 1. He took dramatic images as the men freed the water and then watched it turn into a raging torrent.

A look at the USGS Navarro Gauge chart five miles up river showed a sharp drop from 5 ft. at 5 p.m to 2.5 ft. at 8 p.m. It stayed down at that level for a few days. The recent rainfall moved the gauge up to a high past 13 feet on Dec. 20 before it began falling rapidly again.

Wilson, this reporter and others, including some from government agencies, searched the river after the breach but there was no sign of any fish kill. 

Common wisdom on the coast is that the sandbar itself kills fish and breaching it saves fish. While Wilson was photographing the two men breaking the levee, a big truck with a Fort Bragg driver slowed and had a look. Wilson told him two men had just breached the sandbar. That brought a smile from the departing truck driver who cheered, “They are saving the fish.”

Wilson is a well-known local photographer and author who has made a practice since 2016 of studying the Navarro River mouth and posting to the MCN Announce listserv his observations about potential flood impacts on State Route 128. 

Until Wilson photographed this breach, some on the listserv and on local radio insisted stories of purposeful breaches were mere folklore. This reporter found more than a dozen anecdotal stories of Navarro sandbar breaches with three that have been verified, two of which caused big fish kills. Almost every year, and sometimes several times in a year, a large sandbar is deposited by the ocean at the mouth of the Navarro River. While other coast rivers are blocked such as the Ten Mile River and Pudding Creek, the Navarro is the largest of the 11 bridged rivers north of Navarro. And it can get plugged up by the ocean like a rubber plug in a bathtub. When that happens,  the Navarro River quickly flows over a portion of SR128 just before it meets State Route 1. The impasse covers no more than a mile and is an opposite situation than flooding up river. If the river is large enough to flood homes in the Anderson Valley, it will always be too big for any sandbar to contain. 

A big steel gate is closed by Caltrans when the water hits the road from sandbar flooding. That means travelers must take a circuitous route. The fastest way around involves using Cameron Road on the west side of the Highway. Travelers coming from Fort Bragg to Anderson Valley can cross the Navarro River and take Cameron Road.  They can also use Orr Springs Road through Comptche to use Flynn Creek Road to get back to 128. 

As rains continue, travelers and commuters want to know if the road will close again. This depends on ocean conditions as much as rain and the river. But nobody has spent the time to come up with an exact prediction for sandbar formation, partly because the volume of sand thrown up by the ocean varies. On Dec. 21, the sandbar appeared to be forming again. Wilson thought so too, after going out Thursday night with his drone.

“It might close again in a few days,” Wilson said.

Sandbar breaches have been a matter of controversy for more than a century for the Navarro River. Some have suggested that they were created by mankind silting up the rivers, cutting the water flow and killing off salmon.

Scientists say artificial beaching has killed fish on the Navarro. Environmental agencies have strict rules about rivers, beaches and fish that don’t allow people to make even minor alterations to river beds, state and federal waters or State Parks property 

But the issue falls into jurisdictional cracks as the property belongs to state parks and several agencies are involved in waterflow and wildlife. Sandbar breaching requires starting with the Army Corps of Engineers, but no law says who regulates temporary sandbars.

“It’s an orphan issue,” O’Neil said, “but it is something that is important and will become more so in the future.”

O’Neil is also a surfer. He, like Schultz, has seen surfers creating breaches.

“In other parts of the state, mostly, these are generated by adjacent homeowners who are concerned about flooding,” O’Neil said.

He said he has also seen instances where people just walking the beach are tempted by the enormous possibility that cutting through that sand presents.

“It’s like, `Wow, look at that, what could we do here?’” he said. He added that creating breaches can be very dangerous to people doing the breach due to the amount of water that is suddenly released.

The Russian River sandbar in Sonoma County is breached most years with heavy equipment involving extensive permits, studies and a cost of $1 million per year. Homes would be flooded if this were not done. No homes are threatened when the Navarro plugs up. Some locals on the listserv want Caltrans to add raising SR128 by about a foot to its upcoming work on the highway.

The Navarro River has had sandbar breaches at least since the days of logging. In the 19th century the river was blocked intentionally for log jams. The logs, and much sediment, were transported down the river, blocked in at the mouth and then fed into a lumber mill. The mill closed in 1883.

There has been much discussion on the listserv about the Navarro River, including how the huge amount of sediment from logging from the 19th century through the ownership of Louisiana Pacific dumped huge amount of sediment into the river, contributing to the mountain of debris at the mouth of the river, as well as destroying salmon breeding ground by silt. There has also been a steady increase in water diversions out of the Navarro which has made the river less mighty, especially by the wine industry in the summer months when the low water levels make the river vulnerable to toxic algae blooms. 

“I know that quite a bit of water is taken from the river upstream,” Schultz said. “When I snorkeled upstream from the Hendy Woods State Park, many pumps were taking fresh water from the river. As more and more people try to grow crops near the river this will of course put a strain on the river. The amount of freshwater coming down the river varies greatly yearly. “

Scientific papers say that coho salmon fingerlings can be killed by saltwater intrusions from breaches that happen before big rains. And salmon and steelhead may enter the river too early if breaches happen.

Scientists have also weighed in on the listserv discussions of the sandbar and the breaching process. A decade ago, State Parks scientist Renee Pasquinelli presented her investigation of the issue on the listserv, which is revived and quoted regularly, among other science that shows manually breaching the sandbar can be a bad idea that kills fish.

“State Parks is responsible for management of the Navarro property. We too have received questions regarding the closure of the river mouth. This situation has existed for decades; the difference is the previous tenant of the Mill Keepers house artificially breached the mouth (sometimes in the middle of the night) to protect his chemical shed. 

“Past studies have concluded that artificial breaching without adequate rainfall can be lethal to estuary species… I have literally seen thousands of dead fish, crabs, and other organisms at the Navarro after an illegal breaching incident several years ago,” she said in a 2016 email.

Pasquinelli has since retired from State Parks and moved to Humboldt County, so was unable to address anything about the current beach, such as whether it had any impact on fish or other matters. She suggested talking to current State Parks Senior Specialist Environmental Scientist

Sonoma-Mendocino Coast District Tara Fuller provided a 2019 document now used by State Parks for guidance: “Considerations for Management of the Mouth State of California’s Bar-built Estuaries.” The report was done for federal ocean agencies by the Bodega and Moss Landing marine laboratories.

That document is not specific to the Navarro nor does it address unauthorized breaches.

On the Navarro, it mentions that the saltwater intrusions actually help mitigate the algae blooms that are becoming more common and deadly due to warmer waters. Sandbars all along the coast are causing problems as the long-term effects of dams and development accumulate. In some places with dams, sandbars do have to be removed to release trapped fish.

The main point of the paper is that every estuary and every sandbar is different, not just from river to river but from year to year. Says the report: “Sandbar-built estuaries are notoriously variable, even in their natural state, with some estuaries remaining closed for longer than a year and then remaining open for longer than a year — or opening for just a day or closing for one tidal cycle. This intense habitat diversity is a hallmark that gives rise to high genetic diversity facilitating the persistence of unique species endemic to California and also supports a diverse assemblage of species. This advocates for a management strategy that maintains environmental variability and associated habitat diversity (including extreme events) that can maintain the immense biodiversity of these systems. At the very least, managed breaches should not be executed in exactly the same way every time — but the challenge is to quantify the variability under which these systems evolved and conduct occasional managed breaches in a way that sustains this variability over the years.”

Resident Ashley Nicole Nieminen was concerned about the artificial breach.

“I own property on the Navarro River and have lived there for 28 years,” Nieminen said in an interview. “I have a connection and understanding of the ecosystem. My education is from personal experience and research online. It’s important that people know that their travel convenience is not more important than the ecosystem of the Navarro River.”

More than two dozen homes once composed the town of Navarro, at the mouth of the Navarro River. As far back as the 19th century, newspaper articles and historical accounts show artificial breaches. The town of Navarro was a thriving village until 1883 when the lumber mill closed. That was followed by a series of fires, floods and other catastrophes that culminated with the 1906 San Francisco earthquake wiping out what was left the town, except for two buildings, the big house where the mill manager had once lived and the centerpiece inn of the town, built in 1861 and which was renovated recently. In between it spent more than a century as a road house, mostly called Navarro-by-the Sea. It was the first roadhouse to greet those coming to Mendocino when automobiles began arriving on the dirt Highway 1. Locals say Clark Gable and Carol Lombard stayed there in 1939, on a trip from Southern California to Oregon. A second town called Navarro had been established as Wendling in 1902 14 miles upriver, changing its name to Navarro when the Navarro Lumber Company bought the Wendling Mill. For a time there were two towns one called Navarro Mill and the other Navarro-by-the-sea.

Roger Collin of Elk, responding to arguments on the listserv that the sandbar is man-made, sent an e-mail to this reporter.

“I’ve been around here for 55 years, and have personally `released’ the Navarro back in the day, with shovels, or driftwood, and by hand, to start a small stream eating its way thru the sand, usually around Thanksgiving, after the first couple of small rains have caused the Navarro to rise almost to the roadway. It was a fun way to spend a few hours, and probably only sped up the break-thru by a few days to a week,” Collin wrote.

“I think there’s probably something to the idea that fluctuations in nature, although sometimes alarming, tend to balance each other out over time. A good example of wrong-headed responses from governing agencies is the well-documented expensive stream-clearing that went on in the ‘70s and ‘80s in local rivers. I think it was the Fish and Game Dept., perhaps others as well, that hired crews to clear stumps logs and debris jams, and then reversed course, and declared that actually, the obstacles in the river created deep holes with a cooling influence that enhanced salmon habitat and survival,” Collin wrote.

The sandbar has befuddled people for many years. A news article in the Sept. 7, 1962 Mendocino Beacon reported that inn guests were digging in the sandbar in the hopes of saving fish. 

In a quote from the Mendocino Beacon, a reporter wrote “Last week’s item pertaining to the thousands of dying fish at the Navarro River, was written with information passed on to this reporter. This week I will relate what I saw myself. Labor Day, my husband, two children and I decided to take a boat ride up the Navarro to have a picnic lunch and swim. Jack Sparkman of the Navarro-by-the-Sea Inn generously lent us a boat and motor to use on our outing.

“When we arrived at the river, we were surprised with the good news that the mouth had been opened. A group of guests at the Navarro-by-the-Sea Resort had been so appalled by the terrible waste of fish life that they had dug away by hand shovels the sandbar trapping the fingerlings. However, in my opinion they were too late. Even though the mouth of the river had been open all night there were still literally thousands of dead fish lying on the banks and on the river bed. Hundreds of seagulls were feasting on the dead bodies. As we went up the river, we kept seeing more and more dead fish. Some were up on the banks above the water line left when the water rushed out the newly opened mouth, some floating on the top of the water. About a mile above the mouth we witnessed nature’s garbage disposal, the buzzards at work. Approximately twenty-five buzzards were busy cleaning up the carnage. Needless to say, this was not a pleasant atmosphere for a holiday outing.”

Wilson and scientists interviewed believe the 1962 fish kill was created by the breach, not the sandbar, and the unnamed Beacon reporter had made the wrong assumption. But this assumption was then and still is popular, despite science showing the opposite.

The history of the sandbar and the impacts of water diversions and increased sediment in the river, along with numbers of coho salmon and steelhead, will be reported in a future issue.

Schultz said the breaching was something he did on his own and not part of his job.

“Let me be clear. When we did the breach it was not part of my work as director of the Albion Field station. I would be excited to share with you some of the things that we do at the station. We do a significant number of educational marine science field trips for middle and high school groups during the spring and fall. Most of what we do is for Pacific Union College which owns the field station.”

Schultz said that the field station does research with students working on masters degrees. And he said that now he’d be “adding a section on the sand dams at the mouths of rivers.”

The breach brought criticism and controversy when it was posted on Albion area Facebook groups. Schultz isn’t surprised, now that he knows more.

“In hindsight and now understanding a lot more of the history and science of the event it makes sense that a lot of people have strong opinions,” Schultz said.

“People care a lot. Many management decisions have a variety of thoughts and I certainly triggered conversation by carrying out this breach. I certainly will not let this happen again. We are fortunate that it appears that no animals died due to what we did, but I do understand that it was not a good idea. I for one will be happy to let the sand dam breach itself in the future and will add this education into the curriculum of visiting groups.”

Pacific Union College, located in the Napa Valley issued a statement about the incident. 

“The recent involvement of Albion Field station staff with the sandbar breach on the Navarro River was not part of any station-authorized activity. The Albion Field station exists to provide a learning and research site which promotes respectful support of the environment utilizing the most current and widely supported management techniques. Administration and staff of the Albion field station are committed to the highest level of environmental management and protection.” The statement was sent by email from Pacific Union College Vice President of Marketing and Communications Gene Edelbach.

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