County Continues Carpinteria Salt Marsh Dredging

By the County of Santa Barbara

Due to the increased flooding risk to adjacent properties and the City of Carpinteria, Santa Barbara County is conducting an emergency dredging operation at the Carpinteria Salt Marsh.

Operations will continue 24-hours as needed until the amount of sediment in the marsh is no longer a flood risk to the community. The estimated completion date is early July 2023, as operational safety and circumstances allow. Further information will be provided as it is developed. 

After the creek flows receded following the extreme rains from January 2023, the Carpinteria Salt Marsh revealed an extreme amount of sedimentation. This sedimentation obstructs Santa Monica Creek and Franklin Creeks. When these channels are obstructed, the community is at increased risk for flooding throughout the City of Carpinteria. Obstructed channels also interrupt the tidal cycle in the marsh, which reduces habitat for fish and wildlife that rely on open water channels for habitat and foraging.

The County is using a hydraulic dredge vessel to remove sediment from the drainage channels in the marsh. The hydraulic dredge vessel exports water and sediment through a discharge pipe into the surf zone at a designated location near the mouth of the Salt Marsh. The marsh was dredged in a similar fashion previously following the 1/9/18 Debris Flow.

The beach is Closed to Public Access 400 ft in each direction of the marsh mouth. Please do not approach the dredge pipe and equipment. Beach water quality samples are collecting during operations. Sampling results are be posted at https://www.countyofsb.org/emergencybeachops

For more information on the County’s response to the local emergency, visit readysbc.org.

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19 Comments

  1. Ah, global warming. Isn’t this what everyone has been warned about for decades?
    Now man decides to destroy natural habitats and protected marshes to save billionaires beach houses?
    Serious hypocrisy.
    And tax payers who don’t benefit from beach front properties, which is 99% of tax payers, are footing the bill to destroy nature?

    • Sac, you are falling for the con by conflating CO2 and so called “global warming” with several other types of pollution and environmental harm. Yes, humans have and continue to cause environmental harm. The con has worked, because you support all of the environmental harms you listed as examples in the name of reducing CO2 emissions. You support deforesting South American rainforests to extract lithium to make batteries because the con convinced you that CO2 was more important. You support cobalt mining in the Congo because the con has you convinced that contaminating the countryside with uranium is a small price to pay to reduce CO2 emissions. I support protecting the environment, and CO2/global warming is a fabrication that is used to justify environmental harm.

    • CHIP – do you seriously believe that humans haven’t contributed at all to global warming? Seriously? Over 100 years of factories belching deadly pollutants into the air. Nothing? Billions of people driving cars, planes, trains, ships for over 100 years. Nothing? Toxic chemicals being dumped into our oceans. Nothing? Millions of acres of trees being cut down EACH YEAR. Nothing? Do you truly think so little of humanity that you can’t even acknowledge the fact that what we’ve been doing to our planet for the past 100+ years has ZERO affect on it?

    • How can it be that floods and debris flows far more severe than anything experienced in living memory, such as the great flood of 1862, were natural but the relatively minor recent rains and flooding we have experienced is a catastrophic consequence of human caused “global warming.” There was also that time back in the 1960s when the city of carpinteria was flooded by a post fire mud/debris flow. The Santa
      Monica debris basin has prevented that from happening again during recent post-fire rain events. I don’t suppose you want to remove this debris basin and restore the natural cycle of periodic flooding of carpinteria, do you? If you want to keep the “global warming” con alive, you need to be a little more careful about staying consistent with history.

    • Actually, and you deniers know it, if you look at climate history, catastrophic record-setting events are happening with rapidly increasing frequency, caused by our addition of heat energy to the atmosphere through radiative forcing. You know, massive CO2 emissions.
      The only con is by the deniers.

    • Repeating a lie does not make it become true, even if you repeat your lies endlessly. AGW is driven by our massive injection of CO2 into the atmosphere. It’s an undeniable fact. Science has known about radiative forcing since the 1800s.
      Of course, repeating politically-motivated lies has now become standard operating practice for carbon shills and their right-wing sycophants.

  2. The marsh needs dredging….nothing more….nothing less. The dredging benefits rich people, poor people, and schlubs like me. The cleanup/dredging must be done quickly and efficiently. If it’s not done sooner than soon, we could be looking at a disaster considering that El Nino is upon us and we could really/really get drenched. All of us should thank our lucky stars that the County of SB is taking this dredging project seriously. Let’s leave the Global Warming discussion for another day, but today….let’s get the dredging started!

  3. What exactly is the County of SB worried about so much that they’re going into “Emergency mode” and taking heavy machinery into a sensitive natural habitat, one of the few marsh wetlands left in the entire state? An example for them and all their supporters here that you’re going against normal ecological processes, ie Mother Nature. And yes, that’s hypocritical!

    • As you should be aware, human activities have largely short-circuited natural processes along our coastal watershed. This is an attempt to help both the natural riparian ecosystem and the residents of the area.
      But at least you’re not a hypocrite – you stick true to complaining about everything.

  4. In reality deniers are the climate change champions.
    After reviewing 139 years of temperature & storm data out of 6,000,000 years they think they know the “right” temperature of the earth.
    They deny what happened 4,000,000 years ago, an ice age.
    And they deny the fact that before the ice age there were no polar ice csis, confirmed by scientists.
    So today the earth is colder than it was millions of years ago.
    But after seeing a glimpse they know everything
    Point was per the climate change gurus all beach houses were supposed to be u sr water decade ago and now they’re damaging natural wetlands to save a few billionaires vacation homes. Bunch of John Kerry’s flying around in private jets killing the earth when they tell you have no right to treat the earth the way they do.
    Rules for thee but not fir me

  5. If you’re a knee jerk type, you’re saying global warming is happening and next year could be the cause of a potential flood in Carp because also there could be an El Niño and so let’s have the County (who don’t have scientists) thrash our last best local coastal marsh. Is that right? That’s funny and sad.

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