When Rick and Cathy Doesburg look at the mouth of a canyon that empties
out at their Forster Ranch home, they envision a potential wall of mud.
When city officials look at the mouth of that canyon, they see a series
of storm drain improvements that the city built in 1996.
The Doesburgs are engaged in a legal battle with the city over what they
say is the city's failure to abate a nuisance that it declared in 1993 in
the privately-owned canyon. While the Doesburgs say the city never fixed
the root cause of the problem- a clogged-up canyon.
City officials reply that the city has no obligation to go onto private
property to solve a problem created at private hands, and the city went
above and beyond the call of duty by installing five 'beehive' drains at
the mouth of the canyon, designed to send floodwaters into manholes protected
by steel cages from being clogged up.
The Doesburgs acknowledge that the canyon is privately owned. But they
say that since the city used its policing power to declare the canyon a
public nuisance, the city had an obligation to see that the problematic
canyon was fixed.
Now, with El Niño weather phenomenon threatening a torrentially
wet winter, the Doesburgs say all they can hope is that the city's new drainage
system will be enough.
"I think very easily this house could be destroyed in spite of this,"
Doesburg said.
The Doesburgs had barely settled into their new home at 1310 Calle Cadena
when the house was flooded by storm runoff from the canyon in 1987. The
city took steps to hire a contractor to perform erosion-control measures.
The Doesburgs say that work was never performed, and the privately installed
fixtures failed in January of 1995 when a wall of mud invaded their backyard.
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