Ocean to touch two marshes

How do you restore a marsh that’s been walled off from the ocean for 80 or 90 years? How do you bring fish and birds back to their traditional habitat? For the Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy, which purchases land near the Santa Ana River for restoration, the answer is nearly this simple: just add water.

The conservancy unveiled a $10 million plan last week to lower or demolish decades-old levees, and let the ocean back into two marshes in southeast Huntington Beach, raising the total restored habitat where the Santa Ana River reaches the ocean to 130 acres.

It would also dredge flood channels in a previously-restored marsh.

The affected areas run along Pacific Coast Highway from the Santa Ana River to the AES Huntington Beach Generation Station off Newland Street.

While the concept is straightforward, the plan will take four years — including getting permits from a dozen agencies, working only when endangered species aren’t nesting there, and leaving a year and a half in between halves of the project so birds can adjust.

In the end, both the Brookhurst Marsh and Magnolia Marsh will have water flowing in, and the nearby restored Talbert Marsh will have some touch-up work done as well.

Conservancy members already have a model for success.

In 1989, they let tidal waters into the Talbert Marsh east of Brookhurst Street and watched it become a hot spot for fish and birds, including endangered species, the conservancy’s project manager Gary Gorman said.

“What we’re going to do is essentially the same thing further upstream,” he said. “The tide will be restored to those areas, and that will bring in a tremendous amount of nutrients. That will draw more fish and more birds, which is the goal of the project.”

Only at high tide will waves crest a wall and exchange waters with the Brookhurst Marsh, Gorman said. But the change won’t be minor, he said.

“It will produce fairly drastic results,” he said. “We’re going to add two tides in there every day.”

If earthmoving begins as planned in September 2008, the Brookhurst Marsh — running from Brookhurst Street to Magnolia Street — should be finished by March 2009. But the Magnolia Marsh west of it won’t get its makeover till Sept. 2010, said Chris Webb, a senior coastal scientist for Moffatt and Nichol, a consulting firm doing engineering on the project.

“We want to allow the birds to leave the marsh that’s going to be constructed upon, and go to another marsh as a refuge,” he said. “If need be, they can use the refuge marsh for the year after construction while the impacted marsh is reestablishing itself.”

Detailed planning on the project has gone on for a year, but the group has aimed to do this for decades, said the group’s chairman Jack Kirkorn.

“It’s been a dream of ours ever since we even became a nonprofit private organization,” he said. “We’re finally getting there. It’s one of the crown jewels of our goals.”