Beebe Ranch Channel Restoration

The Beebe Ranch is a two hundred acre ranch located in the Eastern foothills of Petaluma, California. The Beebe Ranch has a creek tributary that runs through the property for a distance of over seven thousand feet conveying water from the Western face of Sonoma Mountain Water Shed. This tributary feeds into Old Adobe Creek and the Petaluma River. It once supported the Coho Salmon and Steel Head Trout, providing a food source for the Native American's which once inhabited the property. Currently the area supports the Red Legged Frog, along with rare and endangered plant species.

Over the past fifty years the channel has filled with debris and tires. The State Department of Transportation paid the landowner to dump tires that were collected along State and County Roads in this channel. The project task was to consult and perform services to remove over 500,000 tires (tire removal was assigned to a contractor other than Campbell Grading Inc.), realign the channel, stabilize the channel and slopes, eliminate erosion and sediment delivery, construct a two acre habitat pond for Red Legged Frogs, plan and install all erosion control, and re-vegetate the site.

Once the tires were removed a channel of over forty feet deep was left. The bottom six feet of the channel consisted of mud that developed from spring activity and the use of heavy equipment to remove all of the tires. The challenge was removing the mud, stabilizing the bottom of the channel, and developing a streambed that could follow natural succession and create habitats.

Along with the engineers from EBA Waste Technologies, Barth was able to come up with a successful plan. This plan included removing large trees and root balls, laying the slopes back to achieve natural and even drainage patterns, designing and constructing a rock filled burrito wrap lining to stabilize the channel bottom, installing a rock check dams flush with finished grade of the channel bottom, and installing woody debris. Eighteen thousand cubic yards of soil was excavated, placed, and compacted to achieve sustainable slopes and drainage patterns. One thousand three hundred tons of six to nine inch rock was imported and placed in the burrito wrap to stabilize the channel bottom, then four thousand six hundred cubic yards of soil was placed and compacted over the burrito wrap creating the channel bottom, two hundred sixty tons of four to three foot rock was imported and placed as flush check.