In March 1924, Los Angeles geologist and engineer Wayne Loel sketched a simple diagram of a dam that would profoundly alter the Southern California environment for the next century.
Loel’s pencil drawing depicts the tapering cross section of an arch dam rising 102 feet out of Malibu Creek, with a separate view showing the dam curving 85 feet across the canyon mouth. In a neat script on the upper right corner of the tracing paper, Loel wrote two words: Rindge Dam.
The dam’s name was a nod to “the Queen of Malibu,” the imperious May K. Rindge, who owned a 17,000-acre ranch that stretched for 25 miles along the Malibu coast. Although it’s been functionally obsolete for 80 years, Rindge Dam survives as zombie infrastructure, dead but with a lethal afterlife that haunts Malibu Creek and the local coast.
This article appears in Issue 29 of Alta Journal.
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Hoping to create a dependable water source for livestock, crop irrigation, and family residences on her ranch, Rindge hired Loel and civil engineer A.M. Strong to design the dam. Loel estimated that the dam could impound 574 acre-feet of water, equal to what 1,100 California households might use annually today.
Loel and Strong enjoyed long, distinguished careers. A noted paleontologist, Loel earned substantial royalties from a Ventura County oil field he discovered and later endowed a chair at his alma mater, Stanford University. Rindge Dam, however, would hardly prove a professional highlight.
For one thing, Rindge fired Loel from the project even before the spillway was completed. And, built on rugged terrain three miles upstream from the ocean, the dam almost immediately had serious problems.
A 15-foot wall of floodwater overtopped the dam in 1927, the year after the spillway was finished. Four months after the March 1928 collapse of the St. Francis Dam, which killed at least 450 people when a 70-foot wave of water and debris surged through the Santa Clara River valley, a state engineer warned of “considerable seepage” along Rindge Dam’s spillway. While the state had occasionally inspected the construction site, Rindge Dam was built without a permit. “Collapse of the dam could follow,” the engineer wrote, “because of the fact that the material in the saddle, where the spillway is located, is very soft and would rapidly erode under the heavy flow of water.”
A young range composed primarily of sedimentary rock, the Santa Monica Mountains are highly erosive; debris periodically washed into the creek and compromised the dam’s storage. The historic wintertime storms of 1938 alone sent 150 acre-feet of sediment into the reservoir and broke off a portion of the spillway. By 1945, siltation had reduced storage by nearly 90 percent, and inspections of the site in 1956 concluded that the reservoir’s reduced capacity made spillway repair costs impossible to justify.
After the 1963 failure of the Baldwin Hills Dam in Los Angeles killed five people and destroyed 277 homes, the state ordered inspections of California’s dams. In a 1964 letter to the Malibu Water Company (formed in 1938 and headed by Rindge’s daughter, Rhoda R. Adamson), the Department of Water Resources warned that “a single severe storm” could lead to Rindge Dam’s failure and inquired about the company’s plans for repair work.
Given the dam’s many problems and a shrinking customer base, the Malibu Water Company sought to leave the water-supply business and in 1966 petitioned the California Public Utilities Commission to end service. The state agreed and decommissioned Rindge Dam in 1967.
A white elephant for nearly 60 years, the dam continues to block Southern California steelhead, listed as endangered at the federal and state levels, from reaching 90 percent of the fish’s historic Malibu Creek spawning grounds. Rindge Dam also disrupts sediment flows that could help replenish shrinking beaches along Santa Monica Bay.
For decades, organizations such as California Trout, Heal the Bay, and the Surfrider Foundation have pushed to tear down the dam, and as far back as 1992, the U.S. House of Representatives commissioned a feasibility study to investigate the restoration of Malibu Creek. Now, operational plans for the dam’s removal, known as the Malibu Creek Ecosystem Restoration Project, are underway. Work could begin by 2027, and if all goes according to plan, Malibu Creek will again flow freely by 2035.
Like the nearby and far more publicized Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, the $92 million landscaped overpass designed to provide mountain lions with a traffic-free route across Highway 101 in Agoura Hills, tearing down Rindge Dam is a step toward rewilding the Santa Monicas. Beyond the environmental benefits, the dam’s scheduled removal is a milestone in Southern California history—the long-overdue opening of Malibu Creek and the symbolic dismantling of the Rindge empire.
A RESILIENT FISH
It’s a perfect spring day in the Santa Monica Mountains when I drive into Malibu Canyon and toward the coast from Calabasas. Billowing white against the deep blue sky, a dense fogbank flows off the ocean, cascading like a waterfall over the high ridge of Castro Crest. The canyon’s wildflower bloom is peaking: splashes of yellow-orange sticky monkey flower, a mottling of violets from sages, and towering stalks of cream-colored chaparral yucca blossoms bursting from the brush like exclamation points.
Below the road crawling with oncoming San Fernando Valley–bound commuters, Rindge Dam lurks troll-like within the canyon. Now part of Malibu Creek State Park, the dam is a stealth landmark, invisible and unknown to most Southern Californians, though it did gain some social media notoriety as a destination for adrenaline junkies attempting half gainers into the waters pooled at the spillway’s base.
With headwaters at more than 3,100 feet on Sandstone Peak, the creek drains a 109-square-mile area and is the Santa Monicas’ largest watershed. When Malibu Creek runs, it runs hard, with record flows that have reached nearly 35,000 cubic feet per second—more than twice the typical rate of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.
Malibu Creek helped shape the Santa Monicas’ cultural and natural landscape. The creek predates the range’s formation, having carved Malibu Canyon as the mountains were uplifted. Grizzly bears roamed the canyon into the 1850s, and the deep chasm served as a boundary between Chumash populations to the west and the Tongva to the east, both of whom used the gorge to travel from the coast and inland areas.
Creek sediments fanned out into the delta that created the iconic point breaks of Surfrider Beach. And long before Miki Dora rode those perfect waves, Malibu Creek provided prime habitat for Southern California steelhead.
Steelhead are rainbow trout that spend most of their lives in the ocean and, unlike salmon, can return more than once to natal streams to spawn. A widely dispersed fish, steelhead live as far northwest as Russia’s Kamchatka
Peninsula, while the Southern California steelhead’s range extends to the species’ southernmost limits in Baja California.
Steelhead are designated by geographic populations, each of which reflects the unique attributes of its region, says Mark H. Capelli, South-Central/Southern California steelhead recovery coordinator with the National Marine Fisheries Service. The fish live everywhere from riparian zones in redwood and Sitka spruce forests to areas dominated by cacti. Capelli says the Southern California steelhead has adapted to “some of the most severe, intense, and challenging conditions,” which include Malibu Creek.
“Steelhead are not just native to Malibu Creek; they’re an integral part of the whole ecological system that Malibu Creek represents,” he says. “The fish have evolved over 20 million years to adapt to the characteristics of the creek, from the Mediterranean climate to the vegetative coverage, which is fire-dependent chaparral and oak woodland.”
Even after Rindge Dam was built, enough fish returned to lower Malibu Creek to support steelhead sportfishing into the 1980s, says Capelli. But additional development, including modifications to the Pacific Coast Highway bridge over Malibu Creek, further degraded stream habitat, while an increase in wastewater flows favored non-native fish species.
The life cycle of a Southern California steelhead is an epic survival tale. After hatching, the fish spend a year in freshwater before growing large enough to venture into the ocean. Swimming alone rather than in schools, they pursue food almost to the Arctic. Then, after a couple of years, they find their way back to home streams to spawn.
“It’s a pretty remarkable story,” says Capelli. “They’ve evolved to take this enormous risk to come into a watershed that they may not even be able to get out of because the sandbar isn’t open very long and streams often dry up. But streams are sheltered, and there’s a dearth of predators compared to what’s out in the ocean, so they’re the perfect nursery. Even so, it’s still a dicey proposition for a fish that’s basically designed for the ocean to swim up a stream that may not even be as wide as the fish is long.”
Dismantling Rindge Dam, as well as smaller upstream barriers, and clearing the dam’s 800,000 cubic yards of accumulated sediment—rocks and gravel, sand, fine silt—could open 18 miles of prime steelhead habitat. The project aims to restart, not jump-start, long-disrupted natural processes: the steelhead won’t be restocked; they will have to repopulate Malibu Creek on their own.
“We laughingly call them the Field of Dreams fish,” says Rosi Dagit, principal conservation biologist with the Resource Conservation District of the Santa Monica Mountains. “If you create the habitat and make it accessible, steelhead will find it. But these fish really need our help.”
DIMINISHED EMPIRE
By the time the dam was completed in 1926, May Rindge had fallen on hard times. During endless battles to protect her Malibu ranch from outsiders, Rindge drained the fortune, estimated at $4.6 million in 1911, that she’d inherited from her husband, Frederick Hastings Rindge, who had died at 47 in 1905.
To prevent the Southern Pacific Railroad from establishing a route across the ranch, Rindge built the Hueneme, Malibu and Port Los Angeles Railway, which the Ventura Free Press described thus: “It starts nowhere and ends nowhere. It connects with nothing.” But the 15-mile railway succeeded in keeping Southern Pacific out because federal law prohibited a new railroad in a corridor where one already existed.
Less successful was her costly two-decade crusade to block a state highway (today’s PCH) across the ranch, which ended with a 1923 defeat at the United States Supreme Court. Rindge later demanded $9.2 million for the taking of her land; she received a check for $107,289, which she refused to cash.
The dam was part of Rindge’s strategy to regain her financial footing as she began to open up parcels of Malibu for development. She launched Malibu Potteries, a ceramics company that crafted gorgeous tile from clays found on the ranch. Rindge’s daughter, Rhoda, and son-in-law, Merritt Huntley Adamson, built a Spanish colonial revival beach house elaborately adorned with the tile. If the Adamson House, overlooking Malibu Lagoon near the site of the onetime Chumash village Humaliwo, is the most celebrated remnant of the Rindge epoch, the dam is the most monumental remnant of the family’s onetime empire and power.
Rindge Dam was immensely ambitious, especially considering that governmental agencies and utility companies build most dams, not private individuals. To lower costs, the dam’s engineers, Loel and Strong, salvaged 231 30-foot steel rails from the now-defunct Rindge railroad and entombed them as the dam’s structural skeleton. Ranch hands finished most of the project in only nine months.
But it’s easier to build a dam than to tear one down: In 2024 dollars, Rindge Dam cost about $2.8 million to build. Current projections estimate a price tag of $279 million to demolish the dam as well as remove the massive amounts of sediment. Some material will be deposited near Malibu Pier so nearshore currents can distribute the fine sands and replenish beaches. Trucks will haul unusable material to landfills.
We’ve entered a new era as California has gone from building to demolishing dams. In Northern California, the largest removal effort in U.S. history is underway with the dismantling of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River. Ventura County’s Matilija Dam could come down within a decade.
What sets Rindge Dam apart is a location within fragile wildlands tucked inside the country’s second-largest metropolitan area. And, of course, its history. May Rindge is like a character out of a novel, whether you view her as a paleo-NIMBY whose backyard happened to cover 17,000 acres or as a proto-ecofeminist fighting against the paving of paradise.
But Rindge Dam’s benefits were short-lived and limited to a select few, while its damage has proved far-reaching and long-lasting.
“The removal of Rindge Dam is not only symbolic of how people can help repair damages. It offers hope. That’s something in short supply these days,” says Dagit. “Taking these actions to reconnect disconnected systems, to take an iconic species like steelhead and recognize that if we can make it work for them, then so many other pieces will fall into place. And the benefits to us, as humans, are real. They’re just as real as the benefits to these creatures. This is an act of hope.”•
