LA city benchmarks Korea‘’s rivers restoration’

Los Angeles city, the city council and an environmental group invited the Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs of Korea for 3 days from February 5, 2010 to February 7, 2010 to benchmark Korea’s rivers restoration experiences and the 4 major rivers restoration project. During the period, they had four events including press conference and project briefing.

The events was hosted by FoLAR(Friends of the Los Angeles River) which has 7,000 members and was first established in 1986 for the purpose of restoring the LA river into an eco-friendly cultural spaces. In the event, 500 people joined including LA river restoration team at LA public business department, members of LA council and LA river management center, and citizen who were interested in the river restoration.

“They want to learn Korea’s know-how in the river restoration”

The reason that the environmental groups are highly interested in our Cheonggye stream restoration and the 4 major rivers restoration project is because of their LA river restoration. The LA river originates from Santa Fernando and runs 82km to reach the Pacific and 51km runs through LA.

The concrete waterway was built by the US army corps of engineers in the 1930s to prevent flood, but it was just a sewage without any fish. Lewis MacAdams, the chairman of FoLAR said “LA city, the city council and environmental group started the Los Angeles River Project to restore the LA river which is a perfect concrete sewage at the moment, but we are facing lots of difficulties and we want to learn know-how from Korea who has the successful evidence from the Cheonggye stream restoration and has started the 4 major rivers restoration project which is over 1,000 miles”

After a briefing session of the 4 major rivers restoration project at LA Korea Cultural Center on February 5, 2010, Gary Moore, manager of LA public business department, handed the master plan for LA river restoration to Park Jae Soon, director of financial division, Office of National River Restoration. Gary Moore said “the master plan for the LA River restoration was modeled after Korea’s Cheonggye stream restoration. We are going to remove concrete and restore the eco-system and make the river accessible to citizen. We were impressed by the Cheonggye stream restoration and it’s amazing that the 4 major rivers restoration is already in progress. We will go and see how these projects go in Korea”

On the following day, a briefing session and questions and answers session were held with 50 people from the LA city council, On the last day, FoLAR conferred ‘Rivies Award’on Yang Yoon Jae, a member of national architecture committee (former manager of Cheonggye stream restoration project). And a video of the 4 major rivers restoration project was shown at the venue, and it was greatly complimented.

Being covered by 10 newspapers and broadcasting stations, the event was a good opportunity to introduce the 4 major rivers restoration project to Koreans and policymakers in LA city.