Cracking down in the dunes
By LAURA MITCHELL
Staff Writer
GLAMIS — Officials temporarily had closed a total of three areas of the Imperial Sand Dunes by early Saturday morning when rowdy crowds got out of control.
Last week the Imperial County Board of Supervisors, working with the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, ordered a nighttime curfew at Competition Hill along Highway 78, the scene of the wildest parties in the sand dunes.
On Friday afternoon, officers closed a popular drag race area known as the Sand Drags when a fight almost got out of control.
"We haven't had any challenges to the Comp Hill curfew. However, the crowd moved to Oldsmobile Hill, as we thought it would," Imperial County Sheriff Chief Deputy Sharon Housouser said.
Oldsmobile Hill is about two miles south of Competition Hill.
Housouser said there were thousands of people gathered at the bottom of Oldsmobile Hill. It was becoming unsafe, so the entrances were closed at 12:30 a.m. Saturday, she said.
"We declared it an unlawful assembly and cleared everyone out," Housouser said.
The partiers dispersed without incident, she said.
But the crowd Friday afternoon at the Sand Drags in the north dunes was less than cooperative. Someone tried to do a wheelie and landed on another vehicle, BLM spokesman Stephen Razo said.
A female in the bottom vehicle suffered broken knees but was otherwise all right. Unfortunately, one of her relatives got upset and started a fight, Razo said.
Housouser said officers had to call for backup to get the crowd under control.
"When you have a fight like that going and a couple thousand people gathered around ... everyone starts cheering," she said. "We set up a perimeter in the crowd and got them out of there safely, then we closed the Sand Drags down."
She said police units lined up in front of the Sand Drags with a National Guard Humvee to stop vehicles and close it down. But the crowd did not disperse quietly.
Razo said there were multiple arrests at the drags.
"The crowd was becoming unruly but it never escalated beyond that," he said.
In both cases it was a situation where, in the interest of safety, law enforcement officers work to prevent unruly behavior, Razo said.
As of Saturday afternoon, 170,000 people had visited the dunes with more trickling in. There were 627 law enforcement incidents and 118 medical emergencies, he said.
An archive of Imperial Valley Press articles, opinions and letters to the editor regarding the Imperial Sand Dunes is available on the Web at: ivpressonline.com/dunes/
>> Staff Writer Laura Mitchell can be reached at 337-3452 or lauramitchell9@yahoo.com