In 1998, high water floods from the El Niño weather phenomenon washed away about 200 feet of creek bank along Scotts Creek at the Swanton Pacific Railroad, where the main line ran about one mile beside the creek. The water rose over twelve feet, eroded thousands of yards of soil, and exposed a bank whose coarse sand washed away easily, making stabilization necessary after an earlier course change had already forced the track bed farther into the hill. The solution was to build a trestle for the track, construct a live crib wall, and backfill the area to restore it, but after two-and-one-half years of planning and permitting, work could begin only in mid-August and had to be finished by the end of October, with strict limits on equipment in the fragile riparian zone and all supplies hauled by railroad. The all-volunteer organization, led by president Fitz Fitzpatrick, elevated the track on a temporary scaffold and built the rail trestle underneath it on reinforced concrete foundations dug into firm soil, then lowered the track onto the completed structure. Volunteers then constructed the crib wall from pine timber cut on Swanton Pacific Ranch, using rebar-pinned joints and deadman ties into the bank, but the difficulty of digging deep post holes in wet ground forced them to improvise a simple pile driver that could drive four-by-six posts four feet deep in minutes, greatly speeding the work. The finished crib wall stood eight to nine feet high and 220 feet long, after which fill was hauled in side-dump cars, compacted, protected with filler material and live willow cuttings, and topped with ballasted, aligned, leveled, and tramped track, erosion-control jute netting, and planted trees. In a little over three months, volunteers built three trestles, moved and placed hundreds of logs, and hauled and compacted hundreds of yards of fill to meet the October 31 deadline.