The emerging issue for the next few months is easily going to be our neighbor, the Hahamongna Watershed Park, located in the city of Pasadena but adjacent to Altadena and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
First, the good news: congrats to Karin Bugge, Petrea Burchard, Barbara Ellis, and the other Hahamongna Bloggers, who will receive the Best Advocacy award at Thursday's Arroyo Verde Awards from the Arroyo Seco Foundation for their efforts to preserve it as open space.
And now, the bad news: that effort may come to naught as LA County plans a mind-boggling sediment removal project to preserve the Devil's Gate Dam next to the park.
The major culprit — as in many things — is the Station Fire, which caused a vast amount of sediment, about 15 feet, to wash down the hills and collect in the dam area. The dam can't handle that level of debris flow again.
County officials say that several years of sediment — not just Station Fire-related, but just through normal rainfall — needs to be removed for the dam to function, to save the park and downstream Pasadena and South Pasadena. It's an emergency, they say, which will circumvent a lot of normal environmental and CEQA planning.
The project the county is envisioning will start in September, 2011, with the construction of a two-lane paved road that will extend to Oak Grove Drive near La Canada High School. And going on the road: dump trucks, to move out 1.6 million cubic yards of sediment. At its height, estimates are that there will be will be 300-400 truckloads PER DAY. We've penciled out, for an eight hour working day, about one truck every 90 seconds. Cost: $35 million. Duration of this project: three to four years.
In addition to the disruption of turning a natural area into something like a quarry, according to Mary Barrie of Friends of Hahamongna, 50 acres of land will be permanently cleared, including 15 acres of native black willows behind the dam, with loss of resulting habitat. There will also be noise and particulate pollution, affecting not only hikers, but students at La Canada High School and staff at JPL. Altadena forest activist Lori Paul has more information in a message she sent out to the newsgroups which the Arroyo Seco Foundation has reprinted. PSN's Larry Wilson has also weighed in.
We're of two minds: it will totally turn the area upside-down — but protection of lives and property downstream is also critical. This is one of those situations where, like Michele Zack wrote in her column earlier this week, who will be allowed to be inconvenienced?
We urge the county, the city of Pasadena, the Arroyo Seco Foundation, and other stakeholders to work together to come up with a solution — the danger of flooding needs to be taken care of, but there also need to be ways to moderate the environmental effects of removal, and a plan to mitigate its effects after the last truck drives away (roads have a way of becoming permanent). We also think some thought needs to take place on figuring out a regular sediment removal plan so such extreme measures don't have to take place again.
