Mud Slides Flatten Plans for Seminar on Erosion Control

A seminar on erosion control planned for months for mountain homeowners living between Topanga Canyon and Westlake Village became bogged down at the last minute Saturday--by erosion.

Mud slides that oozed across roadways in the Santa Monica Mountains prevented soil management experts and flood control officials from traveling to brush-fire-blackened areas where discussions and demonstrations had been scheduled.

“The roads are closed, so we had to call it off,” said David Gottlieb, a director of the Topanga-Las Virgenes Resource Conservation District.

That agency had arranged for officials of Los Angeles County’s fire, agriculture and flood control departments, and the U. S. Soil Conservation Service, to inspect fire areas and advise residents about preventing runoff damage to hillsides denuded by fire.

The experts were scheduled to first stop at Bruce Shultz’s house in the center of the 11,400-acre Decker-Piuma area that burned Oct. 14-17 last year.

Mountain Roads Closed

But Decker Road at the base of Shultz’s driveway was being undermined by fast-moving rain runoff Saturday morning. Several other area mountain roads were closed by slides.

Shultz said his property escaped major damage from the storm. But the burned-over surrounding hillsides had clearly reached their saturation point.

So had grassy, unburned areas. Water was oozing from an oak-studded meadow at the National Park Service’s Paramount Ranch in Agoura at midday Saturday. A young man driving a Toyota pickup playfully churned the meadow into mud by cutting huge circles into it.

When he was finished, he acknowledged that the meadow mud-whomping was illegal.

“I got caught doing this once. But it was a lady ranger and I sweet-talked her into lowering the ticket from $325 to $25,” he said.

Half a mile away, firefighters at Los Angeles County’s Cornell Road station measured rainfall totals behind their 50-year-old firehouse. Firefighter Bob Berryman said the gauge showed that a total of 6.55 inches fell Friday and Saturday.

Slope Slid to Street

In Topanga Canyon--where Saturday’s erosion-control tour was to have ended--a 20-foot-high slope next to 350 N. Old Topanga Road slid into the street and was scraped away by county road crews.

California Department of Transportation workers were doing the same thing in the Newhall area.

Heavy equipment operator Chris Erskine was wrapping up a 12-hour day in mid-afternoon after patrolling the Antelope Valley Freeway looking for rock slides. His first task of the day had come at 3 a.m. when he moved a five-ton boulder off the Shadow Pines Boulevard off-ramp.

Erskine said the Santa Clarita Valley received between four and five inches of rain Saturday. “The ground out here is real soft, real saturated now,” he said.

That softness was creating some fears at Crescent Valley Mobile Home Park, 23500 The Old Road, Newhall. A 300-acre brush fire burned a crescent shape around its steep hills last July and park operators counterattacked with a ring of protective sandbags.

That strategy has worked so far, said Guy Swope, a four-year resident of the park whose trailer sits opposite one of the steepest slopes. “We got pounded pretty good last night,” he said Saturday. “But I’m not worried. If the mud comes down here, we’ll find a way to get out.”