Woo Acts to Keep Hillside Streets Open : Safety: Critics say emergency vehicles are delayed by construction blocking roads.

Responding to years of complaints about public safety hazards created when construction projects block the narrow streets of hillside neighborhoods, city officials are finally preparing for a crackdown.

Fire officials and hillside residents say that the blockades, particularly in the Santa Monica and Verdugo mountains, can prevent emergency vehicles from reaching a fire or someone in need of medical aid, and that construction sites on their clogged, substandard streets could someday give rise to tragedy.

Spurred by those concerns, Councilman Michael Woo on Wednesday introduced a measure in the City Council that would require builders to leave at least 16 feet of clear roadway on substandard hillside streets while doing construction work. The measure also proposes setting up a task force of various city agencies to conduct a coordinated review of construction plans before the city grants permits.

The current system, Woo said, is a mishmash of confusing city ordinances, overlapping jurisdictions and disjointed approval processes that have done nothing to fight the problem.

“We’re not talking about a situation that is merely inconvenient,” Woo said, “we’re talking about a situation that is life-threatening on these narrow, winding streets, where any kind of emergency can quickly become a disaster. These streets are dangerous enough under the best of conditions.”

Although the proposal is aimed primarily at hillside neighborhoods, it would also apply to narrow, substandard streets throughout Los Angeles. Such streets, Woo said, are found in parts of Wilmington, Venice and the San Fernando Valley.

Under the proposal, the city would also be empowered to stop work on projects where construction blocks the roadway. Woo said builders could meet requirements by storing materials off public property, creating alternate parking, stationing workers to direct traffic and posting the phone number of a supervisor for residents to call when problems arise.

Woo first unveiled the proposal at a news conference he held Monday on a treacherous hillside in Laurel Canyon. He said an elderly woman had died nearby while paramedics tried to crash through a construction site blocking the road.

Fire officials and homeowners confirm that emergency vehicles often have trouble getting through construction areas but details of the incident cited by Woo are sketchy.

In the late fall of 1988, according to Woo and fire officials, a fire truck responding to the emergency call at an elderly woman’s house on Bulwer Drive was blocked by a construction site that spilled onto the street. An ambulance finally rammed through an opening, but the woman was dead by the time paramedics arrived, Woo and the officials said.

It could not be determined whether the extra time spent getting to the woman was a factor in her death, fire officials said.

Nevertheless, hillside residents stepped up their lobbying efforts at City Hall after the incident, taking particular aim at Woo, their councilman.

“It only added a tragic emphasis to the years of complaints from frustrated hillside homeowners,” said Jim Nelson, president of the Lookout Mountain Associates homeowner group. “For years we’d been saying somebody is going to die because there will be no way to get a fire truck or ambulance up there.”

Woo’s proposal was applauded by officials in the city’s Fire and Building and Safety departments. He said he expects quick approval by the council.

Representatives of a federation of 54 hillside homeowner groups also hailed the proposal. But some said such reforms are long overdue and that the city needs to enforce existing ordinances.

“That is the real fly in the ointment,” said Alan Kishbaugh, vice president of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns. “Builders are violating the existing laws with impunity.”

The congestion problems exist throughout hillside areas off Mulholland Drive, particularly on the Hollywood side, where many of the communities were developed well before World War II. For decades, the communities consisted of bungalows on rustic streets. But over the years, these have given way to full-size homes on the narrow, winding hillside streets. And building activity continues.

Although citywide statistics were not available, officials estimate that there are 300 miles of roads so badly engineered or narrow that emergency vehicles have trouble getting through even without construction blockages.

Los Angeles Fire Capt. Robert Heidel, who works at Station 97 on Mulholland Drive, said there are as many as 50 homes just in one section of Laurel Canyon that are inaccessible to firefighting or emergency equipment.

“That’s our plague up here--the narrow streets,” he said.

Timothy Taylor, chief of the building bureau in the Building and Safety Department, said the city is being forced to take action because developers have refused to heed its requests for cooperation. “Builders seem to forget they should be good neighbors when they are building in the hills,” he said.

Councilman Marvin Braude said he strongly supports Woo’s proposal because his district also contains hillside areas riddled with substandard roads that restrict access. “It has become a public safety issue,” he said.

Woo already is working to establish a Hillside Street Safety Task Force, which he said will implement the reform package.

On the panel will be officials from the Building and Safety, Planning, Transportation and Street Use departments, and representatives of the city attorney’s office, bureau of engineering, and Fire Department, Woo said.

To address broader concerns--including the size and height of houses, grading, congestion and sewage--Woo recently proposed setting up a planning trust fund that would raise money from developers to pay for better enforcement of existing laws, increased building and planning staffs, and closer inspection of development plans. The measure has been approved by a council committee, and the city administrative office is working on a preliminary feasibility report that could be out as early as June.