Protection Needed for Foothill Forests

* Who are the protectors of your foothill forests? Not necessarily the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Following the earthquake, this department used heavy equipment to reopen and extravagantly widen an old dirt road named the East Canyon Motorway. Readers may have enjoyed Sierra Club hikes on this road.

According to the working crew, the road was reopened to provide an emergency route for departments of public safety. Yet construction started after the Jan. 17 earthquake, and the road was not available for three weeks.

The Fire Department removed all tree canopy arched over the road and destroyed many large walnut and ash trees and innumerable young trees on the side of the road. The largest native ash tree on the entire route was cut despite being located 10 feet from the side of the roadway. Woodlands composed of a mix of native ash and walnut are not known to occur anywhere in the state except in this part of the Santa Susana Mountains. All cut trees and limbs were thrown to the side of the road and not removed. They are unsightly, poor ecology and future fire hazards.

The East Canyon Motorway traverses Significant Ecological Area No. 20 and constitutes part of the Browning-Ferris Inc. mitigation for a landfill expansion. The land is to be given to parks and would become part of Santa Clarita Woodlands State Park.

The county’s Division of Forestry is a part of the Fire Department. Was the division involved or consulted? Do the supervisors of heavy equipment crews and construction projects know anything about significant ecological areas or native trees other than oaks? The system of SEAs was made by the county to inventory and protect to some degree the best of county open space and is part of the county master plan.

On this project, the public loses once again. Who influenced whom, and who gains? We will probably never know. Possible winners are the Chevron Corp. or BFI, each of which owns about half of the East Canyon. Other landowners also have keys to the gates and are attempting to use the road. All try to keep the public from walking through their lands.

Your true friends are the state park agencies and park activists who are trying to preserve the forests and make them available to you. Voting yes on the California Parks and Wildlife Initiative in the 1994 primary election will help the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy make parks in the area.

DON P. MULLALLY

Granada Hills