Distrust Runs Deep : Hollywood Hills Tunnel Plan Angers Foes

Bundled-up hikers and mountain bikers start their advance on Runyan Canyon Park above Hollywood at dawn each morning, threading through the mountain retreat in a quiet parade of exercise and meditation.

Recently their reverie has been jolted, though, by a new breed of visitors to the park--people with hard hats and work boots, geological maps and hydrology reports.

Metro Rail is coming to the hillsides soon, and many of the park’s admirers--as well as some federal, state and city officials--fear that the sounds, contours and ecology of the eastern Santa Monica Mountains, also known as the Hollywood Hills, will never be the same once subway tunneling begins next year.

While the rest of Los Angeles’ subway routes will run under major thoroughfares, such as Wilshire and Hollywood boulevards, the northbound link will veer away from busy Cahuenga Pass and instead punch a 2.3-mile tunnel through the mountains beneath million-dollar homes and National Recreation Area parkland.

The controversial Hollywood-to-Universal City route was approved in 1989 by transit authorities after years of political wrangling. But the reality is just beginning to jar area residents who face underground boring and blasting until at least 1999.

Worries are as plentiful as autumn leaves, but swirl primarily around the depletion of vast amounts of precious ground water, the placement of a huge, exhaust-belching ventilation shaft almost as deep as Los Angeles’ tallest skyscraper is high, and what some believe is an inadequate understanding of the project’s environmental impact.

What the Metropolitan Transportation Authority clearly understands, however, is the depth of opposition to its plans.

After the costly and embarrassing construction fiasco it suffered while tunneling under Hollywood Boulevard, the MTA is encountering a visceral reaction from mountain residents and park users as it approaches the San Fernando Valley.

Bill Gable, a singer-songwriter who leads the 4,000-member Runyan Canyon Coalition, has pored over thousands of pages of MTA documents and attended dozens of City Hall meetings in an effort to comprehend and parry perceived threats from the Red Line. Although he has won grudging respect from transit authorities for his persistence, he still boils over with frustration at times.

“If you ruin this park, we’re going to kill you,” he thundered at an MTA official at a recent public meeting.

The MTA, for its part, promises to be a good neighbor. “Protecting the mountains’ resources is one of our primary goals,” said Thomas M. Wilson, the MTA’s chief engineer on the hillside segment.

But his promises ring hollow with homeowners like Joan Luchs, a realtor and Cahuenga Pass Homeowners Assn. leader who generally favors development.

“I think their credibility is shot and we can’t trust them,” she said.

On Wednesday, the MTA executive board is expected to award a $124.4-million contract that will drive twin gaping holes into the mountains and bring the Subway Age to the Valley. But this is only the beginning. In the years ahead, as two massive machines burrow through the Hollywood Hills, the unresolved construction and environmental issues are sure to remain at the forefront of community debate and government oversight.

The Federal Transit Agency, a unit of the U.S. Department of Transportation charged with monitoring the federally funded Metro Rail project, recently contacted through its Los Angeles-based consultants a prominent Thousand Oaks geologist named Frank Dennison.

A practical and cautious scientist who has worked on more than 5,000 grading projects throughout the Santa Monica Mountains, he’s been toiling alone in his office the past couple of weeks, surrounded by 30 sprawling reference books, in an effort to independently evaluate the MTA geological studies of the tunnel route. Those studies have puzzled him. His concerns swirl around water.

“MTA’s consultants’ interpretations of this complex area have been simplistic,” he said, speaking of the southeastern Santa Monica Mountains. “They will find much more water than they’re aware of.”

One of those consultants, James F. Dolan of the Southern California Earthquake Center at USC, did not dispute Dolan’s assertion, responding that simplifying the geology “helps engineers understand and take action.”

Mountain partisans and the MTA focus intensely on the mountains’ buried water for different reasons: Conservationists believe it nourishes plants and animals that live on the surface. The MTA worries about the extent to which it will sabotage its tunneling. More water means a longer dig, and that means much higher costs.

Dennison, an old hand who does three-dimensional rock modeling in his head rather than on a supercomputer, advises that understanding the area’s seismic history is the key to calculating its reserves of water.

The Santa Monica Mountains, he noted, are the result of 40 million years of upheaval, rotation and twisting. The tunnel will drive through a major fold created 2 million years ago and cross at least three major fault zones.

The hard part for geologists, Dennison said, is to create a picture of the rock before and after each gyration in its past, because it is behind those folds and faults that water dripping down from rain clouds and lawn sprinklers dams up.

How much water? There’s the rub.

Dorothy Sperry, lead environmental specialist for the MTA, says the authority estimates it will draw 2,000 acre-feet of water out of the ground during digging for the Universal City-Hollywood segment.

According to Gary Schultz, associate engineer at the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, however, the MTA has applied for permits to discharge nearly four times that much into the Los Angeles River over two years.

Another water expert believes the amount could exceed even that. Mel Blevins, executive engineer at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and court-appointed Watermaster of the San Fernando Valley, estimates that 2,000 acre-feet of water will be pumped out of the ground during the excavation of the Universal City station alone.

But not only are officials at odds over how much water will flow out of the mountains, they don’t agree on how to dispose of it or whether the MTA should pay for it.

Blevins accounts for the Valley’s ground water as if it were money in the bank, and he is responsible for forcing companies and public agencies to pay the DWP for any that they remove. He complains that in several meetings, MTA officials have “tried to twist my arm” to waive his $700,000 bill for the Universal City station dewatering.

“But I won’t allow it,” Blevins said. “I think every cost of a program ought to be accounted and paid for, or you don’t do it.”

Paul Edelman, staff ecologist of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, among others, has urged the MTA to “recharge” the Valley’s ground-water table with the mountain water instead of pouring it into the Los Angeles River. The MTA likes that idea; Sperry said her office has studied that prospect extensively, proposing to offset the money requested by Blevins with the value of the recharged water.

That may be impractical, however, because the Universal City water is contaminated with hydrocarbons and solvents, and the mountain water is likely to contain high levels of sulfates, dissolved solids and arsenic.

Injecting that water back into the Valley’s well system would require the MTA to trespass through a dizzying maze of water-quality regulations and jurisdictions.

Gary Yamamoto, regional chief of the state Department of Health Services, cast doubt on the transit authority’s ability to comply with rules he set out for them. Yet he has not necessarily deterred the MTA’s earnest effort.

“We want a win-win situation where we can recharge the water and even improve it,” said Sperry of the MTA. “But if the costs are excessive, we’ll have to discharge it into the river.”

Of course, there is always Plan B.

To avoid much pumping at all, the MTA would ideally like to plug up the mountain’s water-bearing fractures with grout as it tunnels through.

In public meetings, MTA public affairs manager Mark R. Pattison relates this technique with relish. He describes how the contractor’s tunnel-boring machines--which look like giant, boxy centipedes tipped with broad metal claws--rip through rock a few feet at a time, then stop to scout. If long sensors detect water, the contractor can shoot grout under high pressure into the cracks of the mountain to dry it up.

The MTA puts a lot of stock in this method, but Blevins, with 35 years of experience in the Valley underground, pooh-poohs it.

“They can’t grout--I think it’s technically impossible,” said the DWP executive engineer. “Ground water moves too slowly in the mountain, and you’re talking about way too many fractures. It’ll leak, leak, leak all the time.”

Ironically, the drip-drip-drip of water torture is exactly what the subway project has seemed like to Joan Luchs.

The Cahuenga Pass homeowners leader is still steamed about losing the battle to keep the tunnel under the Hollywood Freeway. But she, and neighbors in the eastern mountains, are even more alarmed about the MTA’s plan to sink a tunnel ventilation shaft through the mountain.

“The animals are going to go airborne when they hear that tunneling,” she said. “And we hillside homeowners are going to get all of the impact and none of the benefit.”

An emergency exhaust and rescue shaft became necessary when the subway alignment shifted away from the Cahuenga Pass and a Hollywood Bowl station was eliminated. It has been designed as an 850-foot-deep, 22-foot-wide concrete pipe that to install would require blasting out earth for more than two years and 20 to 40 dirt-hauling trips a day down narrow, winding Mulholland Drive.

The shaft location chosen by MTA engineers is just a few yards from the northwestern boundary of much-loved, city-owned Runyan Canyon Park, a site that is included in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area and a former retreat of swashbuckling 1940s film star Errol Flynn.

A somewhat homely hideaway that sports a modestly paved road, abandoned tennis courts, gangly sprinkler pipes in its valley and piebald chaparral on its hillsides, Runyan is nonetheless deeply admired by countless flatland refugees.

Visit any time of day and you’ll see old, shirtless Russian men, or young UCLA marathoners, or arm-in-arm West Hollywood couples, stretching, biking, or walking Dalmatians up to its Cloud’s Rest, a spectacular aerie with a panoramic view of the Los Angeles Basin and a bench to ponder it from.

“This is the closest thing to a natural canyon on the basin side of the Santa Monicas,” said John Diaz, land acquisition chief for the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. “It’s a real treat for people who live in gridlock and growth and garbage to come out and experience open space. If the MTA goes ahead with their plan, they could leave it arid.”

But Jim Slosson, an expert in Santa Monica Mountains hydrology who was once the state’s chief geologist, said park advocates shouldn’t worry much about plant survival. Most hillside vegetation shoots roots less than five feet below the ground and depends only on rainwater, he said.

The subway project’s original environmental impact report, filed in 1983, did not discuss any biological impact of tunneling through the mountains, and a subsequent environmental report in 1989 provided no data on the ecological impact of a vent shaft.

The scarcity of information has fueled the ire and provoked the paranoia of area activists as well as federal and state officials.

“We’ve been given the kiss-off,” said David E. Gackenbach, superintendent of the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area, who has demanded that the MTA find another spot for the vent shaft because the current location will impair the use of federal parkland.

In the summer, the MTA surprised many by its apparent willingness to change its mind: It separated the vent shaft construction from the tunnel contract under pressure from the Runyan Canyon Coalition and Los Angeles City Council President John Ferraro. It has also told neighbors and city officials that it will study at least three alternate shaft sites and undertake an environmental analysis of those proposals.

The two leading alternatives call for a horizontal shaft blasted either from a city street tree yard in the Cahuenga Pass or from privately owned land just below Mulholland Drive near the top of Hillpark Drive.

But not everyone is convinced that the ventilation shaft will be moved away from Runyan Canyon.

“The MTA board operates in a star chamber--they always appear to be negotiating in good faith but you never really know,” Diaz said.

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Cross-Mountain Subway

The Metropolitan Transit Authority will soon award a contract to dig twin subway tunnels south from Universal City through the eastern Santa Monica Mountains to Hollywood. Its contractor will first excavate a vast hole beside the Hollywood Freeway at Lankershim Boulevard, then use two tunnel-boring machines to claw 12,300 feet through hard rock; 18 cross-over passages between tunnels, and a midline ventilation shaft, will be excavated by explosives. These will be the only Red Line tunnels in Los Angeles that intersect an active earthquake fault.

Sources: Metropolitan Transportation Authority