Ah, Malibu: 1 Slide Snarls Celebration of Another’s Repair

The good news was that Malibu and Los Angeles County officials held a news conference in the seaside city Thursday to announce that Kanan Dume Road, a major route between the San Fernando Valley and the shore, will reopen Monday after a year and a half.

The bad news was that it was mighty hard getting to the event because of the other lingering traffic problems in the area.

Even county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, whose district includes Malibu, admitted that he resorted to driving along Pacific Coast Highway in a lane restricted to dirt-hauling trucks in order to squeeze past the crunch at Las Flores Canyon Road.

The highway is open to only one lane of traffic in each direction at Las Flores because of a nearly week-old mudslide that’s still being cleaned up.

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When everyone responsible for fixing Kanan Dume finally arrived at the site where a landslide took out the road in September 1996, there was plenty to celebrate.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve heard of a project coming in on time and in budget. Sadly, that prohibits the contractor from doing any work for the MTA,” joked Yaroslavsky, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority board member who with Malibu Mayor Jeff Jennings devised a plan to rebuild the road using loans and grant funds from the county.

The road, which will officially reopen at 2 p.m. Monday, carries 5,000 cars a day in winter and 10,000 daily in summer, when swarms of beach-goers join the ranks of commuters on the 13-mile route connecting Agoura Hills and Malibu.

In late 1996, when Kanan Dume buckled, Malibu was still recovering financially from the impact of earlier fires and floods, and could not afford to fix the road without county assistance. The county loan was approved this August and work began in mid-October.

Rebuilding 500 feet of collapsed roadway and fortifying the hillside beneath it cost about $964,000, said Malibu Public Works Director John Clement.

The city saved about $500,000 when the California Department of Transportation donated more than 50,000 cubic yards of fill dirt from a slide-rebuilding project near Temescal Canyon Road in Pacific Palisades.

The same slide that made Yaroslavsky late for Thursday’s news conference also helped hurry along the repair of Kanan Dume: Caltrans has been trucking dirt from the Las Flores slide up to Kanan Dume since the weekend.

Leaders of a community group called ROK, or Re-Open Kanan, praised Jennings’ efforts to resurrect the ocean-Valley link. In addition to going to the county for money, Malibu persuaded three property owners whose land abuts the road to donate easements, allowing the city to extend and stabilize the graded hillside beneath the slide area.

“This is a wonderful thing you’ve done for the community, and we are so appreciative,” said Sara Grisanti, one of four co-chairwomen of ROK. The group will host a block party at the site, a mile north of the highway, at noon Monday, before the road opens.

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Late last summer, when the road had been closed nearly a year, the community was far less complimentary toward its elected officials, irked by both the literal impasse and the budgetary one that prevented immediate repair.

Residents peppered the Malibu landscape with signs asking citizens if they were fed up with the situation. Hundreds responded, and ROK took all the responses to the Malibu City Council.

Without a free-flowing Kanan Dume, Grisanti said, many residents had trouble getting their children to school or themselves to work.

And everyone--residents and authorities alike--worried that rescue workers would have trouble reaching the area during the emergencies that often plague Malibu.

“This day drops my blood pressure about 25 points right now,” said Capt. Bill McSweeney of the Malibu-Lost Hills sheriff’s station. “This is a very happy day for the Sheriff’s Department and a very happy day for the community.”