This is a collection of articles dealing with organic gardening, ecology, environmental restoration, news items of interest, travel and just about anything else I find of interest and willing to share with others around the globe. - ENJOY!
"Landslide on California highway part of $1 billion in damage"
This is Part II of my post about the Central California Coast Highway and natural mishaps that have befallen the Big Sur area with wildfire and flooding. Part I is below.
In an ironic twist, I've had this post in draft form since December 15th 2016, yet I've spent so much time pondering how to find a way to conclude it and then suddenly this catastrophic event above took place in the very area I wanted to highlight an an example of infrastructure rethinking. This section of Pacific Coast Highway is notorious for is instability. There's really no bedrock, the soil is made up of loose soil and fractured rock on an extremely steep mountain slope. In so many ways the unstable geology here is reminsicent of the broken fractured geology of the Carrizo Gorge area of eastern San Diego County where a series of 17+ tunnels have always been in danger of total collapse as this tunnel #16 above right which was recently seen collapsed this yearas seen in a January 31, 2017 YouTube video, weeds and large boulders obstruct the track. The American way of road building in the early days had many twists and turns. The roads didn't offend the landscape, but rather flowed along with it. In later years roads were straightened to increase speed and ease travel and this often meant blasting their way through mountains and other obstacles. Unfortunately many places are unstable and have a long history of bandaid fixes and patches, only to fall down again during the next storm or earthquake event. It was back in December 2016 that I saw what could be the answer to the bad stretch of roadway from the way sensitive care was taken by this article below.
"Scientists hope a new approach to planning road infrastructure will increase crop yield in the Greater Mekong region while limiting environmental destruction, and open dialogues between developers and the conservation community"
A new highway snakes through the mountains of the upper Mekong in the picture above & right which was needed to improve transportation infrastructure which would benefit the economy. But rather than tackling the steep unstable slopes along those hills and creating an ecological nightmare, they opted for something that would be intitially more expensive to build, but in the long run safer and easier to maintain while providing a better conservation purpose at less cost over time. The very first images that popped into my head when I read this study were the many dangerous landslide points along California's beautiful Pacific Coast Hwy 1. Had such dangerous locations been bypassed with more superior engineering at original construction, the loss of life, property and permanent damage to the environment would never have played out the way it has over the past several decades. Of course way back when it was first built, they most likely had very little money aside from technology. This mostly was a tourist scenic route as opposed to major economic transportation corridor which is east of here with Hwy 101. Not only would being a scenic route want to avoid tunnels, the geology would make it almost impossible just like San Diego's impossible railroad to Imperial Valley. Clearly there are many places along the coast highway where steep slopes should be abandoned and ocean infrastructure considered. And there is usually no consensus on how or if this should be done. Here are some of the ideological roadblock hatreds from two opposing sides as the article pointed out:
"Conservationists can to appear to oppose nearly all new infrastructure, while developers and their financial backers are often fairly mute on the environmental impact of their proposals. This can lead to a breakdown in communication." (University of Cambridge)
Maybe both environmentalists and developers should learn how to use the data to avoid building those so-called highways to hell. But I wouldn't bet on it. As it stands now, even some of the fix-it patches they have already done will always be subject to removal by Nature in one fell swoop no matter how sophisticated and technologically advanced they believe their skills are.
Devil''s Slide area on Hwy 1 south of San Francisco in rock fractured by faults in San Andreas zone.
image - California Department of Transportation
This construction zone at right is Pitkins Curve on State Highway 1, the California Department of Transportation is completing a bridge that juts out from the side of the cliffs, leaving the old highway to capture falling rocks which I believe is finished now. My wife and I passed through here heading south on Cabrillo Hwy 1 towards San Luis Obispo, California. Some would argue that it would ruin the scenery by putting part of the highway viaduct bridge off the shoreline into the water, but can we really say that these massive scars since the original construction are more scenic ? Below here is the finished product we drove through on our way south.
I love this combination of half tunnel half bridge landslide shelter which respects that the area is slide prone and impossible to tame. This type of design allows for periodic sliding which is common feature of this geography. But it also hopefully allows no danger to befall automobile travelers along Hwy 1. This type of structure is uncommon to most of Southern California, but well known and very common in many of the northern parts of the world.
British Columbia's Hwy 1 Lanark Snow Shed is 316m long
Image - TranBC Canada
Above and Below are beautiful examples of what are termed either Snow Sheds or Avalanche Sheds.
Below is British Columbia's Great Bear Snow Shed on the Coquihalla Highway and it's interior drive
Image - CWMM Consulting Engineers Ltd
Ultimately these types of partial tunnel shelter designs on mountain sides allow natural slides to occur rather than preventing them is what that Pitkins Curve Bridge is all about. Unfortunately such construction is rare in Southern California where weather and climate have traditionally been pleasant most of the time and allowed the State to save money by taking a shortcut approach which has allowed development to increase at a faster pace and that's ashame for both Humans and Nature.
Image - LE CHIC EN ROSE - Model Railway
I know, it's a model train, but scenes like this are common everywhere in the real world of Switzerland. The Swiss cannot afford to ruin and destroy or make mistakes on landscapes they do not have. One stupid engineering blunder could ruin a steep mountain valley and almost render it unusable forever by bringing an entire unstable mountainside down into a valley.
Image - Northwest Air News
Above here is the Golden Pass Scenic Train near Zwissimen station Switzerland. I remember traveling through many tunnels and avalanche shelters on the train back in 1976 when I first visited Europe. This photo above reminds me of that movie scene from the 1965 WWII flick, "Von Ryan's Express," where Frank Sinatra single handedly holds off all those German soldiers in that Alps avalanche tunnel while his fellow prison camp escapee comrades make it over the border from Italy into Switzerland. All through the Alps these incredible infrastructures were everywhere and many of them seemed to have been built a century ago. Even the numerous public walkways or pathways and trails are all lined with stone along terraced hillsides to prevent erosion and degredation which were meant to last for centuries. Much of this careful done by hand has lots of natural character while providing a more maintenance free infrastructure system. Nothings perfect, but this kind of thinking is as close as you get. It's a work of Art.
image - jw.org
Public Pathways in Switzerland's Lavaux Wine Region
What about Tunnels and Wildlife Corridors ??? Maybe Nature's trying to tell mankind something !!!
Tragic Landslide event in 2010 on a Motorway in Taiwan
Image of Dipslope Failure - Reuters
A catastrophic slope failure incident took place at 14:33 on April 25, 2010, at the Da-Pu section of National Freeway No. 3 in northern Taiwan. It resulted in a nearly 200,000 m3 debris mass on the freeway and caused five deaths.
Early traditional road building like that of the iconic American highway Route 66 often flowed with the landscape's natural geography. It rarely offended the land by blasting through formidable mountain barriers for a more straighter convenient tourist travel. The early roads hugged river canyons, had many "S" curves, some like this one on the right called 'Deadmans Curve' which is old Hwy 99 through California's Grapevine Canyon which was eventually replaced & road straightened when Interstate 5 was constructed. I can understand thier reasoning, but why not make a short tunnel through that low hillside which would allow deer, mountain lion and other large animals easy access to the riparian canyon corridor below without danger of crossing the freeway ? Large cuts in roadways are also constantly subject to slides in California either by heavy rain storms or earthquakes.
Postcard image - socalregion.com
Above is an old postcard photo of an early Hwy 99 switchback roadway up the canyon. I get the reasoning for straightening out a endlessly twisting roadway infrastructure for convenience and safety. But long term maintenance and forethought should also have been considered and incorporated into many design plans for Interstate 5 and they weren't.
Image - Matt Beckstead 2011
This photo above is a wildlife ecoduct on the highway from Calgary, Alberta to Invermere, British Columbia. Over here in Sweden, while I'm not exactly keen on many things about living here, I do respect and applaud their numerous attempts at tunnels and wildlife overpasses like these two examples above and below. When we travel to Oslo Norway or Stockholm Sweden, these infrastructures are all along the route. They allow Moose and large Elk to travel from one side of the motorway to the other. It prevents automobile collisions with these large animals which also saves human life. Are they really all that complicated to design and build ? I come from Southern California which in the decades since WW II has had excessively almost unrestricted growth and doing things cheaply has been their road most taken. However in the long run many areas are ongoing maintenance nightmares.
Main Reasons for Highway Wildlife Over & Under Passes
Image - Inside Philanthropy
Google Earth
In Southern California there has been a movement to build more and more of these wildlife overpasses to prevent the larger animals from becoming roadkill. Yes we see roadkilled squirrels & rabbits all the time, but it's the larger animals like Deer, Bears, Cougars, Wolves and Coyotes which are not nearly as abundant as the smaller animals. Plus there is the human life safety factor. Hitting a large animal on a highway (usually at late night) is a dangerous experience. One area of controversy for roadkill is the passes between the Santa Monica Mountains, especially where Cougars of Mountains Lions attempt to traverse such passes to get from one part of their traditional territoral range to another. For me coming from San Diego County, I never understood why a tunnel was never proposed and implemented when the newer Mission Gorge Road bypass was built back in the 1960s for a wildlife gap connection between Cowles Mountain's Pyles Peak and Kwaay Paay Peak next to the San Diego River's Mission Gorge within the Mission Trails Regional Park.
Image from Trail to Peak's website
If you look towards the left hand side of the photograph above, you can see where Mission Gorge Road leaves west Santee headed towards San Diego's Mission Valley. It pushes upwards from Santee through the gap between Pyles Peak and Kwaay Paay Peak. This would be the ideal location for building a tunnel to allow a wildlife corridor above and allowing a major connection between both sections of Mission Trails. The other major spot which would have provided good beneficial wildlife corridor would have been a short tunnel through the gap between North Fortuna Mountain and Miramar Military Reservation along Freeway 52 which is on the right hand side of the photo above.
From Trails to Peak's website
Again here is the entire map of Mission Trails Regional Park and you can easily see both Pyles Peak and Kwaay Paay Peak with Mission Gorge road running through the center of both. Perfect spot for wildlife corridor.
Photo credit: Dr. Yun Wang
I kid you not, if Southern California had the mega-fauna (Asian Elephant) problems common to the Simao-Xiao Mengyang expressway in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province, China, heads would roll if something sensable wasn't done immediately. So getting back to our California Route 1 Cabrillo Highway along the central coast, I really think that building a viaduct type of bridge over water construction would be the way to go and still be beautful and scenic. Allowing those unstable steep slopes to settle and heal with native vegetation would be much more eye pleasing than allowing the area to continue to degrade because of a belief that Nature has to be tamed and conformed or bent to our will. Somewhere Jennifer Doudna just fell off a chair. Below is another example of successful over water viaduct down in Australia.
Photo: david_wimble via Instagram
Sea Cliff Bridge in Australia
Seriously folks, picture California's Central Coast where most of the major catastrophic landslides have historically taken place and imagine a picturesque viaduct bridge like the one above to bypass the danger and allowing the land to heal with it's native coastal sage scrub.
While news reports have focussed on Nature, the real spotlight should be aimed at human mismanagement of the region, from the region's land management policies right on down to the average land owner
Image from YouTube
Image - nbclosangeles.com
This iconic image above is of Bixby Creek Bridge along central California's Big Sur Coastline. This region is one of the prettiest gems for which tourists are attracts people to visit California. This bridge is probably the most photographed feature on the Cabrillo Highway (Route 1) in California. But the area has also had a long troubled history infrastructure issues here along this coast highway. During this past year (2016) it has been a tough time to for visiting tourists and even tougher challenge if you are a local permanent resident or business owner. For almost a year they have been isolated completely from the outside world. First, there has been a long period of drought, with this region listed on maps as being far above the rest of the state's "severe" & "extreme" designations to the high rating of "exceptional." As time went on, that extreme designation on the map spread, but has always been exceptionally bad between San Francisco & Santa Barbara in the coastal mountin ranges. Second, there was the Soberanes Fire (& multiple other fires) which started on July 22nd 2016. On August 2, officials announced that their investigation found that the fire had been caused by an unattended illegal campfire. While no suspect was identified, Monterey County District Attorney Dean Flippo said that, if an arrest were made, the culprit could be charged with negligence and manslaughter. Yeah that's right, someone died. And finally third, after 5 years of intense exceptional drought, this past 2016/17 record rainy season brought the mud and landslides. Bridges gone, roads collapsed and massive slides of whole mountainsides coming down obliterating everything in it's path. Now while Nature certainly played a role, it's often the lack of foresight in planning and critical mistakes in decision making during the crisis which exacerbate these problems which has a domino effect later on. In this particular post (Part I), I'll mainly focuss on the Soberanes Fire & human error.
Image by Stan Russell - The Big Sur Blog
Looking north from Soberanes Point about 10:30 PM, 7/23/16 Working its way down steep canyons towards Highway 1
This fire at it's very beginning blitzed through an area I had first discovered back in 1985 calledPalo Colorado Canyon north of Big Sur which is well hidden from most outside tourists unfamiliar to the region. Locals know exactly where this area is. This place was a beautiful hidden paradise when I first found it back in 1985, but it's mostly gone today. My second trip there in 2014 which you can read from the link above, I also wrote about an amazing phenomena from this region where streams and rivers still ran even after years of exceptional drought. The question was why ? Especially since I did point out the numerous dead trees I saw first hand back up in that canyon in 2014. In 1985 there were no dead trees. But there are a combination of two natural components that allow streams and rivers to flow here even without normal winter rains & absence of summer monsoonal rains that the interior part of the state experiences and that would beHydraulic Descent & Fog Preciptiation which is the very reason water sources are so dependable here. But human error changed all that. Here is a blog account and discussion by locals in the Big Sur area about the problem of illegal campfires on June 30th 2016 just a couple of weeks before the July 22nd 2016 Soberanes Fire.
Xasauan Today Blog - Because Nature Bats Last
Image - Xasauan Today Blogger
The Campfire Conundrum
"On a Sunday walk along the Pine Ridge Trail during Level IV fire restrictions in 2013, we looked at dozens of fire rings and couldn’t find a single one that hadn’t been used the night before."
"Level III fire restrictions are currently in effect in the Los Padres National Forest. This means that all wood and charcoal fires are completely prohibited outside of a few designated Campfire Use sites (in designated car campgrounds). Smoking and recreational target shooting are similarly restricted. Lanterns and stoves may only be used with a Campfire Permit."
"This isn’t a secret. Signs informing the public that campfires are prohibited abound. In spite of this, and in spite of the fact that fire danger is obviously quite high, campers light dozens of fires along Big Sur’s backroads and trails every single night."
"What gives? My guess is that it’s a function of the same human failing that prevents us, in so many contexts, from seeing how seemingly harmless individual behavior can have a devastating cumulative effect. The campfire builder likely perceives, correctly, that there is little chance that his or her fire will be the one to cause a conflagration. After all, it’s probably fewer than one in a thousand illegal campfires that becomes a wildfire. To these campers, the suggestion that they are endangering life, property and forest resources seems uptight and exaggerated."
Follow the rest of the story and comments section discussion about the potential for disaster (HERE) and keep in mind that three weeks later that devastating Soberanes wildfire started and burned for four months from July 22nd thru October 28th when it was declared 100% contained with only some hotspots still to be dealt with in the fire perimeter. But this wasn't the only damage done to the area. Despite heroic efforts by firefighters, much damaged was done by the Bull Dozer construction of Fire or Fuel Breaks along almost every major ridge, even some impossible access areas on the edge of wilderness. And these were not just one or two bulldozer blades wide fire breaks, these were often 5 or 6 blades wide or more. Admittedly this is a tough wild extremely steep rugged impossible canyon terrain. But the problems they created in attempting to stop the wildfire will be with this area for a long time to come.
Image - Big Sur Kate Blog
Well, you can google more Bull Dozer fuel break cutting work on the Soberanes Firelines and many more done far away from the actual firelines in anticipation of the fire breaking out and making big runs which quite often did happened. There were so many big equipment companies called to fight this fire that the region in some places looked like an all out war preparation by a German Army Panzer Division. Maps at the time showed an extensive networks of bull dozed fireline roads everywhere which seriously did look like Battle Plan maps and I suppose they really were. But the real damage here was to the underground mycorrhizal grid and infrastructure of both native tree and chaparral root systems which took centuries for this part of the natural world to construct. An Absence of the mycorrhizal grid will be a major invite over the next few years for non-native noxious weeds to grab a foothold which will eventually become permanent residents into this once pristine untouched landscape.
Image - Cal Fire San Benito-Monterey Unit Crews work on putting in control lines for the Soberanes Fire near Big Sur, California in this August 4, 2016
(Vern Fisher - Monterey Herald) Bulldozers work on a fire break in the Rancho San Carlos area of Carmel Valley while fighting the 23,568 acre Soberanes Fire on Wednesday, July 27, 2016 just five days after the fire began
(Vern Fisher - Monterey Herald)
A private contractor dozer operator works a fire line west of Cachagua in August 2016
(David Royal - Monterey Herald)
PanzerDivisionsDozer Crews cut a containment line on Daniel’s Ridge east of the Old Coast Road as firefighters battle the Soberanes Fire in Big Sur
Photo from CAL FIRE
The dozer that rolled over on the Soberanes Fire in 2016, killing Robert Reagan
"Both a private contractor and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) were issued citations by California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) related to a fatality when a dozer rolled over. Robert Reagan, 35, of Friant, California, was killed while fighting the Soberanes Fire south of Monterey, California July 26, 2016."
"Minutes after Mr. Reagan began operating the piece of equipment for Czirban Concrete Construction on contract to CAL FIRE, it rolled over. Not wearing a seat belt, he was thrown from the cab and was killed when the dozer rolled onto him."
Sadly the Army of bull dozer operators used to stop this wildfire and save property owner dwellings not only took it's toll on the environment, but also one bull dozer operator's life. Often times and especially in terrain like this, many firefighters are asked to do impossible tasks at the risk of their very lives. I've previously written about and voiced my opinion about firefighters having to risk their lives for people who have built buildings on property with impossible death trap access. The image below I watched on television Live in May 2014 where wildfire in San Marcos, California in 2014 which moved towards one hilltop Mansion which was surrounded by more than a dozen giant dead Aleppo Pine trees in the homeowner's landscape. Nobody should be made to risk life and save that and homeowners who choose such locations should accept the inevitable. You can read that post below here:
After any Wildfire the Burned Area Emergency Response (BAER) assessment would have conducted a survry and an implementation clean-up & repair work would be on-going for perhaps months.
Inciweb.com Excavator moving previously cut vegetation to cover fireline.
inciweb.com
Excave placing vegetation material on fireline
Inciweb.com
Working on suppression repair
Inciweb.com
Brush and cut vegetation from suppression repair work.
After it's all said and done, this is the result of clean-up repairs. Areas where the wildfire were untouched are repaired from a human eye-candy appeal point of view where brush is placed on top of the fuel break scar to hide it and provide some measure of runoff control with the next seasons winter rains. What they don't tell you and probably most of them are ignorant of or if the know, view it as trivial, the mycorrhizal fungal network grid which previously supported native chaparral and trees has been erased and obliterated under the ground. The scar is now ripe for take over by non-native invasive annual grasses and other noxious weeds which were generally kept in check by the former fungal network, but now that this has been removed, a bacterial soil system has replaced it and this scenario is what annual weeds will thrive under. Some scars will be left untouched like this once below from the Sherpa Fire. It will be viewed now as a strategic fuel break for fighting future wildfires. But given some months it could later look like older historical fuel breaks which are densely weed infested and will move future wildfires along more rapidly. Like this one below in Southern California.
Inciweb.com West Camino Cielo Fuel Break, Los Padres National Forest
Image - Chaparral Institute Trabuco Ranger District of the Cleveland National Forest fuel break along the ridgeline of the Santa Ana Mountains
Other victims in nature weren't so lucky to escape. An irreplacable world record Pacific Madrone is gone forever
Photo: California Department Of Fish And Wildlife
Image - Mine 2014
Pacific Madrone (Arbutus menziesii)
The largest madrone tree in the United States in 2007 (left) and in 2016 (right). The tree, located in Joshua Creek Canyon Ecological Reserve in Monterey County, was severely burned in the Soberanes Fire. A giant in Big Sur registered as the largest of its kind in the nation appears to be a casualty of the devastating wildfire. Madrones really have no defenses against wildfire other than resprouting from the trunk base after being burned up. They have a very thin bark much like that of a Manzanita. Even when they get older and have the characteristic rugged bark like the old growth one above, they are no match for a wildfire. Most likely in youth this one above was burned and resprouted from the truck. This is proven by the fact is has multiple trunks. I've photographed young Madrones in Palo Colorado Canyon and they will start out as a single trunked tree. Much like the one on the right that I photographed in 2014. But once burned, that single trunk Madrone becomes a multi-trunk resprout from it's stump's base. Sadly though this time around, the Soberanes fire was just too hot and appears to have burned down deep into the rootsystem and surrounding soil.
Image - Dr Aljos Farjon
Santa Lucia Fir (Abies bracteata)
The other potential for wildfire victim here is the highly restricted habitat belonging to the Santa Lucia Fir or Bristlecone Fir (Abies bracteata) which is endemic to the central California Coast Ranges. Many of the largest known pocket woodlands of Santa Lucia Fir at various locations (particularly Ventana Wilderness) were effected by both wildfire and Forest Service backfires. But even still at this time there has not been a lot of assessment on the conditions or status of this Santa Lucia Fir in some of the remote regions. Perhaps this year will change that. The other danger for all plants which endure an extreme or rather in this case "exceptional" drought designation for four or five years is at the end of that period trees will have produced less seed/cones (offensive strategy) as opposed to putting all it's resources into survival mode (defensive strategy) for the adult tree itself, so that when a fire does come along and wipes a forest out, there is very little release of seed resources to counter the damage caused by the catastrophic event. This goes with every tree and shrub caught in the middle of massive unprecedented drought followed by wldfire. Change could be permanent and sometime irreversible. So time will tell. This particular tree has been hit hard by previous fires in the past, but again we will have to wait and see.
Some Local Blogger References for Central California which are far better than Main Stream Media Outlets
And Finally the Rains Came and Deluged all of Californnia!
ABC 10 News January 2017
I won't spend any time on this portion of the ongoing disaster to this region. That will be in my second post. I mainly focussed here on Nature and what has taken place, although it has to be acknowledged that many many homes and commercial buildings were lost which devastated the human population here. But the misery and inconvenience continue and it's still not over. But maybe there is some good news as far as infrastructure repair if anyone out there is paying close attention. Stay Tuned!
Big Update: While Palo Colorado Canyon seem to be spare numerous Wildifre, January 2022 is a different story. Imagine wildfire season starting in a January
