By an edhat reader
Equipment and workforces are about a quarter mile up from the start of Cold Spring Trail installing metal netting across the river. Is there an environmental impact report?
I’m sure a full Environmental report would show many species of plants and animals will be adversely affected. And when the boulders roll and bust down the netting who’s responsible for clean up of the jagged remains?
Of course there is an environmental impact. These nets are designed to protect people, animals, plants, structures from future debris flows.
ALWAYS_RUNNING. “whose.”
You don’t think plants and animals were affected by the mudlside!
I’d imagine clean up will be done by the same folks that had to pull bodies out of the mud.
I think they’d prefer jagged metal to the alternative.
There’s a river along the Cold Springs Trail, a quarter mile from the trailhead? I’m sorry but such distortions of reality (aka histrionics) bring into question the entire premise of your concern.
I believe this work was permitted under emergency conditions which means they don’t have to do extensive studies. At this point, 2 wet seasons after the mudflow, there is some question as to how much they are needed because of the vegetation recovery in the watersheds. Other questions exist, like how do they get a proposed backhoe into the areas to clean the nets once they get clogged if there are no access roads? And if they just dump the captured debris downstream of the nets, does that really help when the next storm comes? Best case scenario is if the nets never get used, don’t require cleaning, and are taken down after 5 yrs as proposed and get stored away for the next fire in 30 years.
If you want to be constructive, you may be interested in volunteering at the library literacy program.
To paraphrase the chief in “Jaws”, if you want to protect Montecito from a debris flow if the mother of all storms hits our area, you’re going to need some bigger nets.