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Storms spark an abundance of caution in L.A. mountains

During a lull in last week’s battery of El Niño storms, Jim Hardie stood in a freshly dug culvert in the TreePeople park, at the crest of Coldwater Canyon Avenue, and pointed up a steep trail.
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January 13, 2016

During a lull in last week’s battery of El Niño storms, Jim Hardie stood in a freshly dug culvert in the TreePeople park, at the crest of Coldwater Canyon Avenue, and pointed up a steep trail.

“You can imagine, when its really pouring, rain is just cascading down that trail,” he said.

Hardie is director of park operations for TreePeople, overseeing a 45-acre slice of the Santa Monica Mountains. It’s his job to think about how to redirect torrential rains so they don’t wipe out trails where Angelenos come to “escape the craziness” of what he called “life below” during a Jan. 7 interview.

Los Angeles long ago tamed its river, once a moody and potent force of destruction, into a series of concrete channels, but its residents still perennially struggle against occasional hard rains to keep the region’s roads clear and its encompassing wilderness intact.

Meteorologists have predicted this year’s El Niño event, a warming of Pacific Ocean waters that can result in storms, could be stronger than usual. 

Last week’s rainfall already tested the people and agencies responsible for keeping cars and hikers moving through the mountains that ring Los Angeles.

Earlier that day, Hardie and 12 volunteers had cleared a channel in a main trail for the next rains. Standing between a pair of miniature earthen levies, he explained the operating hypothesis: that water would empty through the new cleft, down a drain and into a lush valley below, rather than wiping out the small plateau where he stood.

“We had dug this out two weeks ago, knowing this storm was coming,” he said. “But this morning, from the rains Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday — this was filled [with mud] to about here.” 

He raised his hands to his shins, which were still clad in kneepads that enabled him to kneel without muddying his jeans.

In Franklin Canyon Park, a mud-slicked road was closed on Jan. 7.

Hardie was a volunteer during the last El Niño event, in 1997, and remembers portions of trails getting wiped off the mountain — precisely what he’s trying to avoid this year.

Farther north, like Hardie, Rabbi Joe Menashe is tasked with accounting for the rain pouring onto the land in his charge. Menashe is executive director of Camp Ramah, a popular Jewish summer camp in Ojai.

“A camp director’s job is to worry in general,” Menashe said. 

These days, mudslides and other water damage are on his list of things to worry about.

“Our maintenance crew has been running around throwing up sandbags and clearing drains constantly,” he said.

Camp Ramah has few visitors until the summer, particularly when compared with the hills around Los Angeles, where hiking is a very feasible prospect year-round. 

Last week’s mud and looming clouds didn’t deter a multitude of hikers from TreePeople, where the parking lot stood mostly full in the midafternoon.

“Parks are supposed to be open,” said Dash Stolarz, the public affairs director for the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) in L.A. “So we go out of our way to keep the parks open.”

MRCA oversees 72,000 acres of parkland, from Simi Valley to downtown, including Franklin Canyon Park, directly across the road from TreePeople.

The agency is keeping an eye on the streams and waterways that crisscross those parks, working to keep flood channels clear of debris and, in particular, looking out for homeless people who could be caught in the torrent, Stolarz said. 

At any given time, 31 employees and another dozen or so volunteers are on hand to rescue stranded hikers, remove debris or clear downed trees, she said.

She’s stark about the potential dangers: “Fast-moving water kills people.”

TreePeople park director Jim Hardie stands in a freshly dug culvert.

The organization’s efforts are part of a citywide push to safely channel the pouring rain away from its residents, especially its most vulnerable.

On Jan. 6, as storm clouds disgorged over L.A., Mayor Eric Garcetti logged onto the online forum Reddit to address questions and concerns about the much-anticipated El Niño drenching.

“We cleaned 40,000 storm drains in preparation for the rains and 70 catch basins, all of which have been upgraded in recent years,” Garcetti wrote in response to a user’s question about drain infrastructure.

He also discussed at length efforts to protect the city’s homeless population during the storm, such as opening extra shelter space and deploying outreach teams.

Back at TreePeople, Hardie stressed the group’s work to turn the destructive potential of the downpour into a boon for the parched city. 

TreePeople is a nonprofit organization that, in addition to running the park, works to pressure Los Angeles and its residents to use water more wisely and adopt other environmental measures. Below the park’s entrance plaza, a 216,000-gallon cistern collects water through a sand and felt filter, water that can later be used to nourish the park’s plants during dry months.

“We joke that if the end ever comes, we’ll go down and hide in the cistern,” Hardie said.

The park overlooks the San Fernando Valley, and as heavy storm clouds hung over Burbank and Studio City, an apocalypse seemed none too far-fetched, but not too daunting, either.

If the end came, Hardie joked, “We’d be here up in our own kind of island in the sky.”

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