Blockades of Narrow Streets Targeted

Responding to years of complaints about safety hazards created when construction projects block the narrow streets of hillside neighborhoods, Los Angeles officials are finally preparing for a crackdown.

Fire officials and hillside residents say that the blockades, particularly in the Santa Monica and Verdugo mountains, can prevent emergency vehicles from reaching a fire or someone in need of medical aid, and that construction sites on their clogged, substandard streets could someday give rise to tragedy.

Spurred by those concerns, Councilman Michael Woo earlier this month introduced a measure in the City Council that would require builders to leave at least 16 feet of clear roadway on substandard hillside streets while doing construction work. The measure also proposes setting up a task force of various city agencies to conduct a coordinated review of construction plans before the city grants permits.

The current system, Woo said, is a mishmash of confusing city ordinances, overlapping jurisdictions and disjointed approval processes that have done nothing to fight the problem.

“We’re not talking about a situation that is merely inconvenient,” Woo said. “We’re talking about a situation that is life-threatening on these narrow, winding streets, where any kind of emergency can quickly become a disaster. These streets are dangerous enough under the best of conditions.”

Although the proposal is aimed primarily at hillside neighborhoods, it would also apply to narrow, substandard streets throughout Los Angeles. Such streets, Woo said, are found in parts of Wilmington, Venice and the San Fernando Valley.

Under the proposal, the city would be empowered to stop work on projects where construction blocks the roadway. Woo said builders could meet requirements by storing materials off public property, creating alternate parking, stationing workers to direct traffic and posting the phone number of a supervisor for residents to call when problems arise.

Woo first unveiled the proposal at a news conference he held on a treacherous hillside in Laurel Canyon. He said an elderly woman had died nearby while paramedics tried to crash through a construction site blocking the road.

Fire officials and homeowners confirm that emergency vehicles often have trouble getting through construction areas but details of the incident cited by Woo are sketchy.

In the late fall of 1988, according to Woo and fire officials, a fire truck responding to an emergency call at an elderly woman’s house on Bulwer Drive was blocked by construction work that spilled onto the street. An ambulance finally rammed through an opening, but the woman was dead by the time paramedics arrived, Woo and the officials said.

It could not be determined whether the extra time spent getting to the woman was a factor in her death, fire officials said.

Nevertheless, hillside residents stepped up their lobbying efforts at City Hall after the incident, taking particular aim at Woo, their councilman.

“It only added a tragic emphasis to the years of complaints from frustrated hillside homeowners,” said Jim Nelson, president of the Lookout Mountain Associates homeowner group. “For years we’d been saying somebody is going to die because there will be no way to get a fire truck or ambulance up there.”