FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN

More than a week of flames in Southern California should certainly re-alert Serene Lakes residents to the dangers posed by having only one egress, Soda Springs Road.  The news coverage of the evacuations has brought back sad memories of the Charring Cross Road inferno, where 6 people were trapped and died while trying to flee the Oakland-Berkeley Hills fire. A train blocking the railroad tracks could prove disastrous to us all if we were forced to flee a fire- but so many other things- a stalled car, a flat tire, an accident could block the single road out- and the fire itself could render the road useless.

We've lived with this peril for years, perhaps unaware of the magnitude of the risk involved. Now though, Royal Gorge LLC proposes to add up to 1,000 more dwelling units, much of them high-density, with constant turnover of residents. This will more than double our risk of entrapment in the event of a wildfire.  You see, Royal Gorge doesn't propose to provide a secondary egress.  In their Qs and A's they state, "Why isn't Royal Gorge proposing to provide a secondary access road?" Their answer: "Information collected to date indicates that topography and land ownership would greatly impede development of a secondary access road.  Pahatsi and Soda Springs Roads were sized for significant traffic volumes per the Placer County General Plan in order to serve the significant amount of zoning in the area."

I'd like to remind Mr. Todd and Mr. Mark Foster, Mr. Kirk Syme, and all their investors in Royal Gorge LLC that what's at stake here is people's lives, not "the significant amount of zoning".  And no matter how wide Pahatsi and Soda Springs road are (and they're not all that wide), roadways are governed by their points of constriction, in plain english, their bottlenecks.  Proposing to add 1,000 more dwellings to an already dangerous bottleneck evinces, at the least, a casual disregard for the real human consequences of piling more cars and people into an area with substandard fire egress.  

KTG