Agoura Hills evacuation plan draws fire from Kanan Road residents Play

Loud complaints over fire evacuation plans and traffic jams at a key access point to Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains erupted in Agoura Hills last night.

The issue is the City of Agoura Hills general plan emergency element — a planning document that covers emergency evacuation on Agoura Hills streets connecting to the 101 Freeway. That's a critical evacuation corner from the Santa Monica Mountains and from Malibu.

But Agoura Hills traffic engineers calculate that as few as 100 cars per hour will flee the Santa Monica Mountains during a fire emergency. And they don't anticipate any vehicles at all leaving the city of Malibu via Kanan Dume Road — even though the city of Malibu evacuation plan lists Kanan Road as a key artery.

Most of the complaints last night came from people who live north of the 101 Freeway, off of Kanan Road in Oak Park or Agoura Hills. They worry about evacuating during the next fire, trying to get to the 101 Freeway onramps at Kanan Road to flee for their lives.

That's what happened in the Woolsey Fire to Carolyn Gaspartin: "It took us over 15 minutes to go two miles down Kanan Road in bumper-to-bumper traffic."

But traffic jams on Kanan Road at the 101 are an everyday bother for residents up there — not to mention people trying to connect from Malibu to the nearest freeway.

Other residents said traffic on Kanan at the 101 is jammed every day, with or without an emergency.

MAN: "There is massive traffic independent of any fires."

WOMAN: "My God, what is wrong with you?"

Those were residents Robert Weinstein and Cyndi Larson at last night's explanatory hearing on the City of Agoura Hills emergency plan.

The city has already approved rezoning for more than 1,000 apartments along Kanan, most of them where the two supermarket shopping centers sit at Thousand Oaks Boulevard. But some of them have been approved south of the 101 freeway, towards Malibu.

The fear voiced last night was that Kanan Road will once again jam in a fire and block traffic flowing north out of Malibu and the Santa Monica Mountains.

In fact, the city's traffic engineers say Kanan Road will be jammed with more than twice its capacity at the traffic lights near the 101 if there is a fire coming from the north and people are evacuating from the south.

But the city of Agoura Hills plans more than one thousand new apartments in the Kanan corridor. Steve Goldman says that's just dangerous.

"This is not accounting for smoke, disabled vehicles, panicking people, emergency traffic, power outages and panicky drivers. You will be responsible for injury and death because of your outrageous and irresponsible refusal to stop building on Kanan."

They were testifying at a hearing of the Agoura Hills planning commission.

One of the major issues is the traffic engineering study from Agoura Hills, which says that zero cars from Malibu could be expected to evacuate up Kanan Road during a fire. And that same engineering estimates that only 100 cars per hour would flee the Santa Monica Mountains into Agoura Hills during a fire evacuation.

The controversial Agoura Hills safety plan — with its traffic estimates that are at best questionable — goes to the Agoura Hills City Council later this year.