LA DWP Seeks Seven-Year Storage Yard in Malibu Hills Play

Details have now been released on the plan by the city of Los Angeles to store electrical poles in Malibu — 10 miles outside of L.A. — for seven years.

Dozens of LA DWP truck trips would run back and forth through Malibu, through the PCH lane closures, through the Civic Center, for seven years.

The city of Los Angeles goes before the Malibu Planning Commission next week. LA's Department of Water and Power is seeking a permit for an equipment and supply storage yard in Malibu, 10 miles west of the L.A. city limits.

Even though temporary permits for this were granted by Malibu about six months ago, details of the industrial storage yard have been released for the first time.

LA DWP proposes to send out DWP trucks from the yard every morning to deliver electric poles and other supplies 10 miles to the east, to the Los Angeles service area in Pacific Palisades. Two trips back and forth per day for each of at least six trucks. That's 48 one-way truck trips added to PCH, right through the heart of Malibu and the lane closures for PCH fire reconstruction.

Supply trucks will drop off material all day, and those trucks will be directed to use Malibu Canyon Road. DWP says it will not do mechanical work on vehicles onsite, and the laydown yard will not be a place where truck drivers show up for work. That means the trucks will be arriving and departing early in the morning and late in the evening.

DWP plans this operation for seven years.

The proposed industrial yard is surrounded by parks: the Solstice Canyon unit of the National Park Service to the west, and MRCA's Corral Canyon to the east. The Malibu Beach RV Park is to the south, and the Malibu Coastal Trail is to the north.

The city of LA wants to light up the hillside, which will be visible from the ocean and possibly from PCH, a state-designated scenic highway.

A half dozen storage containers would hold wire, cable and insulators, being held for eventual installation in Pacific Palisades 10 miles away. Prefabricated concrete structures would be stored on the site, to eventually be buried to house underground transformers in LA. Underground conduit — big orange spools of plastic tubing — could be expected as well.

The city of LA claims that this site was graded for construction in 1947, back when they planned to build a nuclear power generating plant in Corral Canyon. LA has owned the hillside for 80 years, and they say bulldozing into a hillside along Corral Canyon Road, and all those trucks, would not negatively affect the environment in Malibu.

The city of Malibu bureaucrats agree. Incredibly, the city staff says this project is listed among the classes of projects that have been determined not to have a significant adverse effect on the environment. But the city staff has not examined the traffic impacts.

In a letter to the city, the DWP complains that it has been forced out of its preferred storage yard location in Pacific Palisades. The DWP lost its preferred location because LA Mayor Karen Bass ordered DWP to move, to make way for a Rebuild LA trailer office and parking lot.

May we remind you: Malibu lost 700 houses and 7 lives when a fire that started in Los Angeles burned into this city. DWP played a substantial role in that fire's spread. It had allowed fire hydrants in the Palisades to stay dry for months, not to mention DWP screwed up repairs to a key reservoir and kept it dry for more than a year.

Now that same agency wants to run trucks back and forth from the city of LA into an industrial yard on a hillside surrounded by parks and campgrounds in the heart of Malibu.

The issue goes before the Malibu Planning Commission in a week and a half, Monday, August 3rd.