Continental Shelf

The California Department of Transportation announced on Friday that the draft environmental impact report (EIR) for the Richardson Grove improvement project was available for review.

The project consists in the widening and realignment of a one-mile section of US Route 101 — the primary life link connecting the north coast of California to the Bay Area — from one mile north of the Mendocino/Humboldt County line to approximately eight miles south of the community of Garberville. A portion of the improvements to Route 101 would occur within Richardson Grove State Park.

US 101 is narrow and winding in many stretches, so much so that it cannot currently be used by trucks with 65-foot (20 m) trailers: it is limited to 53-foot (16 m) trailers, because of the risk of swinging wide into the opposite lane in curves.

While I tend to think that’s rather nice that big trucks can’t reach us — I come from a small village and I’m afraid I continue to romanticize the back-country life, after all these years — it must be admitted that this severely limits transportation of certain goods and equipment. The Richardson Grove is a limiting segment.

I used to work in the Bay Area back in the mid-90s, and I lived in Arcata. Every Friday night at 5pm, I would head out into miserable rush hour traffic and tackle the 300-mile drive — that’s 500 km. After I was done with the bad traffic segments, I’d reach the narrow twisting portions of 101 in the dark, and tired. My beacon in the night was the point where I started picking up KMUD‘s signal. And on Monday mornings, I would leave at 3 AM to return to the Bay Area. Believe me, I remember full well how dark, narrow and twisty that road is. In fact, there is a good deal of popular support for the road widening.

And yet, and yet… Those trees are irreplaceable. I hate the thought of losing even one. Presumably, if I had lost a loved one to that stretch of road I might feel differently, although I suspect I would still blame the drivers. As in so many other adverse road conditions, a good portion of drivers treat this stretch without the respect its risks merit. But just because someone else is careless doesn’t mean it’s not you who pays the price.

Looking at the plans available on the Caltrans site, it looks like the design engineers made considerable efforts to avoid taking trees, and only smaller ones. I’ll need to spend more time scrutinizing them in order to give specific diameters.

In addition to the requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which demand that the environmental impacts of any state project be evaluated and mitigated as far as reasonably feasible, the new draft document also serves to fulfil the requirements of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) since the project is funded in part by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). NEPA, however, does not mandate that environmental impacts have to be mitigated, only studied.

Interestingly, because of the two laws slightly different focus, the project’s potential for impacts was sufficient to trigger the higher level of review at the state level (an EIR rather than an Initial Study followed by a Mitigated Negative Declaration), but was only the object of an Environmental Assessment, the lower level of review, on the federal side; the current plan (barring surprises) is for the FHWA to issue a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) at the end of the review period.