California Conservation Corps Carbon Creek Cleanup Continuing

This week, crews from the California Conservation Corps have been busy clearing out plant material from Carbon Creek to ensure that the water flow is smooth and that fire risk and other concerns are minimized.

With coordination from the Carbon Canyon Fire Safe Council working with the Santa Ana Watershed Authority and funding obtained by a grant secured by the City of Brea, the work will move down the creek into the Brea/Orange County portion of the canyon. 

This includes further treatment of the arundo, which was once rampant in the canyon, but has been largely mitigated after the Freeway Complex Fire of November 2008.  Despite all the destruction of that wildfire, a silver lining was that the existing arundo was burned to the ground providing an opportunity to treat the extremely aggressive invasive at the root level. 

Several treatments since then, all coordinated by the Fire Safe Council, with the invaluable cooperation of SAWA and the cities of Chino Hills and Brea, local fire agencies and others, have kept the arundo mostly in check and it's an ongoing effort a decade later.