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.

California Conservation Corps Crews Continue Carbon Canyon Creek Cleanup

Over the last couple of weeks, work crews from the California Conservation Corps, under contract with the Santa Ana Watershed Authority, which oversees a grant-funded arundo donax treatment program, have been busily working to clear dead arundo and much other material (plant and otherwise) from Carbon [Canyon] Creek.

As the photo below shows, there has been a significant amount of debris taken out of the creek and hauled away by the Corps (unfortunately this does not include trash dumped at what are now two spots along the old La Vida Mineral Springs resort property, although someone did recently remove the garbage at the deep turnout on the other side of the highway.)

These bags of plant and other material removed by California Conservation Corps crews from Carbon [Canyon] Creek represent a small fraction of what has been done by these workers over the last couple of weeks.  This is at the west end of the old La Vida Mineral Springs property on the Brea side of Carbon Canyon.

This project with the creek will be ongoing and, hopefully, funded, as efforts to eradicate the highly invasive, flammable and difficult to kill arundo continue over years.  There has already been a noticeable difference in the appearance and water flow in the creek.

Everyone involved in this project, including the CCC, SAWA, Hills for Everyone, the Carbon Canyon Fire Safe Council, the City of Brea and anyone inadvertently left off this list, deserves credit for participating in what is probably the sole bright spot to come from the November 2008 wildfires that ravaged the Orange County portion of Carbon Canyon.

Arundoing and Other Doings

In the last couple of weeks or so, work has been ongoing between Olinda Village and the old La Vida Mineral Springs property on the Brea side of Carbon Canyon in the removal of dead biomass from the arundo donax that had long been accumulating in Carbon [Canyon] Creek, but has been subject to an intensive eradication program given unintended assistance by the devastation of the November 2008 Freeway Complex fires.

Crews from a Lake Forest habitat restoration company called Nature's Image (see here) have been busily engaged in the tough task of cutting and hauling away of plant material, as the accompanying photographs, taken last week, show.  These efforts will continue, presumably, for some time, even as new stands of arundo have arisen and will have to be treated.

Meantime, on Chino Hills State Park property alongside Carbon Canyon Road east of the new Discovery Center, work details from the Inland Empire division of the California Conservation Corps (see here for more on the local center of this organization, which has served California since 1976) are doing cleanup work with unwanted plant material.

And, in recent weeks, CalTrans has been on the Orange County portion of Carbon Canyon Road, removing dead trees from as far as near the Chino Hills border to the rehabilitated El Rodeo Stables, where the remnants of very tall, but also very dead trees, burned in the 2008 fires, were probably a risk to those driving on the highway.  CalTrans crews have also been very busy over the last week or so putting down ribbons of asphalt to seal cracks that have long been worsening on SR-142.

Finally, workers have also been quite busy along the highway working on power lines and poles, so the amount of maintenance activity recently has been quite impressive.