Unmarked, Unmapped Back Roads

The call went out just after dark on a chilly evening earlier this month. A 62-year-old man, exhausted and dehydrated, had been found after wandering for four days in remote Bootlegger Canyon near Acton. Los Angeles County firefighters and paramedics were summoned.

But when they arrived, firefighters found themselves lost in a maze of winding, dead-end dirt roads. They could see the flashing lights atop sheriff deputies’ cars in the distance but couldn’t get to the injured man.

After trying for nearly half an hour, the firefighters finally asked a Fire Department helicopter to use its spotlight to light their way. When the helicopter landed to take the man aboard, it blocked the narrow road, trapping the ground units behind it until it took off.

Welcome to the tangled back roads of the foothills between the Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys. Although once sparsely populated, they are sharing in part of the explosive growth of both areas, and that has some fire and sheriff’s officials worried.

The development is being imposed on a decades-old network of largely dirt roads and private streets. The mix has firefighters in particular complaining that it has become increasingly difficult for them to find their way.

Maps that don’t match the area’s actual streets, houses as much as a mile away from their legal street addresses and absent street signs have complicated the travels of emergency units in fast-changing communities such as Acton and Agua Dulce along the Antelope Valley Freeway.

“It’s a real mishmash. It’s the type of thing that can cause confusion,” said county Fire Capt. Ron Conway, whose Acton-based crew went on the rescue that night in Bootlegger Canyon. “It’s really frustrating to not be able to get where you’re needed.”

The man found in the canyon Nov. 6, John Ferguson of Lancaster, was released from Antelope Valley Hospital Medical Center on Monday. But county officials fear that future delays could prove more serious, perhaps fatal, unless something is done.

“The potential is there. With more homes, it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” said county Fire Capt. Terry Hart, who worked in the Acton area until recently. He said fire officials in the foothills have been wrestling with the problems for years.

Last month, the Board of Supervisors directed that a committee of county agencies and community leaders be set up to sort out the mess. But more than a month later, there appears to have been little progress, and even those officials supposedly involved seemed unsure of the committee’s status.

“We’re all certain there’s going to be changes,” said Dave Vannatta, a planning deputy to county Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who represents the foothill areas. But Vannatta said he was not sure what has been done thus far, a comment repeated by several county public works officials.

The more urbanized areas, such as Santa Clarita and Lancaster and Palmdale, pose their own problems for emergency units, officials said. In Santa Clarita, it is heavy traffic clogging streets. And in the Antelope Valley, it is trying to keep up with serving rapidly expanding communities.

In Santa Clarita earlier this month, voters rejected a proposed property tax increase that would have provided $285 million for new roads. In Lancaster and Palmdale, city officials are looking for ways to keep the trains that often run through both cities from stalling emergency equipment.

But at least in those cities, new development often comes in large chunks, and developers are required to put in paved streets and proper street signs. The foothill areas are different. Development more often occurs there in the form of individual homes, which do not trigger sign and street requirements.

“The development going in out here is basically one house at a time,” said Conway at county Fire Station 80, which covers about 150 square miles of the foothills. “There’s no way for them to share in the cost of doing these things.”

One example is street signs. The county does not require street signs to be installed on private roads, which are common in the foothills, even though the county does give the roads their official names, said Roger McClure, supervisor of the county’s street names and house numbering unit.

As a result, signs are often missing or inadequate. In the center of Acton, a growing community south of Palmdale, the only markers designating Ninth Street at one intersection are a 2-inch-high black sticker and a hand-scrawled number on a short metal post protecting a fire hydrant.

“There’s a whole world of problems up there,” McClure said. His unit assigns street addresses to new homes, generally assigning them to the closest legal street on county public works maps. But that process often does not work well in the foothills, fire officials complain.

Many streets there, barely more than dirt trails, do not appear on the public works maps used by county planners. The maps also do not reflect the area’s mountainous terrain. Thus, the street that might seem the most appropriate address for a home to someone checking a map might actually be on the other side of a hill.

Homes built in the foothills in previous years often were well back from well-traveled streets along narrow dirt roads. That was not much of a problem in the past, fire officials said. But new development in the foothills has changed that.

Now, a building set along a major route, such as Sierra Highway, will be given an address using the same street as that listed for an older home behind it in the hills. But in the meantime, developers have put in new homes between the two that are listed as being on other streets.

The result is confusion.

(The U.S. Postal Service says it has no such problems because the homes in the area are on a rural route mail delivery system. They have mailboxes on posts along main roads where residents pick up their mail. Carriers do not have to worry about where the actual houses are.)

County firefighters and sheriff’s deputies who regularly work in the foothills said they have learned to cope with local peculiarities. But when firefighters or deputies must come from other areas, “It can be a real problem,” said Sgt. Ron Shreves of the Antelope Valley Sheriff’s Station.

The foothills also are plagued by roads that dead-end at a hillside and continue on the other side, sometimes several times. Other roads continue uninterrupted but may inexplicably have as many as three different names.

To sort out the tangle, Vannatta of Antonovich’s office said the county could revise the way it assigns street addresses, and the Public Works Department could be directed to keep better maps of the areas. The county also could expand its street sign requirements to include private roads, McClure added.

But for now, no changes are on the horizon. And McClure warned that residents often don’t like the county altering their addresses.

“Sometimes we make people very unhappy” by trying to sort out the confusion, he said. “We keep changing their addresses and they don’t understand why.”