Canyon Growth Turns Byway Into ‘Road of Death’

For the residents of Silverado and Modjeska canyons, Santiago Canyon Road is viewed as a grim necessity. If all roads lead to Rome, as the saying goes, then here, in the hidden back country of South County, Santiago Canyon Road leads everywhere else.

But there’s often a price to pay for traveling this road, which canyon dwellers have taken to calling “the road of death.”

Its reputation was underscored during the evening rush hour of Jan. 9, when a 34-year-old Yorba Linda man became the latest to die in a grisly head-on collision. The circumstances of the death were all too typical:

Armando Sanchez Castro was sitting between the driver and another passenger in a vehicle headed north on Santiago Canyon Road near Modjeska Canyon when they were struck by a pickup truck traveling on the wrong side of the road. Castro died and his friends were critically injured.

On Santiago Canyon Road, head-on collisions are as common as speeding and passing illegally--the chief causes of accidents on what is widely viewed as one of the most dangerous roads in Southern California.

Since 1986, more than 30 people have been killed on the road, with hundreds more suffering injuries, according to California Highway Patrol officials in Sacramento. In 1986 alone, CHP officials said, 162 people were injured in 92 accidents. In 1990 and 1991, 11 people died in five crashes.

“How many people have to die before they do something about it?” said an angry James Hudson, 36, a cellular-phone executive who blamed the dangers of Santiago Canyon Road for his decision to move from scenic Silverado Canyon to Mission Viejo. “It’s probably the most dangerous road I’ve ever driven on.”

County traffic officials said the problem is not the road but the people who drive it, and that there are no plans to improve it.

Santiago Canyon Road is a narrow two-lane byway connecting Trabuco Canyon to Orange. It was never intended to be an arterial connection for the thousands of commuters who use it and who, in many cases, maneuver its twists and turns recklessly and as fast as possible.

But explosive growth and hundreds of thousands of new residents in an ever-growing corner of the county have made the 13-mile road far more dangerous than anyone thought possible.

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Greg Petersen, 51, is a firefighter who has lived in Silverado Canyon since 1968. Since that time, Petersen remembers either witnessing or helping the attempted rescues of 25 drivers who died because of a miscue on Santiago Canyon Road.

“I remember three separate individual fatalities involving motorcycles at the junction of Santiago Canyon Road and the street that leads to Silverado Canyon,” Petersen said last week over coffee at the Silverado Cafe.

He took a sip and sighed.

“I remember six to seven fatalities between the elementary school [on Santiago Canyon Road] and the entrance to Williams Canyon,” he said. “And I remember five fatalities along the road next to Jackson Ranch and the entrance to Modjeska Canyon.”

To Petersen, no stranger to prying bodies from vehicles, the reasons for the carnage are obvious: Santiago Canyon Road, which becomes El Toro Road at its southern terminus, is a sinewy road with blind curves and hairpin turns.

It was never intended to be anything more than a byway along which farmers hauled produce from nearby fields to the markets of Orange, he said, while a handful of rural residents used it as their connection to the outside world.

Now it’s dominated not only by commuters who have flocked in droves to the county’s affluent new communities--Portola Hills, Rancho Santa Margarita and Foothill Ranch--but also by commercial vehicles whose drivers would rather take a shortcut than use the freeway.

Truck drivers “ought to be outlawed” from using the road, Petersen said. Slow-going commercial vehicles back up traffic for miles on a road infamous for tailgating, tempting the impatient motorist to risk passing.

Passing is legal only on a couple of small stretches, but frequent users of the road see drivers daring oncoming traffic by passing to the left or chancing other forms of mayhem by passing on the shoulder to the right.

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Petersen, the battalion chief of a local fire station, said Laguna Canyon Road once presented similar problems, but the state, which owns it, “stepped in and fixed the problems” with tighter enforcement and a widening and realigning of the roadway.

However, Santiago Canyon Road is owned by the county, which Petersen and other residents argue is far less inclined to take action.

Ron Wilkerson of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department says the county has largely deferred both enforcement and jurisdiction of the road to the CHP.

Newly elected Supervisor Todd Spitzer, whose district includes the road, declined to comment on its problems.

County Traffic Engineer Ignacio Ochoa said the Board of Supervisors has no plans to widen or improve the roadway.

“There is no funding, no money, and the county has no plans,” Ochoa said.

Rather than blame the road, Ochoa blames drivers who, he said, commit three common sins: They drink and drive (statistics show alcohol as a factor in numerous fatalities, he said); they pass illegally across the “double center yellow lines the county added at some expense” several years ago, and they speed.

“Any time there’s a fatality, the county is concerned,” Ochoa said. “What we as a county are charged with, though, is having a safe roadway out there, meaning a roadway that is properly signed and striped for any reasonable driver to use safely.”

In other words, he said, the county views the road as being safe and not in need of improvements as long as drivers use it responsibly.

Carol Kelly, a spokeswoman for the CHP, called Santiago Canyon Road “problematic” and symbolic of the change taking place in Orange County: It’s a rural road suddenly overburdened by large numbers of suburbanites who use it “as a freeway,” which it was never intended to be.

Petersen said “adding lights every 50 feet might help.” Other residents say widening the road, which has been discussed but never approved, might help in some respects but also might tempt people to exceed the 55 mph speed limit even more than they already do.

“Knowing how most of those people drive,” said Hudson, the former resident, “they’ll just drive even faster . . . which, in the long run, will only make things worse. In the meantime, I wonder how many others will die.”

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Mainline to Mayhem

Rural Santiago Canyon Road, benignly marked on maps as county road S18 but known to some canyon dwellers as “the road of death,” has been the site of 29 deaths and more than 400 injuries in the last decade.

Roadway Toll

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Fatal Injury accidents Deaths accidents Injuries 1987 0 0 33 51 1988 2 2 23 34 1989 2 3 41 61 1990 2 2 27 44 1991 3 9 22 38 1992 2 2 34 44 1993 4 6 28 49 1994 2 2 31 46 1995 3 3 26 37 1996* 0 0 24 37

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* Through Sept. 30

Source: California Highway Patrol