Bill Hocker | Dec 6, 2017

It is worth re-reading this very prescient Register letter-to-the-editor by Yeoryios Apallas published 3 days before the Oct 8th fire in response to a previous fire on Soda Canyon Road:

NVR LTE 10/5/17: Soda Canyon fire was wake-up call

In the first hours of the Oct 8th fire, a fallen tree backed up fleeing traffic on the road, with burning hillsides all around, until a couple of trucks were able to pull the tree enough to allow passage. It could very well have been a major disaster.

Residents know of and accept the dangers of the road as the price of living in such a desirably remote place. Many residents on the road lived through the 1981 fire. The County, however, as we attempted to present in much testimony and many documents during the Planning Commission and BOS Appeal hearings for the Mountain Peak project, has a more substantial responsibility to insure that commercial users of the road are not put in harms way. In that respect the Supervisors, in approving a large tourism facility at the end of the road, with numerous dangers and access constraints, have abrogated that responsibility.

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