City Appeals Its Own Approval Of Civic Center Way Rebuild – Culvert Collapse Temporarily Fixed
Written by 991KBU on January 27, 2020
And here is something you don’t see every day.
The City of malibu’s approval of plans to reconstruct Civic Center Way have been appealed … by the City of malibu.
The city manager wants the city council to review the plan … already approved by the Planning Commission … to rebuild the road.
This comes after some residents in the condos raised last minute objections to the new roadway design.
And it comes as the city dealt with the partial collapse of a huge culvert under the road … last Friday.
The 70-year-old pipe supporting the road is rotten and was already scheduled to be replaced as part of the road widening project.
City contract crews were back working Saturday morning at the culvert collapse on Civic Center Way, and the road was again blocked from just east of the traffic light at the school to the top of the hill by the condos.
City councilman Jefferson Wagner Friday night told a reporter there that the 8-foot-diameter steel culvert – more than 70 years old – “has compressed from being round to more like egg-shaped.
Feldman told KBUU the repairs will not take long. “We got this,” Feldman said from the scene Saturday morning.
On the uphill side, the eight-foot-diameter pipe connects to a pair of concrete funnels, Wagner said, after hiking up the conduits Friday night. One goes under Webster School and the adjacent, old county sewage plant, the other goes under nearby condominiums.
Neither concrete channel is in danger – only the old, round, metal conduit pipe directly under Civic Center Way.
Downhill from the pipe, water is channeled into the canyon barranca for a few dozen feet, then it goes under PCH and the Ralphs supermarket to the beach.
The new city sewer plant is not affected, either.
The old pipe was apparently part of the original 1951 construction of Malibu Canyon Road, which was built by county jail inmates. The rock work at the outfall matches the rock work up the canyon.
Although L.A. County still is in charge of some flood control structures in Malibu, the pipe under a city street falls to the city to maintain.
This is the third culvert failure in city history.
Kanan-Dume Road was closed for nearly two years when a culvert failed just inside the city limits, just after the city incorporated about 25 years ago.
And a section of Fernhill Drive was closed more than a decade ago, as a culvert failed in a barranca between Boniface Drive and Grayfox Street.
