| |
Retaining Walls
The road footprint will occupy far more than the 400 acres estimated by the study team. They have optimistically calculated they can limit the footprint by constructing retaining walls where cuts and fills extend more than 100 feet from the roadway. The steep terrain will make such walls common, and we do not believe walls high enough can be constructed using known construction techniques. Walls will cause two obvious impacts. One, they will destroy beauty. As seen from a distance, they will delineate and emphasize the road scar. They will not support any masking vegetation. They will block views from the road. Of equal if not greater importance is that walls are barriers. They channel movement of species that are fleet of foot, but they cut off all other species. In addition to the barrier created by a paved road surface, walls create far greater obstacles to plant and animal movement. The road corridor becomes a hardened canal — a great wall that excludes movement to and from each side.
One of the key complaints about Highway 321 is the negative impact that the retaining walls have on both the aesthetics of the area and on wildlife migration routes. Regarding the North Shore Road , NPS has acknowledged in past policy statements that “the road would cross-successive ridges in an area containing crumbling, faulted, and unstable rock which would require extensive cuts and fills.” These types of cuts and fills would leave a massive, permanent scar on the slopes north of Fontana Lake in addition to the huge retaining walls that would be needed. Likewise, the walls would act as massive barriers to wildlife through this portion of the park. NPS must fully address this impairment of the beauty of the North Shore Road study area and the impacts on wildlife migration.
|
|
