NEW FOIA RECORD: SWEETWATER ROAD COULD BE BURIED AND MADE IMPASSABLE

Thank you for standing with us. Our efforts are bringing critical information into public view.

“Landslides and debris flows downstream from the park could damage or bury the county road and make it impassable.” — Houck report, p. 14

In response to our Freedom of Information Act request, the U.S. Forest Service produced and publicly posted Karen Houck’s December 2023 report, Geologic Hazards at the Sweetwater Lake Property on August 4. 

The report also finds:

• Landslides and debris flows are numerous, and some are active.
• Upstream landslides and debris flows could block drainages and cause “catastrophic flooding.”
• Hazards adjacent to or inside the property could destroy infrastructure and cause “loss of life.”
• Hazards outside the property boundary were not field-checked, and additional hazards may threaten the property and entrance road.
• The report documents fallen rocks along the entrance road immediately outside the property boundary.

Read the full Houck report here.

These findings confirm that Sweetwater Road is not merely narrow, winding and congested—it is a single point of failure that identified natural hazards could physically block.

Although the Draft EIS cites Houck, it does not reproduce this road-closure warning or determine whether visitors, residents and employees could evacuate before the only road becomes impassable. The Draft EIS calls the project the “terminus of a dead-end road,” yet contains no route-specific evacuation-time, road-blockage, opposing emergency-traffic or secondary-egress analysis. Instead, an Emergency Response and Evacuation Plan would only be prepared later as a condition of the future special-use permit.

That is too late. An emergency plan written after project approval cannot establish that evacuation is physically possible.

Before approving additional development and tens of thousands of annual visits, the Forest Service must complete and publicly disclose a corridor-wide, all-hazards evacuation analysis—and provide a physically independent secondary egress route.

Please keep sharing this petition. Send it to at least three friends, neighbors or organizations today and ask them to sign and share it again. Help us reach 1,000 signatures and make certain the decision-makers cannot say they were never warned.

No dual egress, no development!