“Our latest thinking is centered on making the path as low as possible and having easy ingress-egress to it so no one feels ‘trapped’ ,” Marty Adams, DWP’s director of water operations at the Silver Lake and Ivanhoe reservoirs, explained to The Silver Lake Reservoirs Conservancy, the neighborhood citizens group that has worked to enhance public access to the reservoir property for the last 20 years.

Adams said the key to the new Tesla path design is getting approval from the California Department of Dam Safety to use a small portion of the Ivanhoe Reservoir retaining wall for the walkway. If and when permission is granted, Adams says, a new path design for Tesla could be drawn within weeks and construction could be completed in a matter of months.

Earlier this year the Department of Water and Power built a small mock-up of a proposed 550-foot long elevated boardwalk on the north end of the Ivanhoe Reservoir along Tesla between Armstrong Avenue and West Silver Lake Drive. The structure would have closed the final gap in the popular pedestrian path and taken the thousands of walkers and joggers out of the street as they make their loop of the reservoirs. However, as soon as the demonstration piece was erected, residents began voicing doubts that the boardwalk would be much safer than walking along oncoming traffic on narrow Tesla Avenue. Specific complaints centered on the six-foot height of the structure; concerns that at just eight-feet in width, it was too narrow to accommodate all the traffic it would have to carry; and that with just a single ingress and egress at each end, pedestrians could feel trapped above the street in the event of an emergency.

The complaints sparked both Council Tom LaBonge, a supporter of the pedestrian path for many years, and the DWP to re-consider the elevated boardwalk-style design. LaBonge had originally supported the boardwalk as a way to complete the pedestrian path and to alleviate the safety issues posed by the pedestrians being forced onto a municipal street in the middle of their walk or jog.

However, the challenge is to find enough space for a pathway entirely separate from the traffic along Tesla because the dam wall restraining the Ivanhoe Reservoir slopes directly into the narrow street that already carries two-way auto traffic along with the pedestrians looping the reservoirs. Then the DWP’s Adams spotted a possibility.

“We believe it is possible to get permission from the state to make a small notch in the dam at street level that we can reinforce with a retaining structure,” he said, adding that it could be a block wall or something else about two- to three-fee high. The, he said, “a standard concrete curb” could be constructed along the street, allowing the area between the curb and wall to be filled with decomposed granite and used as the walking path.

“This effectively creates a completion of the DG path around the reservoir, but it makes it like a standard height sidewalk all along the base of the dam along Tesla.  There would be no elevated portions and no railings,” Adams explained. “We would work to make the path as wide as possible, but it may get closer to standard sidewalk with in the middle near Rokeby where the dam is the steepest.”  
 “ All of this hinges on the state accepting our engineering on the cut and reinforcement, but we think it is possible,” Adams said, adding that the DWP is already working on plans for the new design.

We did, however, lose some data. All the news for 2010 was lost, and our blog was also lost.

We will be recreating the news for 2010, and the blog will be started afresh.

I personally want to thank everyone for their patience in getting the site back on the road to recovery.