Cova Study of Mission Canyon Questions Up-Canyon Development
It is not widely known that the UCSB Geography Department takes a serious interest in Mission Canyon, and has generated some interesting studies of our Canyon and its unique characteristics. In particular, Dr. Richard Church and his colleagues have authored a number of studies focusing on traffic flows within the Canyon during an emergency evacuation. These studies note that our Canyon has but two major corridors for an evacuation -- Mission Canyon/Tunnel Road and Cheltenham Road. These roadways and their feeder routes are narrow, winding, and bordered by stands of flammable brush. As the population density of the Canyon increases, the number of vehicles sharing these roadways increases proportionately, to the point where a safe and efficient emergency evacuation becomes problematic.
Prof. Cova, formerlly a colleague of Dr. Church, and now Associate Professor at the University of Utah, suggests in a recent publication that restraints on further development in our community, particularly in the up-Cayon area, need to be considered. Just as public buildings have safe occupancy limits established by fire and building codes, Mission Canyon has a "safe occupancy limit" itself. Fire-prone communities, he argues, cannot increase their population without correlatively providing a safe and orderly evacuation of that population under emergency conditions. In his paper "Public Safety in the Urban - Wildland Interface", Prof. Cova outlines a methodology for measuring evacuation efficiency in the face of increased development and population density within Mission Canyon and similar at-risk communities.