[Post reconstructed after 25.10.07 hack]:
My first reaction was one of dismay mixed with amusement:
(Taken from the Griffith Park Observatory. Click for larger view.)
Surely the solution to the brown 800-plus acre scar in the landscape that was once a lot of greenery in Griffith Park visible from all over the city, after much debate about what to do to re-seed vegetation after the devastating fire, was not to … paint the park green!!??? (A spectacularly unreal shade of green too.) It would be just too “Hollywood” a solution to paint the very mountain called Mount Hollywood (peak to the left just out of view).
So I am assuming that there is some valuable and botanically relevant content to this green stuff that I saw being dumped by the helicopters on a Sunday Morning hike. If anyone knows, let us know. I’ve been too preoccupied with work matters today to do a search of the blogs to find out what’s up. I’ve faith in the good sense of the many thinking about the park to trust that there’s much more to this than the colour green. I’ll update this post when I learn more.
Don’t hesitate to share anything you know about this…
[Update: Apparently it’s “hydromulch”. Erosion control, they hope. I remember seeing some of this weird green stuff on mud patches in Aspen earlier this year. Very odd that they couldn’t find a better green.]
[Update #2: Happily, the weird green seems to fade after about a week to a green that is… less weird.]
[Update #3: Mention of some more information can now be found at the Griffith Park Recovery blog here.]
-cvj
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Also, ccp… For what it’s worth: It was not done on Monday…. I saw this on Sunday (as is also clearly mentioned in the post – you seem to have missed that too) and stood there for a while and took the picture. And i believe they’d been at it since before Sunday, and since Monday. Do have a read of the link I gave in the update (that I think you must also have missed).
Cheers,
-cvj
ccp:- If you actually read the post without pre-judgment, you’ll see that it began with humour and then I asked for information and discussion, and acknowledged that it was probably something being done for the right reasons. In fact I did look up hydromulch, and others added to the discussion too.
The only snarkiness that came is that which you brought.
Thanks so much for the information.
-cvj
You know, it’s one thing to be snarky about stuff like this, but it’s much better to be scientific about this and actually like, you know, look up hydromulching and hydroseeding and find out what it’s really about. I was actually up at Griffith the day they did this (Monday).
Yes, the material is colored to be able to see where it has been done and where it hasn’t been done. It’s quite common to do this in areas where vegetation has been burned or damaged, particularly on steep slopes where the next rain would simply wash the seeds away. The color has nothing to do with being “eco†or trying to be cute or cool; it’s a way to see the material you’re laying down.
I lived in the West for quite a long time and hydroseeding such as what you saw at Griffith Park is quite common and is, in fact, usually the ONLY way that damaged hillsides can be recovered. Doing it by helicopter is actually about the only way you can do it and make sure that all affected areas are seeded properly. Nothing mysterious or new age or weird about it.
I have to say when I saw this picture I first checked that it wasn’t April 1st (I get easily confused by time here, it’s always sunny!) because it frankly looks like a bad photoshop job.
When I saw the picture, I thought it was grass seed. Farmers often add dyes to the stuff they spray on land so they can tell where they’ve already gone.
Doing it by helicopter seems excessive, but it seems that they use helicopters for this sort of thing regularly.
In the leadup to the Sydney olympics, they painted the grass for the soccer prelims in Canberra stadium green.
Evidently in order to upgrade the field from rugby to soccer, they needed to returf it, and they imported subtropical turf to Canberra in the middle of winter- thus creating brown grass a few hard frosts later.
The olympic officials were not too impressed.
That stuff goes down all over the place at Cornell every spring as they try to revive the vegetation along the side walks that they killed with their excessive salt all winter.
After a few good rains it goes away.
As for the color, I assumed that was a marker to tell where they had put it….
Totally agree. erosion is bad. No argument there.
-cvj
When I lived in Phoenix one winter, a bank actually *did* spray paint the grass green. It fit with my view of Phoenix as a plastic, artificial place. I’ve seen this mulch used a lot around arid western Colorado, perhaps because of our last 20 years of too many fires. If you hike up to Storm King Mountain next time you’re in Colorado (the site where 14 firefighters died 13 years ago), you’ll see an odd mix of plants that they reseeded the area with–a sagebrush, a legume, and some grass or other. Before they reseeded it, we had a huge mudslide that closed Interstate 70. After the reseeded it, we had a minor mudslide. Anything that helps prevent erosion, no matter the strange shade of green, is a good idea.