The SCV roads less traveled

The Santa Clarita Valley has neighborhoods with streets named for flowers (Canyon Country), famous writers (Stevenson Ranch) and tycoons (Valencia Industrial Park).

Then there’s the area where roads are named for things that blow up, burn or contaminate.

But it’s not likely you’ll accidentally find yourself on Reject Ridge or Fireworks, Photoflash or Flare roads.

Despite what Google Maps says (just three miles from The Signal’s offices on Creekside Road to the corner of Photoflash and Azide roads), you can’t get there from here. “Here” being anywhere in the SCV.

(Azide, by the way, is a component of the colorless salt used to blow up many automotive air bags.)

The main access road to this dangerous-sounding neighborhood, Bermite Road off the Santa Clarita Metrolink Station parking lot, is

closed to the public. And the colorfully named dirt roads that take drivers to destinations like Burn Valley on the nearly 1,000-acre Whittaker-Bermite brownfield south of the Metrolink station aren’t as easily reached as, say, the corner of Poe Parkway and Hemingway Avenue in Stevenson Ranch.

(Burn Valley is a profoundly contaminated area where explosives were set off during the approximately 50 years that the Bermite Powder Company, and later Whittaker-Bermite, operated a munitions plant on the land that is now in the center of Santa Clarita.)

No one seems to know how Google Maps acquired the names apparently assigned by generations of workers at the munitions and fireworks plant. The global mapping giant was emailed questions about how the intersection of Jato and Azide roads wound up on the map along with more benign-sounding intersections like Daisy Meadow Street and Abelia Road in Canyon Country.

Google Maps spokeswoman Elizabeth Davidoff told The Signal: “All map edits or additions are made by either user contribution or obtained through one of the 1,000-plus sources we use, including public and commercial mapping data.”

(“Jato Road” is apparently named for the acronym for “jet-assisted takeoff,” shorthand for the auxiliary power unit that boosts overloaded planes by providing extra rocket power. Rocket fuel from the Whittaker-Bermite site is blamed for the perchlorate contamination in groundwater under the site.)

The contaminated property is being cleaned up under the supervision of the California Department of Toxic Substances Control, and Jose Diaz of DTSC periodically updates interested residents.

Participants find names like Squib Street (a small firework that hisses while burning before it blows up) useful in referencing areas of the sprawling property.

Asked if he thinks the names will stick once the cleanup is complete, Diaz said he sincerely hopes not.