Plan to Rebuild Freeway Challenged : Courts: Project would replace roadway destroyed in 1989 Loma Prieta quake. Suit claims 7,000 residents, many of them poor, would face new health hazards.

Raising claims of environmental discrimination, residents of a mainly minority community here filed suit Tuesday challenging plans for rebuilding the freeway that collapsed during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

The proposed project, set to break ground next year, would route a six-lane, $700-million freeway through West Oakland to replace the Cypress Freeway, the double-deck structure that turned to rubble during the massive temblor, which killed 42 people.

The suit, filed in federal district court in San Francisco, charges that the project will expose about 7,000 residents to excessive noise and high levels of carbon monoxide, ozone, lead and other pollutants, endangering health, lowering property values, and decimating nearby parks and churches.

“Why is it that when there’s something ugly, something polluting, something that no one wants in their back yard, it’s communities like West Oakland . . . that are so often looked to?” Kirsten D. Levingston of Los Angeles, an attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, asked at a news conference.

Lawyers said the suit is part of a new wave of “environmental justice” suits around the country in which legal strategies historically used to counter job and housing bias are being used to attack programs with disproportionate impact on the environment of minority communities.

“In effect, it’s a marriage of the Civil Rights Act to environmental laws,” said James R. Wheaton, president of the Environmental Law Foundation. “Rather than dealing mainly with economic impacts, we’re dealing with environmental impacts.”

The freeway, which handled 165,000 vehicles a day before the quake, would restore the most direct access for motorists between western Alameda County and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

After the collapse, officials agreed to move the route farther west from the West Oakland neighborhoods it bisected, but they eventually decided not to avoid residential areas altogether.

The suit names federal and state transportation agencies as defendants, charging that officials failed to assess the impact of the project on the community and to fully consider less harmful alternatives.

The plaintiffs allege violations of federal clean air, transportation and environmental policy acts and of federal civil rights laws barring government funding of discriminatory programs. The suit seeks a court order prohibiting further development of the mostly federal-funded project and requiring reconsideration of alternative routes.

Jim Drago, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation, declined comment on the specific charges in the suit but said officials had taken numerous steps to get the public’s views in the route selection process.

“The alternative that was chosen was the outgrowth of that public comment,” Drago said. “What we were faced with was meeting a transportation need and taking into account the wishes of the community, the city and everyone else involved.”

Assistant U.S. Atty. Frank Boone, who will represent the federal defendants in the case, declined comment pending study of the suit.

The plaintiffs, attorneys and their supporters described the suit to reporters Tuesday at the Church of the Living God Faith Tabernacle, a 40-year-old institution they said is situated about 50 feet from the proposed freeway route and would be virtually unusable for worship for its all-black, 140-member congregation.

Opponents said the project would displace 44 homes and a dozen local businesses, including Esther’s Orbit Room, a nightclub where Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Little Richard and others have performed.

Nearly 7,000 residents live close to the proposed route, with perhaps twice that many residents living farther away but likely to feel some adverse effects, they said. Other alternatives--such as widening other freeways in the area--could prove less harmful and less expensive, the opponents maintained.

“West Oakland is a beautiful place,” said Renee Morrison, who was born and raised in the community. “But if this freeway goes through, you won’t be able to open your front door without all the pollution and dirt coming in.”