Jurisdictions Disagree on Schoolyard Oil Line : Utilities: Neither San Fernando nor Los Angeles will take the quake-damaged pipe that Arco wants realigned.

If the Northridge earthquake had happened a few hours later in the morning, on any Monday other than the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, scores of children would have been arriving at O’Melveny Elementary School in San Fernando.

They would have greeted rivers of crude oil spewing from a fractured pipeline on Wolfskill Street--rivers that later ignited, seriously burning a man, charring a house and 17 cars, and terrifying an entire neighborhood.

To say that public officials now are unanimous in wanting to move a segment of that same pipeline from beneath the school playground is to understate the obvious. Even the owner, the Arco Oil subsidiary Four Corners Pipeline Co., wants to realign the pipe and replace its aging segments and archaic welds.

Yet, it seems no one can say where, how, when--or even if--the line will be moved.

“If we don’t come to an agreement, it’s going to be major lawsuits coming from all over the place,” Los Angeles Board of Education President Leticia Quezada warned Thursday. “It’s in the interest of everyone involved to come to an agreement.”

Agreement, however, appears to be a long way off. Officials in San Fernando, where the school is situated, don’t want to move the pipe anywhere else inside their city--even though they already have almost a mile-long segment of it under their streets.

Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alarcon doesn’t want it moved into his district, which surrounds San Fernando and borders the school, and which also already hosts a segment of the line.

“It would take a major modification of the city’s franchise with Arco to move the line,” Alarcon said Thursday. “What I am saying is I will not support a new franchise agreement.”

If neither side budges, though, the line will stay where it is, and oil can begin to flow again once Four Corners repairs and tests the line, state regulators say.

“We only regulate the safety of the pipeline once it’s operating,” said Nancy Wolfe, chief of the state fire marshal’s Pipeline Safety Division. “So, on issues of where the pipeline is located, we have to be mute.”

The state Public Utilities Commission, which regulates some aspects of oil pipelines, also may remain mute. “The one thing we don’t have jurisdiction for specifically, like we do for natural gas lines, is the safety of oil pipelines,” said Martha Sullivan, a regulatory analyst for the commission.

The 130-mile pipeline, which links Kern County oil fields to South Bay refineries, travels south along O’Melveny Street in San Fernando before hooking west on Wolfskill Street and back into Los Angeles.

Installed in the early 1920s, the pipeline predates the school by more than 20 years. San Fernando has had franchise agreements allowing the oil to flow since 1924, according to public records. The city of Los Angeles has had similar accords governing the segment traversing its territory.

Unbeknown to officials at the time, the Los Angeles Unified School District inherited the pipe in 1949, when it got the city of San Fernando to vacate a segment of O’Melveny Street so it could be incorporated into the school’s playground, Quezada said.

When they found out about the line, school officials granted an easement to Arco in return for getting the company to bury the pipe deeper, she said.

To this day, San Fernando claims its franchise agreement doesn’t govern the schoolyard. But school officials say they don’t have jurisdiction either.

“The school district has no franchise authority over the pipeline that runs underneath the playground,” said Bradley R. Hogin, a school board attorney. “The city (of San Fernando) has the only authority. It has the franchise for the entire part of the line within its boundaries.”

Concerned over the age of the pipe and whether gasoline could be shipped through it, San Fernando never renewed the Four Corners franchise when it expired in 1989. It has let Four Corners continue the flow until it could negotiate another agreement.

Even if San Fernando and Four Corners never sign a new franchise, it remains to be seen whether the city can stem the oil flow.

“I have a feeling that in the end we’ll find out we can’t stop them even if we want to,” San Fernando City Administrator Mary Strenn said Thursday.

Because it is governed by rules similar to those applying to power lines and natural gas pipes, Four Corners could resort to eminent domain proceedings to ensure unimpeded flow of oil to South Bay refineries, Four Corners’ Vice President Daniel C. Reyneveld told a community meeting in San Fernando Wednesday night.

But even that issue also is not clear, Arco spokesman Scott Loll said Thursday. “It’s so complicated that we can’t define it yet, either,” he said. “We just don’t have the definitive answers yet.”

Neither do the 150 parents who crowded the O’Melveny School auditorium to hear public and pipeline officials address the issue Wednesday night.

“My concern is I don’t want the pipeline at all,” said Marisela Torres, whose nieces and nephews attend O’Melveny. “I think we should find another way to route this oil. We are a small town, but I think we should show that we don’t want the pipeline in our schools or in our cities.”