MTA Delays Decision on Valley Tunnel : Transportation: At raucous meeting, the board postpones decision on condemning ground beneath homes, citing concerns about proposed use of explosives.

For the fourth time in six months, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority Board of Directors on Wednesday postponed its decision on whether to condemn underground easements beneath Studio City and Hollywood Hills homes for a subway tunnel through the Santa Monica Mountains after a raucous hearing marked by emotional appeals and accusations.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, an MTA board member whose legislative district includes the hillside communities, called for the vote delay after declaring his “profound disappointment” with analysis by the agency’s staff of such tunnel construction issues as the need for 14 months of explosives work and the possibility that tunneling would drain 25 million gallons of water per day from the mountains.

Following his lead, fellow Supervisor Mike Antonovich called for a moratorium on tunneling in the mountains and North Hollywood until the safety record of tunneling contractor Traylor Bros./Frontier-Kemper is explored and a new environmental impact report on the water issue is completed.

“A decision to move forward with the forced taking of easements beneath homes . . . is potentially another safety and financial boondoggle . . . that can be avoided by careful forethought,” said Antonovich, a longtime critic of the Metro Red Line who prefers light-rail lines to subways.

Antonovich’s motion failed after MTA construction executive Stanley Phernambucq reported that the agency would have to pay $6 million a month to idle contractors if it stopped tunneling immediately.

In question are twin 2.6-mile tunnels that would connect a Red Line station in Hollywood with a station across the street from Universal Studios in Studio City. The Indiana-based tunneling contractor Traylor Bros. has already completed an 80-foot-deep shaft in the San Fernando Valley, and plans to lower two tunnel-boring machines into it next month.

The boring machines would excavate the tunnel over the next two years, but the MTA contract calls for vast underground equipment rooms and small track crossovers to be created with blasts of emulsion-gel explosives.

Only 24 of 92 homeowners who were offered $1,000 to $2,000 for easements 200 to 900 feet below their properties have accepted the MTA’s offer. Many others--and about 100 other supporters--rallied outside MTA headquarters under the leadership of state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) on Wednesday, then peppered the meeting with passionate speeches.

“In the next earthquake, we’ll have a hole in the mountains and we’ll all go down,” said actress Sally Kellerman, a Hollywood Hills resident.

During a break in the hearing, Phernambucq dismissed homeowners’ and politicians’ responses as “construction hypochondria.”

“Whenever people hear the word ‘construction,’ they complain,” he said.

Yaroslavsky said he found homeowners’ complaints reasonable after meeting with them and three international tunneling experts for three hours Tuesday afternoon.

He said the experts, who last month presented the board with a report declaring Los Angeles safe for tunneling, have proposed ways for the MTA’s contractor to minimize the use of explosives.

“The fact that we have to bring in someone from Alberta, Canada, for this information is an outrage,” Yaroslavsky said.

That specialist, University of Alberta civil engineering professor Dan Eisenstein, suggested that Traylor Bros. use grinding machines called road headers and even laborers swinging rock picks instead of the explosives proposed in its $136-million contract.

The contractor recently had to scrap a controversial plan to store 10,000 pounds of explosives at a time in a tunnel under La Brea Boulevard after Cal/OSHA mining safety engineers said the plan violated state rules.

Phernambucq privately said that his department gets “blasted all the time for spending too much money--pun intended.”

He said his staff had examined the use of road headers and hand-mining techniques and would order their use if the MTA decreed.

“We’re not cowboys, we’re not bad guys,” he said. “We are public servants who just do what the board wants.”

The next scheduled vote on the easements is in January.