Children Must Come First at Belmont

The safety team and the public are being asked by those associated with the Belmont Learning Center fiasco to settle far short of a school construction safety policy that is desperately needed. The Belmont designers argue that the brouhaha over problems exposed by the safety team at Belmont is just environmental hype and that the original design to safeguard against the risks posed by methane and other dangerous gases is adequate, despite the existence of better, if not fail-safe, systems. They are dead wrong.

As lead member of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s school safety team and co-author of Proposition 65--the law requiring disclosure of the presence of chemicals known to cause cancer--I believe the school district has a fundamental duty to students and teachers to provide an unquestionably safe learning environment. For anyone to advocate acceptance of inadequate standards at schools, for cost or any other reason, is intolerable. To the contrary, as the district wrestles with building more than 100 schools in the next 10 years, it must establish a policy for school construction that demands the greatest protections, not the least. At the end of the day, no matter what an “outside” consultant may say, there is no substitute for the district’s own good judgment when it acts as guardian of the city’s children. This is precisely the good judgment being advocated by school board member Valerie Fields, who was singled out for criticism when she demanded better safety at Belmont. She should be applauded.

The children who would be students at the proposed Belmont school do not have the expertise to evaluate health risks nor do they have the choice of which school they attend. The Board of Education is required to make safety decisions for them based on a thorough evaluation of health risks. That is why the board has sought the involvement of the state Department of Toxic Substances Control in determining what level of protection is appropriate for Belmont.

The original Belmont consultants distorted the facts when they concluded that a student attending Belmont is 1,000 times more likely to get cancer from breathing Los Angeles air than from breathing Belmont soil gases. The fact is, the danger caused by the methane at Belmont is not based on breathing toxic fumes; it is based on the buildup of explosive gas concentrations. The presence of other toxic chemicals in the soil at the site also are a concern that must be addressed, but the issue driving the question of whether to abandon the Belmont project is how to adequately prevent the buildup of explosive gas beneath the site.

While it is correct that methane also is present at other locations in Los Angeles, the reasons why the situation is more dire at Belmont are: the highly faulted and fractured site geology, the presence of very shallow oil accumulations beneath the surface, the amount of area that will be paved, the ability of an endless source of methane to accumulate beneath this expansive area, and the concern that construction could affect the way gases have historically vented in the surrounding community. These factors present serious risks and engineering problems that are not easily addressed. Indeed, 14 years ago, a buildup of methane beneath a Ross Dress for Less store in the Park La Brea area caused a devastating explosion that injured more than 20 people. Because of the unique conditions at Belmont, it is unthinkable to put our children at risk.

The safety team and the state’s toxic substance control unit have firmly ratified the need for a much better system. Belmont, and the hundreds of schools to be built in the future, must be unassailable from a standpoint of public safety. The old way of “settling short” in order to build “hurriedly” must now be replaced by sensible policy that assures that the health and safety of children and teachers are the first priority. Any other approach would be an abdication of the district’s vital role as guardian of a safe education for our children.