Face It, School Board Should Never, Ever Open Belmont

Los Angeles occasionally serves up moments of great civic irony. We were treated to a nifty example of this last week as three departing members of the Los Angeles school board, all garroted by the voters in the last election, spent their final meeting listening to a recitation of the horror they have left as a bye-bye present for incoming members.

That horror, of course, is the $200-million Belmont Learning Center, the half-finished downtown high school now usually described as the-most-expensive-high-school-in-the-nation and, without doubt, the grandest fiasco in school district history. The recitation came from Angelo Bellomo, the district’s environmental scientist, who ticked off the various petroleum contaminants in the soil underneath Belmont that may render it uninhabitable by students.

As all the world now seems to know, the school board voted to build the incredibly expensive Belmont center on a field filled with abandoned oil wells. The board members knew it was an oil field. They were warned of the dangers. They did it anyway.

The idea at the time, which seems beyond belief at this point, was to build first and ask questions about contamination later. If problems came up, they would “deal with it.” This on a site where you can stand and smell the various gases wafting out of the ground. Where black ooze sometimes squirts to the surface.

The grocery list of toxic threats recited by Bellomo, in fact, had a ho-hum quality because they are exactly what anyone would expect from a retired oil field. You’ve got benzene, a high-order carcinogen and component of crude oil; acetone, a flammable oil product; a family of vapors known as polyaromatic hydrocarbons that evaporate from crude oil. And, finally, another by-product of crude oil, the explosive gas methane.

In other words, the school board located its grand school on a site that could give the students cancer, eat up their livers and explode underneath them. As Bellomo put it diplomatically in his presentation, it’s not a site he would have picked.

The three departures from the board leave only one member remaining who voted yes to the Belmont project. That’s board president Victoria Castro, certainly the school’s greatest champion and faithful lobbyist. She and the other members will now be faced with one of the ugliest choices in recent times: Close down the school and eat the $170 million already invested, or send the kids to the school anyway in the hope that a perpetual cleanup will keep them safe.

Actually, a sane argument exists for the latter course. Defunct oil fields are common in Los Angeles, this argument goes, and many people have coexisted with these fields for decades. Much of the Miracle Mile and Fairfax districts, for example, stand on top of retired oil fields.

A sane argument, but it won’t wash. First, it ignores the modern reality that sending school kids into a potentially carcinogenic environment amounts to begging for lawsuits. Second, it ignores the O-ring scenario.

Simply put, this school can blow up. From month to month, or year to year, the risk of an explosion will be low. But it will never go away. And, unless the district’s safety record is perfect over a period of 50 years or more, eventually we could see a repeat of the event that destroyed the Ross Dress for Less store in the Fairfax district 15 years ago.

The Ross structure had stood on its site for several decades without incident. Then, on a quiet Sunday afternoon in 1985, a fireball ripped it apart. Cars were incinerated on the street and windows were shattered as far as three blocks away. Twenty-three persons were hospitalized with injuries and burns.

The culprit was methane. Slowly it had crept into the building from old petroleum deposits, accumulating in a back room. And there it waited for a spark.

The fire following the explosion burned for several days, fed by dozens of fissures carrying gas to the surface. Businesses around the store were closed for more than a week. If you lived in Los Angeles at the time, you may recall that this explosion was the reason subway routes were redirected around the Fairfax and Miracle Mile neighborhoods. Even the MTA, you see, had the good sense not to run electric trains, which produce many sparks, through underground formations oozing with methane.

In any case, the Ross explosion was a big deal, as was the debate over rerouting the subway. Did these events ever play a part in the discussion over the Belmont site? Not to my knowledge. The board members who voted for Belmont seem to have turned off their televisions in 1985, stopped reading newspapers, disconnected their car radios. Board president Castro even wrote a 1996 letter to this newspaper about the Belmont project that said: “There is no inherent danger in building a school near an oil field.”

Actually, Belmont sits on an oil field, not near one, but I won’t quibble. Here’s what Bellomo’s safety team now recommends as precautions against the dangers whose very existence were denied by Castro:

* Dig up the entire open space on the 36-acre site and install a thick plastic membrane to stop upward migration of the gases and the ooze.

* Build elaborate methane collection systems and put buffer zones under buildings not yet constructed. In existing buildings, consider abandoning the first floor to human habitation.

* Hire an engineering firm to manage the safety systems and monitor the site day and night for the life of the school.

You can almost hear the unspoken, last line: And never, ever screw up.

Will the new majority on the school board gamble that the district will never screw up over the 50-year life of the school? Apparently not. The image of fireballs and sudden death tends to get your attention.

Still, if they go the other way, what becomes of the half-built monster? No one knows, but last week someone suggested that district officials use it for their own headquarters. Someone else suggested that the Los Angeles City Council might be interested.

Or, failing those, maybe we could convert it to a rest home for retired school board members.

It all depends on who you love the most.