Look Beyond Belmont Hysteria

As a professional civil engineer who has worked on thousands of commercial, industrial, school and residential sites, including the Belmont Learning Complex, I have read with great interest the opinions of so-called experts who would have the public believe that Belmont is an environmental crisis, a time bomb waiting to explode. The school, which is situated on an old oil field, presented us with engineering challenges, but we have met them. There is no danger from toxics left behind from oil production or even from the gas stations and auto body shop that once occupied the site.

Will Rogers, America’s great humorist said, “All I know is what I read in the newspapers.” These days, the newspapers suggest that the Belmont Learning Complex, which is built on a former oil field with pervasive methane and other soil gases, is going to cost millions of dollars to clean up. But is it?

Adding to the hype and hysteria are comments from people like school board member Valerie Fields, who said, “I know I would not work there and permit my grandchildren to go to school at that site.” Using this logic, Fields would never take her grandchildren to visit places like the Los Angeles Central Library or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The soil gas conditions beneath Belmont do not stop at the property line. They are prevalent in neighborhoods throughout Southern California. In fact, Fields and others who are fearful of Belmont should stay away from Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Marina del Rey and much of the coast from Newport Beach to Santa Barbara.

Using the findings of the school’s safety team, a student attending the Belmont Learning Complex is 1,000 times more likely to get cancer from breathing Los Angeles air than from breathing Belmont soil gas, even if no mitigation is installed at the school.

The safety team originally indicated that while methane gas was a potential concern at the school site, that was a side issue, and that toxics in the soil at Belmont were its real concern. Now that the safety team’s own findings show that there are no toxic problems in the soil at the site, it has found a new scare tactic: suggesting potential problems with the oil field that it says require more tests. When will this environmental wild-goose chase end? How many more millions of taxpayers dollars is the school district going to waste on unnecessary “environmental” testing?

Equally disturbing is the total disregard for the families living in the Belmont neighborhood. If a new building like Belmont, which is properly protected and the safest building for miles around, would need to be demolished, then what does that tell us we need to do with all of the existing buildings in the neighborhood that are not protected? Why shouldn’t we demolish other school and government facilities throughout the city where similar soil gas conditions prevail under existing unprotected structures?

Because of overcrowding at the existing Belmont High School campus, thousands of students spend several hours on buses commuting to out-of-area schools. The opening of the Belmont Learning Complex will mark the beginning of a time when the only bus a student boards during the school year is for a class field trip. This high school, which has been in the planning stages since the early 1980s, culminates more than a decade of community and district planning and outreach.

For the people working on the school, the focus has always been on the health and safety of prospective students and staff. Logic and the scientific facts indicate that it is irresponsible to demolish the Belmont Learning Complex. When allowed to be completed, there will be no safer school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. If not allowed to be finished, the site will inevitably be successfully developed to some other very desirable private use. And this school board will be long-remembered as having given away the crown jewel of the LAUSD system.