Belmont Hazards Are Not Unique

After 10 years as an oil field hand, Ruben Sierra knows every tank, every pump, every abandoned well hidden away in backyards and alleys of the rundown neighborhood west of downtown Los Angeles where the aroma of crude oil hangs in the air like an omen.

And what he sees going on there today perplexes him.

There’s a massive new apartment complex rising directly atop an oil well Sierra worked only a dozen years ago. But just two blocks down the street, the Belmont Learning Complex, more than half completed, stands like a derelict, its construction on hold while the Board of Education weighs the potential environmental hazards to students.

“If it’s not all right to build Belmont, why is it all right to build this?” Sierra asks, pointing to an apartment.

It’s a simple but profound question.

The oil field responsible for the explosive methane and toxic hydrogen sulfide at the Belmont site extends for four miles in a band that contains 1,200 to 1,500 wells and stretches roughly east to west from Alameda Street in Chinatown to Vermont Avenue in Hollywood.

Sitting atop the field are thousands of residences, three hospitals and several schools--including the existing Belmont High, which the new complex is supposed to replace.

But although more than $2 million has been spent investigating hazards at the Belmont site--and tens of millions more would be spent to ensure its safety if the school were opened--virtually no investigations have been done to gauge the hazards at the other schools atop the oil field, or at the homes where the students who go to those schools live.

Instead, the school board members who are expected to decide on Belmont’s fate next month have pondered the proposed school in isolation.

Belmont supporters believe it is possible that if board members decide to pull the plug on the school, they could end up shutting the doors on a school that would have become a perilous neighborhood’s safest haven.

“That’s one of the perspectives that’s gotten lost here,” said a senior district official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s one of the troubling things about it: How this story got shaped like this.”

Conversely, some environmental activists and health activists would suggest that the discoveries at Belmont point in the opposite direction. If the Belmont site is hazardous, they say, perhaps many other buildings and construction sites in the neighborhood need more scrutiny.

What is missing in the debate is any agreement on what standard should apply for schools above the oil field. Indeed, since the hazards at the Belmont Learning Complex became public, the story of the school has been shaped less by analysis than by outrage.

When the project began, school officials never carefully assessed the site’s environmental problems or engaged the public in any discussion of how its risks compared with those elsewhere in the area. In fact, officials consciously neglected potentially life-threatening hazards.

When the public discovered that the project had become not only the nation’s most costly high school, but also a potentially dangerous one, Belmont became for many voters the symbol of everything wrong with the Los Angeles Unified School District’s giant central administration.

From that point on, one district official recently recalled, those at district headquarters felt the project was doomed.

Belmont became the dominant issue in school board elections this spring in which voters dumped two of the project’s stalwart supporters.

By the time district auditor Don Mullinax released a report on Sept. 14 that held nine senior district employees responsible for the fiasco, Belmont had few defenders.

But if the board does vote in the next few weeks to end the Belmont project, as is widely expected, Sierra’s question will still remain unanswered.

Charles Calderon, a former state senator and one of the members of a commission created earlier this year to advise the school district on Belmont, believes all the other risks in the neighborhood create a good argument for finishing the high school.

“If you evaluate what the reality is living and working and going to school in Los Angeles, that site is probably one of the safest sites in the entire district once the mitigation is installed,” he said.

“Kids coming to that high school from some of the middle schools, kids coming to that school from the existing Belmont will be safer.”

But David Beckman, another commission member and senior counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council, says adopting that position would only preserve an environmental injustice.

“If you allow a status quo in a community or neighborhood to become a benchmark, then you end up feeding into unequal environmental conditions,” he said. “You end up requiring facilities in areas that are less industrialized to be better than those in more industrialized or poor areas.”

The proper course, Beckman said, is for the district to find a new site that is not above an oil field and build a school free of any taint of risk. Moreover, he said, the district should check all the other schools above the oil field, and “if there are problems, they should be corrected in a prompt way.”

So far, however, the school board has never really grappled with the argument that Calderon and Beckman make, nor with the reality of the oil field, itself.

A striking study in potential risk can be drawn between the new Belmont and the current one, a mere two blocks away and home to about 4,600 students. Just like the campus intended to replace it, the current Belmont straddles the Los Angeles City Oil Field in an area packed with wells.

Oil field conditions are similar at the two campuses, but prevention measures are not.

Records indicate at least 14 wells have been drilled on the 35 acres taken up by the new Belmont Learning Complex. Most of those have been plugged up with concrete to keep dangerous gases from rising to the surface. The state Department of Toxic Substances Control has ordered an exhaustive search to find and properly plug the three or four wells still unaccounted for.

Mitigation prescribed for the Belmont project includes an impermeable barrier under all buildings and another barrier under the athletic field. Methane, hydrogen sulfide and other oil field gases would be drawn by blowers into collection pipes under the barriers and burned.

By contrast, there are six to eight wells on the campus of the current Belmont High School, oil and gas records indicate. None of them have been plugged in accordance with modern standards that date to the mid-1980s.

The fact that there has never been an oil-related incident at the campus does not mean there is no danger, said Angelo Bellomo of the district’s environmental safety team. In 1985, methane venting from below ground in the Fairfax district caught fire and burned for days, surprising property owners who had not known they faced a risk.

“I think the Fairfax incident told us all that we can’t simply say that on the basis that this has not been a problem for decades, this will not be a problem in the future,” Bellomo said.

Latent risks are pervasive at the Los Angeles City Oil Field, which is distinct from dozens of others in the county because of its shallowness and its age. Averaging about 600 feet below the surface, its pressurized crude oil and gases often push to the surface in basements and on sidewalks.

By contrast, the working well on the campus of Beverly Hills High school taps oil thousands of feet below the surface.

Most of the wells were drilled before state oversight was established in 1915, and each, especially those that were abandoned long ago, is a potential conduit to the surface for hazardous gases. The fact that there are up to 300 wells unaccounted for is one indication of the uncertainty in calculating hazards in the area.

Unlike the new Belmont site, where systematic efforts have been ordered to locate and plug every old well, neighborhoods of turn-of-the century homes and new apartment buildings just blocks from the school are dotted by ancient production equipment in various stages of disrepair, including leaky wells that no government agency routinely monitors.

Sierra, the former oil field hand, pointed out one example recently at the end of Angelina Street just across the street from the playground of Plasencia Elementary School and even closer to two apartment complexes under construction.

It was a stub of rusted pipe sticking about a foot out of the ground with no fence to keep the curious away. Through a hole in one side a vapor trail blew sideways about a foot, spreading smelly hydrocarbons into the air. The hydrocarbons shooting from the well could contain methane at explosive levels, or hydrogen sulfide. Nobody checks.

(After The Times reported the leaky well to authorities, the state Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources ordered the property owner to repair and fence it. The owner had purchased the land for development, but did nothing with the well while constructing an apartment complex on an adjacent lot, said Richard Baker, district deputy director of the division.)

Old pumps, some still working, some not, with their oily pipes and collection tanks present another type of hazard in backyards throughout the oil field. Fences, required by law, bar access to most of them, but some are wide open, inviting children into contact with rusted machinery and thick oil deposits. Leaking gases create an ever-present risk of fire.

Baker said his agency responds to complaints about leaky wells, but does not have the resources to find them all. Most are caught when a developer seeks a building permit.

Although these neighborhoods have never had a disaster to compare with the Fairfax-area fire, incident reports kept by the division show that the risks are not purely academic.

The reports include the discovery of unknown wells, oil and gas seepage into buildings, gas complaints, the discovery of wells under houses and an explosion in a Chinatown laundry.

The only known testing in the Los Angeles Oil Field was conducted by the state after the Fairfax fire. It found methane at 25 sites, six of them at levels that could pose a risk.

No continuing testing takes place at two of the hospitals located over the oil field, according to hospital facilities staff.

The Shriners Hospital for Crippled Children near Virgil and 3rd streets and the Pacific Alliance Medical Center in Chinatown conducted tests in the past and found no danger of methane, they said.

At Shriners Hospital, some buildings lie directly over several abandoned wells, facilities director Isaac Barukh said. The only problem the hospital has had is a sulfurous smell--usually a sign of hydrogen sulfide--in the main elevator. Barukh said a consultant tested the elevator and found it safe.

A spokesman for the third hospital located on the oil field, St. Vincent Medical Center, said he could not determine Wednesday whether testing had been done.

Under municipal code, new apartment buildings going up directly atop abandoned wells can be protected by a plastic membrane under the foundation and a venting system that collects dangerous seeping gases.

But the intense public scrutiny of Belmont has assured that if the school is completed, it will meet a higher standard.

The commission on which Calderon and Beckman served unanimously rejected passive gas venting and instead demanded blowers to pull methane out of the ground.

The contrast between the precautions deemed too little for Belmont and the lack of care elsewhere in the neighborhood strikes Calderon as a case of perception strong-arming reality.

“If that site had been characterized properly at the beginning, I firmly believe there would be kids at that high school today,” he said.

Howard Miller, the district’s chief operating officer who will soon make a recommendation to the board on how to handle Belmont, sees no simple answers.

“The people who are certain on either side of this don’t understand the complexity of the situation,” Miller said. “It’s a very troubling problem. I don’t find it easy either way.”

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Sitting Atop an Oil Field

The oil field hazards at the center of the debate over the Belmont Learning Complex are not unique to that 35-acre site. At least eight other schools, including the current Belmont High, and three hospitals lie atop the Los Angeles City Oil Field outlined below.

Sources: State of California Department of Conservation, Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources