Safety Issues at Belmont Site

There may have been good reasons for having abandoned the Belmont Learning Complex, but many affected parties, including parents, teachers and students, have been correct in their belief that safety of the site was not one of them. None of the claims for methane explosive hazards--the principal safety issue--presented to the district’s safety review commission in its late-stage hearings was backed by credible scientific support. Most of the testimony on the safety matter was by union representatives, politicians, etc., all of it presented to a commission from which experience and judgment on the scientific aspects of the problem seem to have been systematically excluded.

It is necessary to question the final dependence of school authorities on the advisory capacity of state agencies with a spotty past record of enforcing sensible precautions in urban oil fields, such as the Inglewood and Salt Lake fields, where hazardous illegal operations, including unreported high-pressure waste injection operations, resulted in real safety problems, such as the 1963 failure of the Baldwin Hills Reservoir and the 1985 Fairfax gas explosion. Even if such activities were to have occurred at the Belmont site--unlikely in view of the age and condition of the oil field in the vicinity of the school--standard precautions planned at the school site would have assured safety and allowed this important facility to proceed on schedule.

The greater hazard to the Los Angeles students appears to be political gas, not methane.

RICHARD L. MEEHAN

Adjunct Prof. of Civil Engineering

MIT and Stanford University

Menlo Park, Calif.

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Re “Alternatives to Belmont Site Have Problems of Their Own,” Jan. 27: Why is it that we have space for a Home Depot on every corner of this city but no place to build a school?

RANDALL R. BRUCE

Los Angeles