School District Studying Geology Lesson

Los Angeles school officials pledged Thursday to step up their geological reviews of more than 100 proposed campuses to avoid the mistakes that now threaten the Belmont Learning Complex.

Supt. Roy Romer said the measures used to uncover a small earthquake fault beneath two buildings at the Belmont campus will serve as a model for investigating potential school sites included in the district’s ambitious construction program over the next decade.

“Having had this experience, we obviously will be sensitive and strengthen this process,” Romer said. “We will have a higher degree of focus on any site we are dealing with in terms of its relationship to any fault.”

Construction will not proceed at potential district sites found to sit atop active faults or, as in the case beneath Belmont, faults that cannot be proved to be inactive, officials said.

State law is somewhat more lenient, forbidding construction of schools only on faults known to be active.

District leaders could not say how much the new investigations will cost. The recent seismic tests at Belmont cost $1 million to $2 million.

“There is no question that fatal seismic flaws should be identified before acquiring a property,” said Angelo Bellomo, director of the district’s environmental health and safety branch.

He and other officials said school sites will be evaluated on an individual basis, but they would not speculate on whether the efforts will delay the opening of new schools or cause building plans to change.

The district’s massive building plans to ease overcrowding received a major boost with last month’s passage of local and state bond issues expected to provide more than $5 billion to Los Angeles Unified.

Romer said the district, following state law, will continue to examine geologic literature and historic photos of potential school sites, and review state seismic maps for faults.

But he and other district officials said the state requirements may not be rigorous enough for troublesome sites, and they committed themselves to going further.

They said they will identify zones of Los Angeles where the topography suggests hidden hazards even if there may be few if any known major faults in these areas.

In areas where faults are likely to be deep, scientists will probably drill small holes and release sound waves to detect faults.

In shallower areas, where bedrock is close to the surface, seismologists will probably dig trenches to determine the potential for faults rupturing at ground level -- the very technique that uncovered the fault beneath the Belmont complex.

Romer and his top lieutenants outlined their approach a day after disclosing three options being studied for the half-finished Belmont campus near downtown, where construction stopped three years ago amid fears about underground toxic gases from old oil wells on the property.

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Board of Education revived the project and was investigating ways to deal with those environmental problems.

Now, the board faces the unpalatable choices of razing two of the six Belmont buildings, rebuilding a smaller version of what was planned to be a 3,600-student school elsewhere on the 35-acre property or abandoning the site and looking for a new location.

Romer said he will make a recommendation on Belmont to the Board of Education within 60 days. A majority of the seven board members said this week that they favor abandoning the site.

The complex, whose price tag has reached $175 million, is already the most expensive high school in California history. If it is not abandoned, some of the rebuilding plans could cost as much as an additional $70 million, Romer said.

A preliminary seismic report on the Belmont property could not conclusively say whether the fault beneath the school is active.

Kerry Sieh, the Caltech professor who found the fault, said that he used “very, very conservative assumptions” in estimating its length and age. Those measurements were used to show that the ground around the fault could shift by one foot in the event of a major quake.

Romer said it was wrong to call such assumptions conservative, given that the safety of children is at issue.

“I don’t see it as overreacting,” he said. “That’s the best science could do. My responsibility is to build safe schools.”

The fault is not on the surface but has the potential to trigger a ground rupture, according to the district’s seismic consultants.

Several geologists consider the district’s efforts overly cautious. They point out that the entire Los Angeles Basin is crisscrossed by faults, yet few sites are actually at risk of ground-level ruptures that can cause extensive damage.

“Most of the L.A. Basin does not have the significant potential for surface faulting,” said Chris Wills, supervising geologist with the California Geological Survey.

Pinpointing earthquake hazards is often a guessing game, with discoveries coming only as new earthquakes reveal previously unknown faults.

“We probably won’t be able to determine the activity level of faults we find on many of these sites,” said Thomas Henyey, deputy director of the Southern California Earthquake Center and a professor of earth sciences at USC. “It’s almost impossible to know which fault is going to go next in Southern California.”

School board President Caprice Young on Thursday echoed that uncertainty, even as she sounded a reassuring tone about the district’s plans.

“We live in California. The more we learn, the scarier it is,” she said. “But we have a responsibility to take all reasonable steps necessary to make sure our students are safe. The standards that were acceptable in the past are not acceptable now.”

Parents in the area and Latino leaders are extremely upset about the seismic revelation and are demanding to know why the fault was not discovered sooner. They expected the school to open in three years, removing thousands of students from overcrowded campuses and long bus commutes.

Romer has promised that some new Belmont campus will be built, but said Thursday that the original plan and a proposed development contract are “obviously history.”

“We can’t continue to build that design,” he said. “Whatever we do will be a new project.”