Oh Those Wacky Tree-Hugging, Sports-Hating, Earthquake-Fearing Californians

All right.  This may be slightly off topic, but I can't resist.  The San Francisco Chronicle, Recorder, and seemingly everything else today is full of stories about how Alameda Superior Court Judge Jo-Lynne Lee's preliminary injunction halting construction of an athletic facility adjacent to the University of California's Memorial Stadium.  The story has something for everybody who likes to dis California:  protesters living in oak trees, anti-development forces, even, dare I say it, an attack on college football.

I'm a second generation old blue myself (class of 1973), a football season ticket holder, I've been living and dying with Cal football for more than forty years, and I suppose I should be outraged.  I'm not wild about using the litigation process for land use planning, either.  But I'm also native Californian and a survivor of the Loma Prieta earthquake, so I'm really not in favor of building large public structures on earthquake faults.  California's Alquist-Priolo Act prohibits building on or near earthquake faults, and requires, as a prerequisite to construction, a demonstration that there is no active fault or trace of a fault underneath. 

Everybody agrees the construction is close to the Hayward Fault, which runs right under the stadium itself.   Two of Cal's geologic tests were inconclusive as to whether there were traces under the proposed structures.  I'm no expert on earthquake science, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to finish the testing and demonstrate, once and for all, whether the site is safe or not. 

Comments

[Oski Bear]

Your argument would be sound if there was no existing facility and this was an entirely new project. The fact is that the status quo is an 87-year-old stadium that is full of cracks and obviously not built to modern seismic standards. There are regularly 400 or more people in that building and on game days as many as 73,000. Whatever they build there will certainly be safer for those people than what exists now. Certainly one important lesson of Loma Prieta and Northridge is that modern buildings (including skyscrapers) do a whole lot better than old unreinforced concrete buildings. The longer this project is delayed by these zealots, the longer that 100’s of lives (to say nothing of Tedford’s tenure) are being put at risk.

[Cystergirl]

Judge Barbara Miller made the decision -- not a CEQA judge or a person knowledgeable about Alquist Priolo. Also, Cragmont School in Berkeley *didn't* survive Loma Prieta -- unlike the blog author -- but got rebuilt in the Alquist Priolo zone. It is all politics. Always.