El Cerrito School Sites’ Safety Questioned

By Kimberly S. Wetzel, Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek, Calif.

Nov. 6–West Contra Costa Unified School District officials are looking into whether children at Cameron Elementary, an early intervention school, are safe in light of new information showing that an earthquake could leave the El Cerrito school crumbling under seismic pressure.

District engineering officer Bill Savidge said staff and geotechnical contractors are currently looking at whether geotechnical surveys should be conducted at the site to determine if it is structurally sound.

"It appears that there’s a historic landslide that toes off the site, around the corner," Savidge said. "I would imagine that they would look at the school and do additional (tests) just to be safe."

According to an El Cerrito building services map showing geologic hazards throughout the city, Cameron School, like Portola Middle School, appears to sit atop land that has a history of landslides and could move or collapse if an earthquake shakes the area.

Savidge said no upgrades have been performed on the school, built in 1951, and a geotechnical survey wasn’t done before because there are no plans to rebuild the campus.

"It wasn’t overlooked, it just wasn’t done," Savidge said. "We didn’t do any surveys for the site because the school actually was not scheduled for reconstruction or modernization under the bond program. So it wasn’t on our radar."

Gretchen Borg, chairwoman of the district’s Community Advisory Committee on Special Education, said she feels "sickened" that Cameron appears to be unsafe.

"The building itself is kind of hazardous on its own," Borg said, noting the glass ceiling and unsecured bookshelves lining flimsy portable walls.

Cameron, west of Portola at 7140 Gladys Ave., is a special education early intervention school that provides learning programs for infants, toddlers and preschoolers and their families. The school serves about 1,000 students per year, Borg said.

The board directed staff members to look into the safety of Cameron last month after school board candidate Robert Brower brought the school’s potentially hazardous location, inside a designated geologic hazard area, to board members’ attention.

"If you have a heart, you want to be an advocate for them," Brower said of the babies and little children at the school. "If you have a heart."

Brower, who has actively campaigned on a platform to address the safety issues at Portola and Cameron, has repeatedly suggested that students should be removed from both campuses immediately because an earthquake could occur at any time.

The district has been grappling with what to do about Portola Middle, which cannot be rebuilt on the current site because to do so in a seismically safe manner would be difficult and costly. The school consists of an upper pad with classrooms on top of a hill and a lower pad with sporting facilities on the bottom.

School officials, who will have to either find another site to build a new middle school campus to house Portola’s 640 students or find existing school property for expansion, are holding public meetings to solicit ideas. Bruce Harter, WCCUSD superintendent, has said the district is examining several possibilities.

Savidge said both schools, built in the 1950s, show no signs of cracks or other indications of landslide or earthquake damage and withstood the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Reach Kimberly S. Wetzel at 510-262-2798 or kwetzel@cctimes.com.

—–

Copyright (c) 2006, Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek, Calif.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.