A major Los Angeles freeway was shut down for eight days last month after a crammed state-leased storage area underneath erupted in a massive blaze that damaged the roadway.
The same thing could easily happen in the Bay Area, where the California Department of Transportation similarly rents out land below thoroughfares for storage without proper oversight.
It’s time for Caltrans to end the reckless program.
Caltrans Director Tony Tavares’ own report 11 days after the Interstate 10 inferno shows that the agency is incapable of monitoring the land it leases out for storage — or assessing whether the income justifies the risks.
Worse, even when Caltrans knows about hazards, it’s unable to take timely action to avoid a catastrophe.
As reporting from the Southern California News Group shows, state inspectors had flagged fire hazards and other lease violations for years at the site where the Interstate 10 fire began.
Yet Caltrans did not initiate eviction proceedings against the tenant until this August, 3½ years after the company stopped paying rent. Those proceedings were hung up in court at the time of the blaze.
Reporting by the Bay Area News Group shows that weeks after the Los Angeles fire, similar leased,-out under-freeway sites here in the Bay Area were still stacked with wooden pallets, vehicles, trailers, storage bins, appliances and RVs. It’s another conflagration waiting to happen.
Yet, Caltrans’ response seems to be ‘no worries, we got this covered.’ The evidence shows otherwise.
Right after the Interstate 10 fire, Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered that Caltrans conduct a review of its leased-out sites. Tavares’ subsequent report indicates that the agency doesn’t have a solid handle on the program.
The state program is a mixture of under-freeway storage and parking sites combined with leases on state land adjacent to roadways for cellular tower and other telecommunication uses. It’s the under-freeway storage sites that present the biggest risk. It’s this part of the program that should be abandoned.
In all, there are 601 total active leases that produce $34.6 million a year in revenue, according to Caltrans. But the agency this past week was unable to quantify how many of those sites are for under-freeway storage nor the revenue produced from that part of the program. That lack of basic information is stunning.
What we do know from Tavares’ report is that in the days after the Los Angeles fire, Caltrans, suddenly aware that it had a problem and with the governor demanding an accounting, identified 38 sites that had “identified risks or warrant further inspection.”
In a report to Newsom, the agency recklessly and sloppily concludes that the Los Angeles fire site and others leased by the same company “are outliers, and relatively few sites present confirmed safety or fire concerns.”
This conclusion is somehow reached even though the report does not determine what percentage of the total under-freeway sites those 38 locations represent.
And it ignores that those spot inspections and prior ones, at an unspecified number of sites, found fire code and hazardous material conditions, unauthorized vehicle storage, stacked lumber, abandoned vehicles and unauthorized trailers and sheds. In other words, new fires are just a lit match away. In some cases, Caltrans could not even access temporary buildings on the sites.
Our follow-up questioning indicates that the state has failed to do basic cost-benefit analysis to determine whether the revenue is worth the tremendous risk to taxpayers, motorists, local economies and the environment.
To help pay for repair of I-10, Caltrans secured $3 million of federal funding. We suspect, when the bills are totaled, it will turn out to be far more. And that doesn’t begin to cover the costs to the Los Angeles region of the eight-day shutdown of a freeway used by 300,000 daily commuters.
The Los Angeles freeway inferno could have turned out much worse. The next freeway blaze could just as easily be in the Bay Area. Caltrans has demonstrated that it’s incapable of monitoring these under-freeway storage sites and has failed to show that the risks justify the unspecified revenue.
The state should cease its under-freeway storage program — now.