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Health & Fitness

Cost Over-Runs: The Real Reason to Stop LAX Expansion

The main feeder pipes to LA County's largest sewage treatment plant meet up below Lincoln where LAX wants to expand north - but no one really knows exactly where.

Many reasons have been tossed about as to why we should fight the airport expansion – aka “moving the north runway 260 ft” – but today’s LA Times article on the cost over-runs plaguing the widening of the 405 are the reason to fight LAX.

 

I urge everyone interested in fighting the airport to focus on this one issue. It’s not sexy, but it’s valid and potentially effective.

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A little background: LAX wants to move the north runway 260 feet north in order to “better handle larger planes, particularly the A380, when they are on the ground”. A recent NASA study on this very proposition determined that such a move would provide “negligible” improvements to safety.

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In order to move that runway, the airport needs to move a segment of Lincoln Blvd. Acquiring the land to make such a shift isn’t a problem because the airport owns the land north and south of Lincoln. So, no one’s home will be destroyed.

 

The real problem with LAWA’s proposal lies underground. The Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant is just west from the proposed changes to Lincoln. It is the largest wastewater treatment facility in LA County and most of the main feeder pipes from the all over the city of Los Angeles meet up below Lincoln approximately where LAWA proposes to dig Lincoln up.

 

But, just like with the 405-widening project, city officials aren’t certain exactly where those pipes are and what it would take to move or replace them while they work to move Lincoln in order to move the runway north.

 

And the hundreds of millions of dollars in complications, the time delays needed to fix them, and the disastrous implications that a break in the main feeder pipes for the largest sewage treatment plant in the Los Angeles Metro Area are the real reasons we should fight LAX expansion.

 

More importantly, it is the most effective way we can win – especially with the news today that the 405 widening project is both delayed and more expensive by a similar, less problematic version of what would happen at LAX. Just think of the problems that severing our city’s ability to properly transport and treat the sewage created by 4 million people would bring us – both in money, complexity, and time. 

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