Current Events Candlestick Park implosion plan has residents fearing for safety Joe Kukura Dec 26, 2014 Youve likely noticed that the San Francisco 49ers no longer play their home games at Candlestick Park. (Their new home is Levis Stadium, 40 miles down the road in Santa Clara.) Candlestick Park has been officially retired from use; the last event ever at Candlestick Park was a Paul McCartney concert in August. The city of San Francisco and a team of developers now plan to tear down Candlestick Park and replace it with a shopping mall, parks, housing and a slew of other lovely-sounding mixed-use plans. What does not sound so lovely is a new change to the plan. Construction developer the Lennar Corporation, the firm that won the bid to tear down Candlestick and build new shops and housing on the site, has changed its mind on how to tear down Candlestick Park. What had originally been planned as a painstaking piece-by-piece demolition of the 70,000-seat stadium is now a plan to simply blow the place up with the flick of a switch. Thats why neighborhood residents have safety concerns about the implosion of Candlestick Park. The implosion plan is still just a proposal, as the prior manual demolition plan had already been approved. Implosion is certainly a cheaper and faster way to remove an enormous stadium from a citys landscape. But residents worry that an implosion would coat their neighborhood with dust and toxins that might stick around for years, or forever. Imploding Candlestick will cause irreparable environmental harm, said Sheila Moore, vice president of the Bayview Hill Neighborhood Association, in the San Francisco Examiner. (Candlestick Park is located in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood of San Francisco.) Large stadiums have been imploded before, generally without significant hazards to the surrounding communities. The Dallas Cowboys former home Texas Stadium, the Philadelphia Eagles Veterans Stadium and the Seattle Seahawks Kingdome have all been safely imploded. Just last week, Texas A&Ms Kyle Stadium was partially imploded to make way for renovations. But implosion is not the right answer for every communitys stadium. Both Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium in New York were dismantled rather than imploded, because New York City law forbids the implosion of large buildings. A 2005 study in the Journal of the Air Waste Management Association found several short-term air-quality issues with implosion, including airborne asbestos and particle matter, and concluded that implosions in metropolitan areas should be prohibited. In the case of a possible implosion of Candlestick Park, residents are concerned because the stadium contains an exceptional amount of asbestos, PCBs and lead-based paints. Additionally, the Lennar Corporations plan has the resulting dust cloud from the implosion traveling only a very short distance. Clinical studies indicate the dust clouds can cover more than 12 miles—enough to cover most of San Francisco. And residents remember that this very same Lennar Corporation was fined $500,000 in 2008 for allowing asbestos dust to cover this very same Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood. Now they are asking the city to let them do this again and that’s just crazy, neighborhood advocate Eric Brooks told the Examiner.
Posted on: Tue, 06 Jan 2015 01:14:42 +0000
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