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P.O. BOX 1234 Berkeley, California 94701 www.savestrawberrycanyon.org November 20 - Alarming News! We learned this past week that our efforts to challenge LBNL's plans for the Computational Research and Theory Facility (CRT) received an adverse ruling in federal court (see PDF copy here). CRT is a massive (139,000-gross sq. ft.) structure planned for the wooded bluff above Hearst Avenue (see this LBNL map). Construction entails uprooting some 50 trees, excavation of some 30,000 cubic yards of earth, to be replaced with new earth, all on an unstable hillside 400 ft. from the Hayward Fault! — rather an expensive enterprise when federal money is scarce and LBNL is imminently poised to announce a second campus site for which CRT's 4 supercomputers would be a perfect anchor project. Now we have learned from an LBNL memo that this Friday, November 26, LBNL will begin to clear the bluff of all trees, just as the rainy season begins!. In light of this hasty action, please see the recent NY Times article citing a Department of Energy (DOE) Report calling for DOE restructuring, due to the nation's diminishing resources and duplication. See below* our comment about this article. See also this 2008 letter in which U.C. Professor Emeritus Garniss H. Curtis explains why geologic conditions in the canyon make more construction there so dangerous. Please contact the following and urge them to take steps to halt the immediate tree-removal for much-needed re-consideration:
* A comment about the NY Times article "Report Calls for Changes in Energy Department," Nov. 15, 2011 The article does not mention the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), located on the hill above the University of California Berkeley campus. In 2006, under Director Steven Chu, LBNL launched a Long-Range Development Plan for one million gross square feet of new construction. Save Strawberry Canyon, a citizen group, was formed to stop this misplaced Plan, advocating an alternative, less risky, economically viable site. The NYTimes drew attention to the 49% of the $13 billion in capital expenses and overhead for the 16 National Labs. Save Strawberry Canyon would point to the plans for the proposed buildings at the LBNL hill site, all of which will cost from 30 to 50 percent more than if built on flat land farther from the Hayward Fault. The hill is a collapse caldera of an old volcano, composed of mudstones, volcanic layers, and large caverns of water. Almost every road cut or construction project at LBNL has caused a slide?41 in the past 60 years. Some were large and difficult to contain; one cut underground utilities, damaged a building, and cut a public road to a hillside residential district for 18 months. Save Strawberry Canyon learned last week that its suit challenging the federal environmental review for CRT was lost. Then a few days ago we learned from an LBNL in-house memo that the Lab will begin cutting down some 50 trees on an unstable hill on Friday, Nov. 25, in preparation for a massive computer facility (CRT). This is the rainy season, so uprooting trees and excavating 30,000 cubic yards of earth and replacing them on a 45 degree slope is hazardous and hugely wasteful. CRT is intended to hold four supercomputers in a location only 400 feet from the Hayward Fault. In the last month four shocks have occurred on an epicenter less than a mile to the south of the site. A major event of magnitude 6.8 to 7.0 has a good probability of occuring at any time within the next 20 years. DOE Secretary Chu, when Director of LBNL, had argued that scientific synergies necessitated placing the proposed LBNL buildings, including the CRT, on the hill site. Yet shortly LBNL will announce a location for a second campus site in one of the cities that border the East Bay: Alameda, Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, Albany, or Richmond. Thus his argument appears moot. To build more on this hill campus would be unconscionable, both for the danger to personnel, students, and the neighborhood and for the waste of dollars.
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