Transcript
Palo Alto City Council City of Palo Alto Palo Alto , CA 94301 Cc: County Supervisors, James Keene, Menlo Park City Council, San Mateo Supervisors, PAUSD, Mountain View City Council Subject: Closure of the Palo Alto Airport (PAO) Elected Public Officials: Time To Shut Down Palo Alto Airport! The crash of a small, two-engine aircraft on February 17, 2010, while taking off from the Palo Alto Airport, killed the plane’s three occupants, and blacked out all of Palo Alto and portions of East Palo Alto and Menlo Park. This crash greatly reinforces the argument that the that aviation is inherently unsafe--and that people who live near the near airports are at the mercy of people (pilots) they do not know, have no reason to trust, and who may even use their aircraft as weapons of suicide and destruction, as did an Austin, Texas, resident the next day after the Palo Alto crash. In this case, the pilot turned a $300 business expense for commercial airline tickets into a $50M-$75M+ Local/Federal loss—a loss that must be borne by over 100,000 local residents, homeowners and businesses and US taxpayers. The table below attempts to provide a "straw man" estimate of the financial losses that might be suffered from this power outage--caused by the crash of this aircraft:
Estimate of One-Day Economic Loss Due To 02.17.10 Power Outage Item Item Cost Per-Unit Units Unit Type Lost Individual Productivity/Salaries $50,000,000 500 100,000 People/Salary-Per-Day Lost Corporate Deliveries/Sales $10,000,000 10,000,000 1 Companies Lost Retail Sales $10,000,000 10,000,000 1 Sales Outlets Lost Sales Tax $905,000 905,000 1 Sales Outlets PA Utility Lost Revenues $1,000,000 1,000,000 1 Accounts PG&E Lost Revenues $200,000 200,000 1 Accounts Lost Homes/Personal Property $2,000,000 2,000,000 1 Homes Vehicles Destroyed $90,000 30,000 3 Vehicles Ruined Food/Perishable Inventories $1,000,000 1,000,000 1 Businesses/Homes Repair Costs (Materials and Labor) $300,000 300,000 1 Various FAA/TSB Investigation/Involvement $2,000,000 2,000,000 1 Labor/Travel/Etc. Homeowner Insurance Increases ??? ??? ??? Homes Fire Insurance Increases ??? ??? ??? Homes PAO Insurance Increase $1,000,000 50,000 20 Airport(s)/Years/dollars Local Emergency Responses ??? ??? ??? People/Salaries
Costs Future Lost Personal Productivity Legal Representation Costs Law Suit Resolutions Other Grand Total:
??? ??? ??? ??? $78,495,000
??? ??? ??? ???
??? ??? ??? ???
Productivity/Salaries Clients/Contact Hours Clients/Settlements/Verdicts To Be Determined
Note -- This is an unofficial estimate. Actual costs to Palo Alto, the County Government and the Federal Government are unknown, and may never be known, due to various levels of government secrecy/delays/non-responsiveness to Freedom of Information requests/CA Public Information Requests. Other dollar values, such as lost sales--can never be known due to there being no reporting mechanism for these sorts of losses due to power outages from the Palo Alto Utility (PAU).
(While this estimate only includes business and personal liability from activities here in Palo Alto, it does not include any losses that might be associated with the deaths of the plane's occupants--which could easily be in the tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars for Silicon Valley employees and business owners.) Other Scenarios While the actual total incident cost for the 02.17.10 crash may never be known, are there other possibilities about this, or other possible airplane crashes, that local governments should be considering? Certainly a plane associated with the Palo Alto Airport could have hit the nearby water treatment plant, and possibly disabling/destroying it, or could have hit a school or the Stanford Campus, killing perhaps upwards of a hundred (or more) students. In those situations, what backup plans do each of these local governing agencies have to respond to the situation? While PG&E was able to correct the damage to its high-voltage feed into Palo Alto rather quickly, how long would it take the City of Palo Alto to rebuild its water treatment plant, should it be destroyed as a result of an airplane crashing into the facility, or the PAUSD to rebuild a destroyed school? And who becomes financial responsible for repairs, rebuilding, or settlements to lawsuits about “wrongful death” that will invariably follow such events? In the case of a Palo Alto Airport-based plane crashing into a local school, would the school district be responsible (meaning ultimately the PAUSD taxpayers)? Given the high costs for repair/rebuilding/legal costs associated with plane crashes in the Palo Alto/Menlo Park/Stanford area, who is ultimately responsible for the damages incurred when such a crash happens on private property, like the HP facility? Would the County as the Palo Alto Airport’s operator, with its deep pockets, immediately become the major respondent in all lawsuits (again meaning the taxpayers of Santa Clara County)? Could a very smart litigation lawyer find ways to bind the City of Palo Alto into such a lawsuit, because of sloppy legal work done decades ago—when the City made this property available to the County as the Airport’s operator? While doubtless most government agencies have outside insurance that might pay some of these damage claims, can any of our elected officials guarantee us that the taxpayers will not eventually have to subsidize not only the airports, but the damage that the pilots
incur when landing, or taking off, from these airports? And could Palo Alto’s become liable for tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars of damages for what might end up being a “pilot error”? How does each and every property tax payer in Palo Alto, and perhaps Santa Clara, when seeing his/her property tax bill go up in order to pay off the bonds that would have to be sold to settle such a law suit, come to see that subsidizing these airports is a “benefit to the community”? Personal/Airport Liability? None of the local newspapers running articles about this crash have raised the issue of personal liability of the plane’s owner, and pilot. There seems to be no sense that liability is even an issue here—given the large number of column-inches devoted to the presumed pilot, column-inches which seem to be more romanticizing him, than asking hard questions about the personal and Airport Operator liability for such events. While most Airports carry liability insurance in the $50M-$100M range, has anyone in the local Press inquired of the Airport operators how much liability insurance the Palo Alto Airport carries, and under what conditions, and to what extent, the Airport is liable for the damages incurred by these sorts of crashes? Should Government (meaning the County Supervisors and the local elected officials) be proactively guarding the safety of the non-flying public by demanding that the highest amount of Airport Liability insurance be carried, and those costs shared by the pilots, rather than perhaps showing nothing by disinterest about this matter of pilot/Airport liability insurance? I know I would like to know how much 3rd-party liability insurance each pilot is required to carry before they are allowed to use an airport in Santa Clara County? And of course, there is the nagging question about what constitutes “safe conditions” for a take off, and which government agency is responsible for setting these standards, and enforcing these standards. Should the FAA (US Taxpayers) be liable for crashes that occur at Airports under its control? Government Has Obligation To Protect Residents People who live in Palo Alto have a right to go to work, and not come home to a house that is burned out, and perhaps a family that is dead, because a “pilot” made a judgment in error. The Government of Palo Alto is currently helping to subsidize a handful of people who have not been the best neighbors, over the long, tortured and unsuccessful financial history of the Palo Alto Airport--while ignoring the safety of 99.999% of its residents and businesses. Moreover, the County, as this Airport’s operator, is seemingly doing virtually nothing to insure Palo Alto resident’s safety either, Back in the 1930s, the College Park residents were in the process of suing Stanford about the nuisance of its air strip when the current location in the Baylands was made available to the pilots by pro-aviation public officials and business leaders. While this was a good
location in the 1930s, it no longer is. It is time to move the flight operations for this airstrip somewhere else. Simply looking the other way is not going to increase the safety of the flight operations of this facility, nor is it going to insure that no more accidents occur there (about 80 accidents have occurred at this location in the past 30-odd years, according to FAA accident tracking data. Most of these accidents are “pilot error”. Conclusion This special treatment of this one group (the pilots) has got to stop. It is past time to shut down this Airport, moving its operations to other local Airports, such as San Carlos and/or possibly using some of the now-mostly-idle Moffett Field. While this might be inconvenient to perhaps eighty Palo Alto residents, it will increase both the quality of life and the safety of living in our town for the 60,000 others of us who are non-pilots, and the 90,000-100,000 people who work in Palo Alto. Each and every time an aircraft takes off, or lands, there is a significant risk of this sort of thing happening again. It’s time to shut down this Airport and recognize that the purpose of Government is the security of the majority, not the underwriting of expensive pastimes of the few. Wayne Martin Palo Alto, CA