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Health & Fitness

Palomar Airport: The PAAC Hustle, Blog #42

The Palomar Airport Advisory Committee [PAAC] meets once a month to review proposed Palomar Airport projects.  Last Thursday a County consultant recommended that Palomar Airport extend the Palomar runway by 300 feet on the West for safety and 900 feet on the east to increase airport capacity.

Both projects would cost about $80 to $90 million.  More than a 1000 piles would be placed through the landfill to "bridge" over the settling landfill waste.

The Consultant Runway Extension Feasibility Report

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The consultant took nearly 20 months.  The report runs about 400 pages.  It refers to more than 10 other documents including FAA advisory circulars, orders, and guidance documents; FAA and San Diego Regional Airport Authority documents, and others.  Collectively, these documents run more than 5,000 pages long.

The PAAC Member Report Review

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The County placed the consultant report on its website on August 1, 2013.  The County set PAAC Agenda Item 6 for the August 15 meeting asking the PAAC to accept the consultant report and forward it to the Board for action.

On August 12, I emailed a request to the PAAC and Board asking that PAAC Agenda Item 6 be continued so that the public had time to review the report.  I noted that 2 weeks was not enough to review 5000 pages of material.

The Palomar Airport Issues

As noted in my last 41 Palomar Airport blogs, inviting larger, faster planes to use the Palomar Airport runway raises safety and environmental concerns. 

On the East, the runway ends next to a closed methane-emitting landfill.  Problems in the last 10 years have included underground landfill fires, methane emission levels exceeding regulatory explosive limits, falsified methane emission gas readings by a County consultant investigated by the FBI for which the County was fined, and aviation fuel leaks from Palomar storage facilities.

In addition, Palomar is designed as a B-II Airport to handle planes below certain speeds with wingspans below certain widths and using small aviation fuel tanks. 

Yet, it appears that Palomar even now – before extending the Runway to near 6000 feet from its current 4900 feet - handles 2,000 to 3,000 C-III corporate jets annually that fly faster, weigh up to 7 times as much as general aviation small aircraft, and carry 2,000 to 2,500 gallons of aviation fuel rather than a few hundred gallons

The PAAC Hustle

At the August 15 meeting, the PAAC listened to a 20-minute consultant slide show.  No surprise.  The consultant favors the project.

The PAAC denied my August 12 continuance request.   The PAAC gave me a few minutes to ask a few questions.  Punctuated by a PAAC audience attendee [possibly a County staff member or more likely a representative of a Palomar tenant present for another agenda item] yelling out “Isn’t his 3-minutes up yet?” 

Wouldn’t neutral PAAC members who were trying to gather and resolve issues for the Board of Supervisors have asked the consultant questions as follows:

·        Won’t extending the runway attract many more C-III planes to Palomar?

·        Explain why - if a plane crashes into the landfill area adjacent to an extended runway - the presence of a methane gas collection system and the lack of a landfill liner will not create safety or environmental issues.

·        What recommendations is the consultant making to remove landfill safety and environmental risks?

·        When contractors building runway extensions either drive 50-foot long piles through landfill waste or drill large holes through the landfill to cast piles in place, are any environmental risks created?  Will the more than 1000 piles placed create pathways for decomposing liquids to migrate to the groundwater?

·        California Pacific Airlines, a commercial air carrier, has proposed more than 10,000 annual operations at Palomar.  Is such use compatible with even more C-III corporate jets?

Was it really necessary for the PAAC to deny the public the time to fairly analyze the consultant report and hustle it off to the Board of Supervisors?   Can the PAAC and County really tell the FAA when the County applies to the FAA for grant monies to extend the runway that the public was given a reasonable opportunity to comment?

And is it surprising that few citizens attend PAAC meetings when they are denied a reasonable chance to review County materials and so routinely ignored?

P.S. Twp more of those improbable plane crashes this past week.  A UPS plane trying to reach a 7,000 foot Alabama runway and a small plane crash into a home killing 4 in Connecticut.


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