The Clash Over The Runways

An eye-opening exploration of the biggest environmental battle over the bay in 50 years
(page 1 of 3)
By Kevin Berger

The guys in the air-traffic-control tower at San Francisco International Airport are telling me how great it would be if the airport built new runways. They know that the airport’s proposal to crank up the concrete mixers and fill in up to two square of miles of the bay—about four times the size of Treasure Island—is a huge environmental controversy. But from their panoramic view of the jet traffic on and above the tarmac, the plan to build additional runways stretching into the bay is the only way to go.

"We’d love it," says tower supervisor Kevin Coon. "It’d make our jobs so much easier."

Just now, though, things seem pretty easy. Facing a clear blue sky at 10:30 in the morning, the controllers seem as cheery as old college pals. Decked out in khakis, sneakers, and sports shirts, they are rolling around in their chairs and uttering codes and commands into headsets with eerie nonchalance. Outside, planes land and take off over the blue bay in a kind of slow-motion ballet. KFOG is playing softly in the background: R.E.M.’s "Losing My Religion."

"It’s the morning lull," says Jim Babcock, who is directing planes on the taxiways.

"It’s the only time they put me on position," jokes Mark Nelson.

Because SFO’s four runways cross like tic-tac-toe lines, the controller on position must clear both the landings and the takeoffs, meaning he or she is responsible for preventing the planes from meeting quite messily in the middle of the airfield. Such a meeting, Coon assures me, has never happened.

"We won’t let Nelly work unless it’s the morning lull," wisecracks Babcock. "And his wife won’t allow it either." Nelson’s wife is Channel 7 newscaster Debora Villalon.

"Yeah, they more than throw a stink," says Nelson, taking off his headset. "They get me out of here."

Actually, Nelson is leaving for a break. Despite a slight dip in the number of planes arriving and departing between 10 and 11 a.m., morning is the busiest time for controllers. To remain mentally fresh and alert, they take a break every two or three hours. Nelson is replaced by Cindy Grimm, who glances at the blinking radar scope to check on a string of approaching planes, looks at the line of jets waiting to take off, and, without missing a beat, begins coolly chanting numbers and directions to the pilots.

Soon, planes begin arriving at a rate just shy of one a minute and taking off once every minute and a half. Amazed at the steady flow, I wonder aloud if the airport, at some point, simply can’t hold any more. "That’s what we’d like to think," Coon says, smiling. "But the airlines just keep bringing in more!"

Still, the traffic moves smoothly. Two jets, flying side by side, materialize out of the glare over the San Mateo bridge and gradually descend toward the airport. As they do so, two jets pick up speed on the departure runways, gain altitude over the bay, and bank away from each other like streaks in a fireworks display.

"A perfect scenario," says Coon. "Just the way we like to see it."

So what’s the problem? "We don’t have a problem on sunny days like this," says Ron Wilson, SFO’s genial and very tall director of community affairs, who has been with the airport for 41 years and who is keeping an eye on me in the tower. "We don’t have a delay problem—95 percent of our delays are due to weather. We can’t control Mother Nature. A marine layer of fog hangs around here most mornings. So for about 30 percent of our working hours, we can allow arrivals on only one runway."

At 750 feet apart, says Wilson, SFO’s runways are too close together to accommodate today’s jets and their wide wingspans in bad weather. Once the famous fog billows in and pilots can’t see one another as they approach the airport, safety insists that only one landing runway be used, causing "a logjam of planes in the sky, all waiting to go through a single plume."Should the runways be reconstructed farther apart, about 4,300 feet, planes could still land side by side when fog blankets the airport, as pilots could rely on their instruments to maintain a safe distance from one another. SFO also plans to build a runway that doesn’t cross the others and extends into the bay like a long pier. Then, explains Wilson, not only could the controllers dial down their stress a notch, but a whole new batch of planes could take off without waiting for their brethren to land. "Our number one goal is to virtually eliminate delay," he says.

Ah, yes, delay. It is the almighty beast that ravages the patience of everyone who sets foot in the clammy dens of anxiety known as airline terminals. Few things in life are less pleasant than being forced to take refuge in a hard plastic seat, unable to escape the drone of CNN Headline News.

SFO doesn’t want you to feel this way. Seething customers don’t bode well for return business—proven by a steady rise in travelers passing through the gates of Oakland International Airport and San Jose International Airport. To take the sting out of fliers’ being stuck in purgatory, SFO already has spent $2.4 billion on its master plan, whose star attraction is the new International Terminal, featuring junk food–free restaurants like the Firewood Café—previously a big hit in the Castro—and jaunty postmodern paintings by local artists like Squeak Carnwath.

Now, SFO is ready to shell out $3 billion more to fight the beast of delay—and attract more planes and customers—by building new runways. Hatched in 1999, the Runway Reconfiguration Program offers four different runway plans, incorporating landfill that ranges from 400 to 1,400 acres. Insiders say this summer the airport will recommend a configuration tilting toward the high end of fill. The bigger plans require digging up about six million dump trucks’ worth of sand, which will be used to form a sturdy base on which to construct the steel-and-concrete runways. The sand will probably be dredged from the bottom of the bay in an area just off the Alameda shore and shipped to SFO in a slow train of barges that would chug back and forth across the water for years.

Nearly every scientist and public official involved in the plan tells me the same thing: The prospective runways’ massive size hasn’t received enough attention. "It’s frightening," says Will Travis, executive director of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC). "We mocked up the runways on a big photo of the bay. When you look at it, you say, ‘Wait a minute. One of those runways is as long as the Bay Bridge from San Francisco to Yerba Buena Island.’ The biggest project before this was probably Treasure Island, and that was in the 1930s. So this is clearly the biggest thing in more than half a century."

Legislated by the state in 1965 to take the steam out of developers hell-bent on filling the bay, the BCDC holds the key to the runways. Plan to fill a single square foot of the bay and you need a permit from the BCDC. Approval takes a majority of 27 appointed commissioners saying yes, the public benefits of filling outweigh the environmental detriment. In this case, the benefit is a reduction in air-traffic delay, although a BCDC vote is a good two years away.

Actually, because the airport is a public entity—it’s owned by the city of San Francisco—the runways have to receive unanimous approval from a veritable Yellow Pages of regulatory agencies before extending their arms into the bay, the granddaddy of our natural resources. These include the city’s Planning Commission, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

But the BCDC is a bellwether of the final decision, says Travis, because it has a wider political spectrum of commissioners than the other agencies. What’s more, this is not a simple matter of deciding whether a Tiburon yacht owner can add a few more redwood slats to his private dock. It’s the biggest landfill proposal in the history of the BCDC, causing many observers to wonder whether its vote will underline the conservation or development in its name.

There’s another crucial distinction between the runways and other proposals. With frank country charm, Travis, who looks like the actor Wilford Brimley, says, "The real difference between this and every other big project that comes before us is, this one is being run like a political campaign. SFO is spending more money on public relations than we have as a budget to operate as an agency—by several fold, I’m sure."

Also, because of its size, the runway expansion will disrupt the bay’s ecology on an unprecedented scale. "Let me put it this way," says San Francisco State University biologist Hal Markowitz, a leading authority on the bay’s native harbor seals. In 1999, the BCDC convened a panel of scientists to discuss the airport’s proposal. "And as soon as they mentioned another runway, everybody’s head went down almost to the table."

It does make you think. The airport is proposing the biggest and most expensive project since we as a society deemed environmental protection of the bay important. Could it really be going to such great lengths to relieve the aggravation of air travel?

NEXT - page 2