Navy Jet Crash Revives Fear of Disaster Near Base

The crash of a Navy jet in the parking lot of a Sorrento Valley industrial park on Monday serves as a reminder of one of the worst nightmares shared by San Diego city planners and Navy officials--the possibility of a catastrophic plane wreck in a developed area near the Miramar Naval Air Station.

While Monday’s crash resulted in only two minor injuries and minor structural damage to buildings adjacent to the crash site, it nevertheless prompted some sober “what-might-have-been” contemplation among city officials who have long realized that development near Miramar poses, in the words of Planning Director Jack Van Cleave, “a risk that’s always there.”

“The reality is that there’s always going to be some risk associated with development around or near any airport,” Van Cleave said. “In the planning process, you try to minimize those risks as much as possible. But you can’t completely eliminate (the risks).”

Through strict limitations on the type of development permitted near the Miramar airfield or on property that lies below flight paths, San Diego planning officials have sought to minimize the potential for disaster inherent in any development near any airport. Indeed, city officials and others credited those guidelines--which, among other things, forbid residential housing in the area of Monday’s crash--for helping to avert a catastrophe Monday.

“The density that is there, which allowed for that parking lot, is what saved a lot of lives,” said Roy Johnson, a Navy community liaison officer. “If that density had been any tighter, or if it had been residential housing, we would have had a catastrophe.”

However, both public and private officials concede that the only way to make Miramar truly “disaster-proof,” to use Van Cleave’s phrase, would be to ban development for miles around the airfield--an approach that virtually everyone agrees is unrealistic.

“It’s one thing to have a concern and another to overreact to that concern,” said City Councilman Bill Mitchell. “Sure, you’re concerned and we should be cautious. But you can’t leave a big corridor of land vacant clear to Sorrento Valley or all the way to Del Mar just because planes happen to pass over it.”

“Ideally, the entire . . . departure (path) should be a mile-wide swath from Miramar to the ocean,” added George Cote, an Orange County attorney and aviation specialist who has done extensive studies on the Miramar flight paths. “But let’s face it, that’s not realistic. Maybe in Lardlake, Neb., but not in San Diego.”

A study by the San Diego Association of Governments in the late 1970s showed that Miramar averages about three air crashes annually. Last year, four planes that took off from the airfield crashed--two in the ocean and two in the desert.

Monday’s accident was the 10th Miramar flight to crash on land in San Diego in the past 10 years, seven of them on the base itself. In 1978, an F-14 fighter jet attempting to land at Miramar crashed and burned on Interstate 15, killing a crew member and seriously wounding the pilot. In 1980, another F-14 crashed on a wooded hillside in Santee. In that accident, the fliers parachuted to safety and no one on the ground was injured.

Because Miramar’s so-called potential “crash zones” extend northwest from the airfield to the Pacific Ocean, proposals for development in areas such as University City, Mira Mesa and along the coast from La Jolla to Del Mar often produce debates that pit safety questions against financial considerations.

For example, in 1981, the San Diego City Council approved a 2,500-unit residential development, called the Lake at La Jolla Village, despite objections that the project was located dangerously close to Miramar.

During debate over the project, located just outside Miramar’s crash zones, Rear Adm. George Furlong warned, “To put 10,000 people . . . about two miles off the runway of the busiest Navy air station in the world does not make much sense.” Despite the council’s approval, the project, located south of La Jolla Village Drive and west of Interstate 805, just east of University Towne Centre, has not yet been built.

Safety considerations also prompted city officials to scale back hotel development plans near the Torrey Pines golf courses last year. Recently, a proposal to build a hotel on Miramar Road was withdrawn after city planners made it clear that they regarded the resulting high population density so near the Navy airfield as being unacceptably hazardous, Van Cleave said.

“Developers being what they are, they’re going to go for the most bang for the buck,” Cote said. “You just need to do the best you can and hope in the future if something happens, it will happen the way this one did.”

Allen Jones, a deputy city planning director, stated the thorny issue another way.

“Obviously, there’s some risk,” Jones said. “But what you hear from developers is, if the probability of a crash in a certain area is a tiny fraction of 1%, then you’re creating an unrealistic restriction if you don’t allow any development. So, if you can’t stop development, you control it to try to avoid problems.”

Realizing that they cannot surround Miramar NAS with a buffer of totally undeveloped land, city planners, exercising what Jones calls “realistic . . . prudence,” have attempted to limit the types of developments permitted near the airfield.

The most hazardous zone, the one closest to the airport, is contained within Miramar NAS itself, thereby precluding other development. Development also is heavily restricted in the second zone, which stretches from south of Scripps Ranch to Interstate 805. In that zone, the major permissible land uses include agriculture, natural recreation areas and light manufacturing.

The third zone, which extends from the airport to the ocean, also has “a measurable potential for accidents,” according to the 1977 Sandag study. However, because of the area’s greater distance from the airport, a wider range of uses, including office buildings and commercial and retail developments such as restaurants or movie theaters, are permitted.

Monday’s crash apparently occurred near the far boundary of that third zone, an area where residential development is normally not permitted. (The lack of specificity of the crash zones made it difficult to determine whether the crash site was just within or narrowly outside the zone, local officials said.)

Jones, however, expressed a sentiment echoed by others when he explained that the difficulty of using crash zone studies to help plan development stems from the fact that the zones are “just some computer’s best guess of where a plane’s going to go down.”

“The problem is, you can draw some lines on a map, but a plane’s still going to come down wherever it happens to fall out of the sky,” Jones said. “You have to hope you get lucky.”