Re “Bye, Bye, Ice Rink – At Least for Now”
[img]2484|right|James Wright||no_popup[/img]On the day that the City Hall-ordered decommissioning of the venerable Culver City Ice Arena is to begin, and after reviewing the city’s latest sponsored condemnation of the rink, Orange County engineering consultant James D. Wright again has steadfastly confirmed the arena is “completely safe” for short- and long-term operation.
In firmly rejecting the third straight city-sponsored inspection that has led to today’s action, Mr. Wright flatly contradicted findings by City Hall hirees that conditions represent a public health hazard. Even though this potentially fatalistic conclusion has been widely disseminated throughout the past month, suggesting that the lives of next-door residents of an apartment complex and the welfare of “adjacent businesses are at stake daily, the only evacuation commanded by city officials has been at the Ice Arena.
He acknowledged that there is wide room for upgrades and improvements, but emphatically none that represent peril, as posed repeatedly and seemingly heavy-handedly by City Hall.
Mr. Wright, a decades-long inspecting veteran recruited last month by the Ice Arena in the wake of allegedly botched inspection tours under the aegis of City Hall, made this declaration to the newspaper:
“It is my professional opinion that the rink is as safe now as it has been for the past 52 years.
“There is no indication of any imminent failure in the piping or the pressure vessels of the system.
“Typically, you look for severe corrosion or unsafe control conditions. We addressed all of those binary safety issues in the (written) action plan we proposed (last month).”
Mr. Wright said that if he were sending a message to property owner Michael Karagozian, who announced he was shutting down the building for the foreseeable future, he would tell the landlord:
“I am sorry it has come to this. I wish we could have been pro-active years ago and implemented these corrective measures when they were first identified.”
(To be continued)
