I hope you saw our story on the Navy Broadway Complex. We spent months trying to find documents and experts and gain insights chasing what I thought was a pretty good hunch. We suspected there is a active fault under the proposed site of the Broadway Complex. That’s that primo piece of land the Navy owns and Super Developer Doug Manchester is hoping to build on. It’s received lots of news coverage. But I never saw any reports or coverage on my hunch. So I began tracking the story—and now I get the distinct impression that the Centre City Development Corporation, some elements inside the City of San Diego, developer Doug Manchester and possibly the U.S.Navy would probably have preferred we passed on the hunch.

We ran into problems early on. The first obstacle was finding an expert to review the initial seismic report by the geologists hired by Manchester -- the company is GeoCon. I have heard for years about fault movement in the downtown area and I figured Manchester’s geologic study would prove to me once and for all there were or were not active faults in the area. When I went through the report, there were two things that struck me. I learned little about any potential seismic movement in the area of the project. And just as important to me was some pages were missing out of the geologists report and missing things in reports involving big money projects tend to motivate me to want to know more about what is going on. So I was left questioning how the report concluded that the geologists “did not find signs of faulting at the site. It is suitable for the proposed development.” Right then, I knew I needed someone who was familiar with the industry and these types of reports. It took some time to find an expert; not a lot of folks will step up and critique a Manchester project. He’s a heavyweight and this is clearly an important project for his people. We ended up calling all over the country before we were referred back to someone right here in San Diego -- Dr. Jeffrey Johnson. He is qualified and careful, which is important when you are chasing a subject like this. I liked and trusted him immediately because he was not interested in publicity or money but he was also curious about the efforts made by the geologists working for GeoCon.

The good doctor agreed to review the GeoCon study inside and out. He then created a report for 10News which you can find in its entirety on the 10News Investigations section of this website. Read it for yourself. Eventually the Manchester people did provide me the missing pages from the GeoCon report. Those missing sections provided allowed Dr. Johnson to finish his appraisal of the geologist’s seismic report. His findings? A more detailed and through investigation of the proposed job site is needed.

Producer Kristen Castillo found an important element for us -- a report prepared by geologist Michael Kennedy for CalTrans. He mapped and named the Coronado Fault while surveying the San Diego Bay as part of a check-up of the Coronado Bridge in 2001. He had concluded it was an active fault. Reporter Marti Emerald found Dr. Jeff Babcok at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography was mapping the fault using some high tech gadgets. We can’t tell you the exact location of the fault lines but we could if a more thorough study were done or when Dr. Babcok finishes his project.

An active fault is defined as one that has moved in the last 10,000 years. That seems like a long time but not when you consider the age of Mother Earth. We found the Coronado Fault was active as recently as 500 years ago. The best guess we have is it runs from the eastern side of Coronado directly into the Navy Broadway Complex site and then jogs north along the Embarcadero.

Here is the no-brainer part -- you can't build on an active fault, if you know it is active. IF YOU KNOW IT IS ACTIVE. Based on the GeoCon report, once Manchester and the Navy worked out the details, they could start building. But what we found seems to say otherwise.

We tried to tell Mayor Sanders about what we had found. Marti asked for an interview but we got blown off and ended up talking with his spokesman, Fred Sainz. It was a useless interview. Sainz clearly thought we were wasting his time, he knew less about the subject then we did, and he didn’t care what Dr. Johnson’s report said. It wasn’t the city's problem, he said, it was Manchester's and the Navy's.

Here’s the latest. Several watchdog citizens groups have been part of this effort. They’re bright, informed and are not easily brushed aside by arrogant publicists or blustery bureaucrats. Activist Ian Trowbridge had attorney Cory Briggs filed an appeal of the Center City Development Corporation's decision on the amended master plan for the Navy Broadway Complex. It says CCDC has violated the Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act and the Seismic Hazards Mapping Act. And community activist Kathryn Rhodes has done a great deal of research on faults. She tipped me to the report that killed the proposed Coronado Tunnel. It went down in flames when the consultants found a fault near the tunnel's proposed path.

I spoke to Mr. Briggs about the appeal and he told me something that’s got me motivated again on the story. The attorney told me (on his way out the door to get married) that it took him four days of back-and-forth e-mails and shouting on the phone to CCDC officials to find out which FORM he has to fill out to appeal the decision. They kept telling him it was a waste of time.
Maybe. Maybe not.

jwblog@10news.com