Oakland medical centre to meet explosive end later this week.
Friday marks the explosive end of the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital. Specialists will set charges to implode the crumbling, 11-storey concrete building Friday morning. Aside from the historic Club Knoll, the hospital is the last structures standing among the nearly 100 military homes, barracks, stores, gyms, warehouses and other mostly wood buildings that dotted the bucolic, tree-shaded base in the East Oakland hills.
The facility was formally decommissioned in 1996 during a wave of base closures around the country. After some fits and starts with another master developer, the federal government sold the 186-acre property at auction in 2005 to SunCal for $100.5 million. SunCal Oak Knoll LLC planned to build 960 homes, some affordable, most market rate, with 82,000 square feet of commercial space and 50 acres of trails and open space. The developer also promised to restore and reopen Club Knoll.
But then the bottom fell out. The company’s financial partner, Lehman Brothers, filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and SunCal did the same on 19 projects it shared with the failed financial giant, including Oak Knoll. Everything stopped except the court battles.
Workers who had started stripping the old buildings of asbestos to ready them for demolition left when SunCal could no longer pay them, leaving piles of trash behind. Vandals stripped wiring, pipes and every bit of metal from the structures, trespassers used them as party houses and their walls as graffiti canvasses. Drug dealers and squatters took over the hospital and other buildings for a time.
Oakland City Attorney John Russo ended up filing $6.7 million claims against Lehman Brothers in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York to get money to secure the property, abate the fire hazards, and finish remediation and demolition. The court released $3.7 million in November 2009, but it still took more than a year and another $1.7 million from the court to get it done.
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