Pacifica High School, Oxnard
This photo is facing west. This is a brand new school near one of the main
intersections of town. Somehow they managed to save this major, mile square
area as agricultural until about 2000. Now the new High School is already surrounded
by new homes (and one small remaining farm whose demise is imminent). They built
this with conventional east facing sprint straight, significant because the
winds here during track season are intense. This track has six obnoxious metal
utility boxes (at the beginning, center and end of each straight). I got to
watch them progressively do the layers of construction on this project by hand
and truck driven sled--the Seal Flex method. It seems simple, almost primative
but you wouldn't know the quality of the surface from the more complicated poured
in place tracks (except there is no noticible seam in the middle of lane 5 here
as there is on most poured tracks). Unique to this track, there is a curious
wide section near the start of the sprints, an accentuated downhill section
just behind the hurdle start line and a half-width (unused) tenth lane. The
wide section (behind the stands on the left in this picture) could be used as
a staging area--but I've actually been the Starter at several of the meets here
and it is not used for such. I'll also say the boxes block the view of the start
lines--very few other tracks have that kind of obstruction near their start
lines. And finally this picture certainly shows the stains as the inner four
lanes are regularly flooded. Having watched this from its inception, the Seal
Flex product is doing fine so far except for one hole that was punched through
the entire surface (how I don't know, its in lane 2 just past the 200 start).
In the lenght of time it took me to notice the problem, a crew has come through
town and done a (clean but noticible) repair to the surface. That's the way
all schools should handle such problems--if the little problems are not repaired,
they turn into big problems.