EDITORIAL REVISITING BELMONT STUDY OR NO STUDY, BUILDING A HIGH SCHOOL ON TOP OF A LEAKY OIL WELL IS A BAD IDEA.

HERE'S a bit of advice for the Los Angeles school board as it faces intensifying pressure to consider resurrecting the Belmont Learning Center fiasco: Take a walk before you take a vote.

Stroll down to Rockwood Street near downtown, and pay a visit to the home of Mario Flores, whose problem was recently reported in the Daily News.

Flores, his wife, his daughter and six tenants live in a two-story building a few hundred yards from the Belmont Learning Center.

Like Belmont, their house is built atop an improperly capped, abandoned, old, shallow oil well. It reeks of rotten eggs and hydrogen sulfide, a potentially deadly gas. The stench is so strong that when they first moved in, the Floreses got headaches.

State investigators found levels of hydrogen sulfide at least 100 times higher than the safe level - ``at least'' because 100 times higher than the safe level is as high as the investigators' meters would go. It's probably even worse.

Levels of explosive methane gas were so high that officials turned off the pilot light in the basement's hot-water heater for fear that it could cause an explosion.

Now, imagine running a school in that kind of environment.

Imagine a learning center that has to keep its doors and windows open all day so that the methane can safely circulate outside. Imagine teachers and students being greeted each morning with the smell of rotten eggs.

Imagine the workers' compensation bills that would pile up once teachers started complaining about headaches or even worse maladies.

Imagine the lawsuits that would be filed any time a student comes down with a serious disease, regardless of the cause.

Imagine the moral gravity of deliberately exposing our children to this kind of risk.

After wasting $175 million building half of the Belmont Learning Center, the Board of Education made the right decision and decided to cut its losses. The risk was too great, the danger too real, to chance further development.

Now Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Roy Romer has taken up the banner of Belmont supporters clamoring for a ``completed environmental report'' - a costly bureaucratic exercise to try to convince the public that what it already knows about Belmont isn't really true.

But reassurances from the regulatory agencies who have never addressed L.A.'s oil well problem - let alone proposed a solution for correcting it - are no reassurance.

That is the core of the problem exposed by the Belmont saga and the plight of the residents of the house on Rockwood Street: local and state agencies have no system in place to deal with these problems, so nobody has done anything to help the Flores family just as nobody did anything to stop Belmont before it was too late.

The assurances that the system has been fixed just aren't true.

Look at the Flores family, who can't get anyone to help them because no local or state agency has taken responsibility for the health and safety issues raised by deadly and explosive gases leaching from the oil-saturated ground beneath much of Los Angeles.