Earthquake Safety Standards Must Be Enforced

#24 SEISMIC UPGRADES

As any longtime resident of Southern California will remind you, it’s not earthquakes that kill people. It’s the buildings.

After the 6.7 magnitude Northridge temblor that caused upwards of $40 billion in losses in 1994, state, county and city authorities quickly passed laws requiring stricter codes both for new and existing buildings.

But 10 years later, fragmented authority over enforcing those laws, lack of funding for inspections and retrofits, and political wavering have enabled building owners to drag their heels.

Creating a statewide agency to oversee earthquake retrofitting and “deputizing” the officials in all the agencies conducting inspections and enforcement would be a start.

So would the exemption of retrofits from increased property tax, and increased taxes and fees on non-compliant properties. In addition, insurance companies should be required by the state to make retrofits or earthquake mitigation measures a condition of coverage.

For obvious reasons, hospitals have been at the center of the debate over earthquake construction and retrofitting. They house people who are often unable to move in the event of a temblor. Also, hospitals must continue to function after an earthquake.

California law requires pre-existing hospital buildings to be brought up to the same level of performance as newly built hospitals. But resistance from the hospital industry and a lack of funding for inspectors have slowed progress.

More than half of the 665 hospital buildings in L.A. County pose “a significant risk of collapse and danger to the public after a strong earthquake” and were required to be retrofitted, replaced or removed from acute care service by 2008, according to a 2001 report by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development. Many of those facilities have received an extension to 2013.

More inspectors would allow speedier review of hospital building plans. Even more important is securing funding for the retrofits at public and non-profit hospitals through a low-interest, state-funded bond measure. For privately owned hospitals, a straight tax credit in place of the existing tax deduction for construction costs would lessen the hardship and prevent hospital closures.

The costs estimated to bring hospitals up to the second-lowest structural rating level vary from $3 to $15 per square foot. Replacing hospitals, many of which exceed 1 million square feet, would cost $250 to $600 per square foot.

Of course, hospitals are only a start. There are thousands of privately owned non-ductile concrete buildings in Los Angeles County that have little lateral flex and are prone to collapse in earthquakes. Former L.A. City Councilman Hal Bernson, who led the effort after the Northridge quake to pass city ordinances requiring retrofitting, believes the city may be liable for injuries and deaths caused by these collapses because owners are not being forced to retrofit them. Fixing the buildings would cost about $13 a square foot, or 10 percent of their replacement cost.

Then there are the approximately 200 mid- and high-rise steel-frame structured buildings in the City of Los Angeles that have a faulty weld in their frames’ column-to-beam connections that were damaged in the Northridge disaster. While these buildings aren’t expected to collapse in a future quake, they could still be rendered uninhabitable, leaving thousands of residents homeless. Retrofitting them would run $10,000 to $25,000 per joint, or at least 20 percent of the total building development cost.

Despite the city’s 1995 ordinance requiring those buildings to be inspected and retrofitted, few have been fixed. Building owners have to pay for the costly retrofits, and city council members, whose districts include many such buildings, have backed down from enforcing them under pressure from landlords. Removing the task of enforcing retrofits from cities to the state would eliminate that complication.

The billions it will cost to make L.A. County as earthquake safe as technology allows are relatively affordable compared with the potential destruction caused by a major quake if vulnerable buildings remain unchanged.

SEISMIC UPGRADES

Proposal: Enforce retrofitting laws, use public funding and tax credits to help building owners pay for retrofits

Obstacles: Lack of political will to enforce building standards, high costs of retrofitting

Cost: Several billion dollars

Time Frame: 20 years