Citing the weak financial state of California’s hospitals, Sen. Jackie Speier introduced legislation on Wednesday that would push back the date by which hospitals have to meet new seismic safety standards.

The legislation would eliminate a 2008 deadline imposed by a law passed shortly after the 1994 Northridge earthquake that requires hospitals to retrofit their facilities so they remain standing after a major earthquake.

The hospitals instead would be required to build new facilities by 2020 that would not only remain standing after an earthquake but remain operational a mandate included in the 1994 law, though not until 2030.

“We are living in a Code Blue in California as it relates to the sustainability of our hospitals,” said Speier, D-San Francisco, during a news conference announcing the legislation. “The bill is going to be a step in that direction of providing relief to hospitals.”

The original legislation was passed after the Northridge quake caused several billion dollars in damage to area hospitals, including closing Saint John’s Medical Center in Santa Monica for nine months.

Since then hospitals across the state, including Saint John’s, UCLA Medical Center and others, have spent billions of dollars building new facilities. Other hospitals, especially those serving poor urban areas and rural ones, have complained they did not have the financial resources to do so.

Duane Dauner, president of the California Hospital Association, said the hospital industry went along with the law 10 years ago because it thought it would be able to cheaply retrofit facilities by the 2008 deadline while saving for the presumed bigger expense of building new hospitals until 2030.

However, the past decade has shown that it’s not cost effective to retrofit and instead hospitals have been forced into accelerated construction plans.

Speier said she was prompted to introduce the legislation because 79 hospitals have closed across the state since 1996 for a loss of 7,000 hospital beds, while no one has died from an earthquake in a California hospital since the 1973 Sylmar temblor.

Labor unions representing nurses and other workers have consistently resisted efforts to relax the 1994 requirements, and on Wednesday at least one group reacted warily to the proposal.

“It doesn’t do any good to have a hospital that falls on people during an earthquake,” said Chuck Idelson, spokesman for the California Nurses Association. “They have had plenty of advance notice to rebuild.”