Loss of Earthquake Study Center Shakes Up California Scientists

Wilfred Iwan knew the $50 million had slipped away from California sometime in late summer. For almost a year, Iwan and other California scientists had campaigned for the government awards that would bring a national research center for earthquakes to Berkeley. Last August, as the federal review panel finished its tour of California facilities, the panel members began to ask questions. And, Iwan thought to himself, they were the wrong questions.

“I was expecting them to ask about the proposed research, whether the research would save lives in the next great earthquake,” said Iwan, an engineering professor at Caltech. “Instead, they wanted to talk about management structure, who would be boss and so forth. I knew we were in trouble.”

Iwan left the meeting unsettled. He believed that the California team represented the most sophisticated earthquake engineers in the world. Half a century of seismic disasters and near disasters had drawn them to this region; if there was such a thing as an earthquake Establishment, it existed along the university corridor running from Berkeley to Stanford to Caltech.

Clearly, it seemed to Iwan, the main issue in the competition for the center should be the quality of research. Why, then, was the review panel so absorbed in questions about the administration matrix?

The answer came a week later when the National Science Foundation announced that the research center would be built on a little-known campus of the state university system in Buffalo, N.Y. The foundation lauded the New York university’s strong management scheme and said that it expected the development of a “world class center.”

Normally in the academic world such defeats are taken with public, if not private, graciousness. That has not been the case with the Earthquake Engineering Research Center. The notion of locating an earthquake center in a region where earthquakes are rare and earthquake scientists hard to find has produced a storm of accusation.

In California, scientists have charged the National Science Foundation--the principal federal agency for awarding scientific grants--with violating its own rules of impartiality and have asked that the competition be reopened. Further, seismic experts here have claimed that the New York scientists copied material from California scientific papers and used it without attribution in the Buffalo proposal.

In Washington, Sen. Pete Wilson (R.-Calif.) and other members of the California Congressional delegation have persuaded the Government Accounting Office to investigate the actions of Science Foundation officials. Wilson has promised a legislative attempt to block funds for the center if the investigation shows wrongdoing.

All of this has been met with wearied skepticism at Buffalo. A spokesman for the university characterizes the California complaints as “a classic case of sour grapes.”

“Their peers judged them and said no,” said Harry Jackson, the spokesman. “Now they are trying to gain in the media and in politics what they couldn’t gain through their peers.”

The virulence of the reaction stems, in part, from the stakes involved: $50 million represents almost half of all the earthquake research funds available in the United States over the five years of the program, and the losers in the competition will be left to fight over the scraps. Of the $50 million, half will come from the federal government and half from other sources.

As designed, the center will become the major focus for the government’s program to make cities safer from earthquakes. The crucial need for advances in this area was emphasized last year by the earthquake in Mexico City, where more than 10,000 persons died even though Mexico City has one of the most sophisticated earthquake building codes in the world.

Among other issues, the earthquake center will be responsible for creating designs for earthquake-resistant buildings, bridges, dams and other public facilities. It will also be charged with developing methods to make existing structures more secure from shaking, and to transfer those methods as quickly as possible into local building codes.

Beyond questions of academic prestige, California scientists contend that locating the center in Buffalo could jeopardize the success of its mission. A slowdown in research is inevitable, they said, as the Buffalo campus spends time accumulating faculty and bringing their research up to the level of more-established institutions.

Fears Cost in Lives

Iwan, who also is chairman of the California Seismic Safety Commission, recently wrote to the National Science Foundation on behalf of the commission: “I fear that this decision may, unfortunately, result in substantially higher losses of life and property in the next U.S. great earthquake than would have been the case. We can only hope that this earthquake will be slow in coming.”

Some seismic engineers outside California agree with this assessment. One researcher from the Midwest who spoke on condition that he not be identified said: “It is very likely that the development of new ideas will slow down for a while. There is no history of notable (earthquake) work at Buffalo; the government is making a leap of faith.”

In Washington, National Science Foundation officials said that these fears are based on a short-term view of the decision. While it is true that a year or more will pass before the Buffalo center will be brought up to speed, they contended that the Buffalo facility eventually will outperform the center that was proposed for California.

“They (California scientists) thought they had it locked up,” said Erich Bloch, director of the foundation. “There’s no birthright.”

Consortium of Schools

Like California’s, the New York proposal was produced by a consortium of universities that include Cornell, Columbia, Lehigh, Princeton and others.

“They will grow with the job,” said Nam P. Suh, assistant director at the National Science Foundation, who headed the search for a location for the center. “When you set up a center like this you cannot look at just one generation; you must look 20 or 30 years down the road.”

Most importantly, officials within the National Science Foundation contended that the Buffalo scientists prevailed because they adapted to important changes taking place in the way the federal government grapples with troublesome technical problems. California scientists failed to adjust to those changes, they said, and came out the loser.

The changes have emerged from the development of large, centrally controlled research centers. Traditionally, scientists funded by the National Science Foundation have worked individually on projects that are sponsored separately by the foundation. Under the center concept, many researchers working in the same field are brought together to coordinate their efforts.

Centralized Control

Control over the direction of research is bestowed on the center’s director and a management board, rather than on individual scientists. The directors, the argument goes, can maintain an overall view of the problem and keep the research aimed at the best targets.

Centers have been used at science foundation for several decades but under the present foundation director, Erich Bloch, the concept was expanded dramatically. Since Bloch’s appointment by President Reagan in 1984, the foundation has established 16 centers across the nation, ranging from the field of microelectronics to biotechnology engineering.

Last year, when the center concept was extended to earthquake engineering, Suh acknowledged, a strong motive was the foundation’s unhappiness with the direction earthquake research had taken over the last few years.

“When I came here in 1984, we had invested $200 million in taxpayers money to deal with earthquake mitigation,” he said. “I had to ask myself, what have we done with the money?”

Not Priority Research

Some breakthroughs had been made, Suh said, but not enough. “When you support the same people for a long period of time, sometimes they tend to do research because those topics interest them, not necessarily because it is the highest priority in (earthquake) mitigation.” he said. The answer, he added, was a center where research could be controlled more closely.

In California--which received more of the foundation’s earthquake money than any other state under the old system--the notion of a center was greeted with skepticism by some scientists. One engineer said that he regards the concept as “something from the other side of the Iron Curtain--a five-year plan.”

Another member of the California team accused the foundation of misunderstanding the nature of the earthquake problem. “Nam Suh sees that people are still dying after earthquakes and he says, ‘How come you people haven’t solved this problem?’ ” said Haresh Shah, an earthquake engineer at Stanford.

” . . . The fact is, we have made great strides. Compare what happened in Nicaragua in 1973 and in the San Fernando Valley in 1971. Both were the same size earthquakes, but Nicaragua did not have the benefit of good earthquake engineering. In Managua, 6,000 people died and the economy was destroyed; in California, 65-70 people died and there was not a great economic impact.” (The actual death toll in the San Fernando Valley quake was 58.)

‘We Had to Go Along’

Shah said the California scientists debated the center idea for some time before deciding to join the competition. “We felt we had to go along or lose the funding,” he said.

Nonetheless, the California proposal for the center reflected the team’s wariness of being controlled by an all-powerful director. The plan emphasized the team’s research ideas, making a strong plea for the need to make older structures safer from earthquake shaking.

At the same time, the proposal soft pedaled the administrative aspects. The proposal’s diagram of the management structure contains only seven separate elements.

In Buffalo, just the opposite was happening. While the research chapter describes only a general approach to technical problems, the management plan is detailed. The center is divided into two major divisions with three support sections. The New York management diagram contains 19 separate elements.

“Buffalo understood what was needed,” Bloch said. “A center, not a conglomerate.”

Like Football Team

Suh compared the California proposal to a team of football players who all happen to be quarterbacks: “Just to collect all the best quarterbacks and then put them together as one team does not make that team strong. You have to have a team effort, you have to have a strong coach.”

Such comments infuriate the California scientists who maintain that the overwhelming emphasis on management issues violates the foundation’s own criteria for choosing winners. “You have to wonder whether the foundation is in the business of building monuments to itself or making good science,” said one earthquake engineer in California.

In the 1985 announcement of the competition, all but one of the main criteria listed by the foundation refer to the technical competence of the proposals rather than management or other issues.

But references to the technical criteria are difficult to find in the assessments of the two proposals prepared by the National Science Foundation’s review panel. In the four-page assessment of the California plan, for example, two paragraphs are devoted to the research.

Akin to ‘Peer Review’

The members of such review panels are outside experts recruited by the foundation. According to the foundation’s policy manual, panel members should be “experts in the particular field represented in the proposal.” A similar process, known as “peer review,” is used throughout the academic world for judging scientific papers and proposals.

In an analysis of the foundation’s decision, the California Seismic Safety Commission contends that most members of the earthquake panel were not “experts in the particular field.”

“This panel consisted of seven members, only one of whom had any significant earthquake engineering experience,” the commission’s analysis said. “The panel was geographically unbalanced as none of the members were from the western United States.”

If the panel had been made up of earthquake engineers, California scientists argued, the competition almost certainly would have been shifted toward the merit of the scientific research. Because they were not experts, they said, panel members turned toward other issues--such as management structure--that were easier for them to judge.

Moreover, the California scientists contended, the review panel appears to have made its decision to choose Buffalo before it inspected the California facilities. Two weeks before the California site visit, they said foundation records show, the panel recommended to a foundation committee that Buffalo be named the winner.

Foundation officials conceded that such a recommendation was made at the July 24 meeting of the director’s action review board. The action was taken, the agency said, because of Buffalo’s “unique” position in having an early commitment on matching funds from a New York state agency but that the recommendation was made contingent on the outcome of the site visit to California. The universities involved in the California proposal included the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford, Caltech and USC.

As for the absence of earthquake engineers from the review panel, assistant director Suh said the foundation purposely set out to attract people with a variety of skills to the panel. Some were civil engineers, a field closely related to earthquake engineering, Suh said, and others were experienced in running large research organizations or university engineering departments.

“These people have perspective; they know what it takes to run a large R and D (research and development) operation,” he said.

William R. Griener, provost at the state university at Buffalo, said the review panel responded to the businesslike atmosphere they found in New York. “The scientists here delivered on time and indicated a seriousness of purpose,” he said. “I’m not sure you can say the same about California; sometimes people tend to rest on their laurels.”

In Washington, aides to Sen. Wilson said that, among other issues, they have asked the Government Accounting Office to investigate the possibility that political pressure played a part in the decision. Aides to Rep. Jack F. Kemp (R.-N.Y.), who represents the Buffalo area, have said that the New York congressman campaigned to win the award for Buffalo, including making use of his White House contacts.

Foundation officials conceded that the agency received overtures from political representatives from both sides, but contend that those efforts played no part in the decision. Jack Renirie, a spokesman for the agency, said that when the foundation receives promotional letters from congressmen, “We usually write back and tell them we’ll let them know when the decision has been made.”

The GAO said that it has no schedule for the completion of its investigation. Staff members said that similar investigations usually take between three and six months.

Similarly, the National Science Foundation said that it does not know when its own inquiry into the plagiarism charges will be finished. The charges involve allegations by two California professors that about 50 lines of their material were used word-for-word in the New York proposal without attribution.

Jerome Fregeau, the foundation official in charge of the inquiry, said that his office will make distinctions between the copying of incidental material and material that involves “fundamental ideas.”

“If it falls into the latter category, we would have to regard the situation as very serious. We won’t know until we have received some answers from Buffalo.” Response from the foundation could range from no action to a cancellation of the award, Fregeau said.

No matter what the outcome, some scientists believe that the outcry over the earthquake center may have unsettled the government’s science program for some time to come. The process of awarding research grants is based on trust, normally shared by all involved, tha1948284008best interest of science. Once shattered, one scientist observed, that trust is difficult to restore.

Foundation officials continue to insist that no irregularities took place in the award process, but they acknowledge that the bond of trust has been broken.

“One of my biggest jobs is explaining this process to people,” Suh said. “I spend a lot of time on airplanes just to make sure there are no misunderstandings. This time I guess I failed.”