Quake Danger Forces Van Nuys Airport Officials to Find New Home

Van Nuys Airport administrators are moving out of their 61-year-old headquarters because it would be too expensive to strengthen the building to meet earthquake safety standards.

The airport staff of about 25 will move out by the end of the year, airport spokesman Bob Hayes said Thursday.

The airport headquarters moved into the building it now uses in 1958, when one of the two runways at the city-owned airport was lengthened, crossing Sherman Way and extending behind the building. The runway was lengthened to accommodate jet fighters assigned at the time to the California Air National Guard unit based at the airport.

Before then, the Spanish colonial-style building, on Hayvenhurst Avenue between Sherman Way and Vanowen Street, was Hayvenhurst Elementary School, said Bill Rivera, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Classroom of Astronauts

Astronauts Sally Ride and Kathryn Sullivan, the first two American women in space, attended first grade there together in 1957. The two women, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, discovered while preparing for a space mission in 1984 that they had been classmates there, although they could not recall knowing each other.

The building was constructed in 1926, Rivera said.

It has not complied with earthquake construction standards since 1971, “and we’ve finally just about run out of extensions from the Department of Building and Safety,” said Airport Manager Charles D. Zeman.

The building is made of unreinforced brick. “Tests showed that the mortar holding the bricks together is still good, but that makes no difference,” Zeman said. It was estimated that reinforcing the building to meet the regulations would cost “over $500,000, and then we’d still have a building that’s more than 50 years old,” he said.

The airport staff will move into offices in the Airport Plaza, a privately owned office building recently completed on land leased from the airport at Hayvenhurst and Sherman Way, Hayes said.

Renting 3,000 square feet of office space will cost about $5,000 a month, Zeman said. The city Board of Airport Commissioners has not yet agreed to leasing arrangements.

“The decision was made to lease for about three years and decide at some later point whether to continue leasing or build a new headquarters,” Hayes said.

The present headquarters will be razed, he said. No decision has been made on what to do with the site, he said.

Airport officials on Thursday also announced a slight increase in air traffic at the Van Nuys facility.

In the first nine months of the year, the airport recorded 376,821 takeoffs and landings, a 4.2% increase from the total recorded in the same period last year.

The increase in flights reverses a 10-year downward trend. Traffic at the airport hit an all-time high of 618,694 operations--takeoffs and landings--in 1976. It has fallen in most years since, to 477,689 last year, the lowest total since 1965.

Hayes attributed the increase to good flying weather in the summer. The rainy spell will probably reduce operations in the fourth quarter of the year, he said.