OKd All Funds for Safe Roads, Governor Says : Seismic danger: Deukmejian distances himself from blame for freeway collapse. Panel prepares for probe.

Distancing himself from blame for the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway, Gov. George Deukmejian insisted Sunday that he always has approved money requested by Caltrans to shore up highways and make them safe in severe earthquakes.

The governor’s comments left Caltrans fending for itself while engineers, politicians and the public continued to point the finger of blame at people in power. The frugal Deukmejian said one of the questions to be answered by a blue-ribbon investigative team is whether the state transportation department should have requested more money to make highways safer.

“At no time,” he told reporters, “have they ever said, ‘Governor, there’s a possibility that these bridges or double-decked freeways might collapse in an earthquake.’ Never at any time had I been given that kind of information.”

At another point, the governor--whose tone was both defensive and angry--said: “We’ve gotten a lot of criticism because we did not expand the freeway system more quickly. We’ve been spending most of the money on maintenance (and) rehabilitation. No one has ever said to me there hasn’t been enough money to carry out repair (and) maintenance work for public safety.

“Listen, the safety of the people comes first. I mean, that comes before relieving traffic congestion. And certainly if there’s anybody in Caltrans--or anybody else in the state--who would think otherwise, they don’t understand what our policy is.”

Deukmejian did not accuse Caltrans of dropping the ball on earthquake safety, but neither did he offer the agency a vote of confidence.

“I don’t pretend to know all the answers and I’m not going to just simply accept answers from Caltrans,” the governor said. “We’ve got to have a fair and impartial and independent inquiry to find out exactly what happened.”

Jim Drago, the official spokesman for Caltrans, would not comment directly on the governor’s remarks. But he said: “We certainly welcome the outside investigative team. We want to get to the bottom of this. We want to know the answers. If anyone can help us get to those answers, great.”

Deukmejian also expressed concern about the man he has named to head the investigative team because of an article he wrote, generally praising Caltrans, for The Times’ op-ed page. The article, published the day after the quake, concluded that “now is not the time for knocking Caltrans.”

“I will talk to him about that,” Deukmejian said. “If he has already made some preconceived decision, then he obviously would not be the appropriate person to head up that team.”

The designated chairman of the investigative team--Ian G. Buckle, deputy director of the National Center for Earthquake Engineering Research in Buffalo, N.Y.,--said that the governor need not question his objectivity.

“I don’t think he has any need to be concerned,” Buckle said. “If I find fault (with Caltrans) I would have no problem in bringing it out in public.”

Buckle said he assumed that Transportation Director Robert Best nominated him to head the commission, which will be evaluating the department’s performance. He said he was familiar with top Caltrans engineers because, as a private consultant working for a Berkeley engineering firm, he helped redesign a bridge on U.S. 101 near Candlestick Park.

But Buckle downplayed his connection to the department. “One cannot work on the seismic design of bridges without working closely with the people at Caltrans, because they do more of it than anyone else,” he said.

Deukmejian talked with reporters after appearing on ABC’s “This Week with David Brinkley.” All three network interview shows Sunday concentrated on the Northern California earthquake. Among the other comments:

* Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) urged President Bush to abandon his adamant opposition to tax increases and raise the gasoline tax to finance a nationwide program of strengthening roadways. “About a quarter of the bridges in the United States are not safe,” said Moynihan, chairman of the Senate water resources, transportation and infrastructure subcommittee. “I would hope that the combination of Hurricane Hugo and the California earthquake might hit the Administration (at a) nine on the Richter Scale.”

Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Moynihan also advocated taking $5 billion from the $12-billion federal highway trust fund and giving it to California for earthquake relief.

* Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), appearing on the same show, said he expects Congress to waive the Gramm-Rudman deficit limits in order to provide earthquake disaster aid. Congress is required by current law to cut the federal budget to reduce the deficit to $100 billion.

* Lt. Gov. Leo T. McCarthy, interviewed with Cranston, estimated that the total bill to the federal and state governments for earthquake aid would be “more than $4.4 billion.”

McCarthy also said he is concerned about “several other” double-deck freeways that appear to have weaknesses similar to the Nimitz. He named two in San Francisco--the Embarcadero and the easternmost section of Interstate 280, both of which have been closed.

Deukmejian described the pancaked Nimitz--deathtrap for an unknown number of motorists--as “just a sickening sight . . . most of them never had a chance.”

“I still can’t believe what happened,” the governor said, “because I’ve always been under the impression that the freeways could withstand a quake of that severity. If anybody had ever suggested that that stretch, or any other stretch of freeway or any bridge, was unsafe--that it couldn’t withstand a quake of that severity--then it should have been closed.”

Caltrans reassessed the safety of its roads after the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, which collapsed freeway bridges in the San Fernando Valley and claimed 58 lives.

But it took until this year for the department to complete the $54-million first phase of the retrofit program, which involved securing highway decking to the concrete support columns. This was done on more than 1,200 elevated structures, including the section of the Nimitz Freeway that collapsed, Caltrans officials said.

The second phase of the project, expected to cost about $65 million, involves wrapping steel reinforcement around the columns themselves. But Phase 2 applies only to highways supported by a single column--not those, such as the Nimitz, where the roadway decks rest atop concrete columns grouped in pairs.

William E. Schaefer, chief engineer for Caltrans, has said repeatedly since the quake that the technology to reinforce the double-column bridges does not exist. Researchers at UC San Diego are expected to devise a solution soon, Schaefer said.

But a number of private engineers and at least one high-ranking Caltrans engineer have said that technology has been available to protect structures such as the Nimitz. And they contend it has not been used because of budget constraints. That view was supported Sunday by Wilfred Iwan, a professor of applied mechanics at Caltech and former chairman of the state’s Seismic Safety Commission.

“The engineering, I believe, was there and available to have made the kind of fixes that were needed,” Iwan said on the Brinkley show. “It would take a lot of money to strengthen these structures. There are a lot of competing social issues that take money. Preparedness for earthquakes is only one.”

Deukmejian, however, insisted that “all of the priorities that Caltrans recognized (as) needed to be accomplished have been accomplished. To my knowledge, any request that we have received . . . for work relating to protection against seismic activity . . . has all been approved and authorized. Nothing has ever been turned down or denied.”

Times staff writer Doyle McManus in Washington contributed to this report.