Official Saw No Need to Bolster Bridges in ’85

A senior state Department of Transportation engineer in charge of the program to strengthen bridges to make them earthquake-resistant reported in 1985 that there was no need to bolster bridge columns until future earthquakes showed them to be vulnerable, state documents show.

Ray J. Zelinski, head of the bridge retrofitting program, told participants in a seismic workshop in New Zealand that California’s project to tie bridge roadbeds together with steel cables may have made it unnecessary to strengthen supporting columns.

“It should be noted,” Zelinski said in a paper delivered at the workshop, “that column retrofits have been avoided by designing restraining features in a manner which circumvents collapse due to column damage. Review of behavior of retrofitted bridges during earthquakes will determine whether features will need improvement and whether columns need to be considered for retrofitting.”

Zelinski’s paper was released by Caltrans on Monday along with a raft of other technical documents.

Caltrans officials have come under criticism from structural engineers for not doing retrofitting work on the columns of the double-decked Nimitz Freeway in Oakland that collapsed and killed at least 39 people in last Tuesday’s earthquake. It is not clear whether the structure collapsed because of column failure or some other weakness in the structure.

Caltrans officials have maintained that further research is necessary before multiple columns such as those that held up the Nimitz can be reinforced. They say that funding limitations have prevented a more accelerated retrofitting program.

But James E. Roberts, chief of Caltrans’ structures division, acknowledged Tuesday that the the retrofitting program may well have been slowed down because of the belief of Zelinski and other state engineers that such reinforcement was not necessary.

“That tells you about why we haven’t seen the need to move . . . faster,” Roberts told The Times.

Roberts stressed that he thought the project to tie roadbed sections together had been highly effective. Such reinforcement had been done on the Nimitz.

He said that Zelinski still believes the tie-down system should be enough to prevent bridge failures, although the collapse of the Nimitz “shakes his faith a little.”

Based partly on conclusions by the department’s seismic unit, Caltrans in 1985 told the state Division of Mines and Geology that bridges along Interstate 880 in Alameda County, including the Nimitz, could be expected to withstand a quake more severe than last week’s 7.1-magnitude temblor, although they would suffer some damage.

Zelinski himself has acknowledged stating in 1985 that the retrofit program would protect every bridge in the system against a quake as severe as the 8-magnitude 1906 earthquake that destroyed San Francisco. Zelinski has been ordered by superiors and Caltrans attorneys not to comment further.

Since last week’s Bay Area quake, Caltrans engineers have sought to portray their retrofitting program as an orderly, three-phase project that started with roadbeds, would move to freeways supported by single columns and then conclude with work on multiple-column structures such as the Nimitz. But interviews and documents released by the department suggest that the pace of the program was actually set by a series of major quakes in the state.

Roberts maintains that it has been the department’s goal since the 1971 Sylmar earthquake in the San Fernando Valley to retrofit both columns and roadbeds. Both of those failed during the Sylmar quake.

But it was not until after the 1987 Whittier quake severely damaged some freeway columns in the Los Angeles area that Caltrans approved a contract with the University of California at San Diego for research into strengthening columns. Roberts says Caltrans officials had been discussing such research before the Whittier earthquake.

Caltrans engineers conceded Tuesday that the research now under way at UC San Diego was never intended to address multiple-column structures such as the Nimitz. In light of the collapse, such multiple-column freeways are now considered vulnerable.

“They (UCSD researchers) haven’t been asked to do that,” Roberts said. “We’re talking about it.”

Instead, the UCSD work is aimed at finding a way to strengthen structures supported by cylindrical single columns. About 700 such bridges and elevated highways were considered the highest priority before the Bay Area quake, and still are, Roberts said.

He added, however, that he recommended to Gov. George Deukmejian in a face-to-face meeting the day after the Bay Area earthquake that research on the multiple-column structures be accelerated.

“I didn’t get a ‘No,’ so we are going to move ahead,” Roberts said.

In another development Tuesday, a former Caltrans bridge designer who now is public works director for the city of Pleasant Hill alleged that the Nimitz structure was not designed to the highest engineering standards when it was built in the mid-1950s.

Jim See, who worked at the construction site as an entry-level engineer before going on to design bridges, said the freeway’s columns were not sufficiently reinforced with horizontal steel supports.

Caltrans has maintained that this was not done because standards at the time did not include such supports. But See, pointing to a 1952 design manual published by the Chicago-based Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute, disputes that.

The Nimitz structure, which opened in 1957, had columns with vertical steel reinforcement. The vertical steel bars were circled by a single horizontal bar every 12 inches along the length of each column.

But the design manual, which is based on standards published by the American Concrete Institute and the American Assn. of State Highway and Transportation Officials, calls for a different, stronger approach, according to See. The manual suggests that every vertical steel bar be wrapped by interlacing horizontal bars to restrain its movement in any direction.

“Every bar must be braced,” said See, who has examined the original plans for the structure and visited the site of the disaster. “Any bar that is not braced will fail.”

Roberts said his staff is investigating See’s allegation. Roberts said he believes that the bridge was built to standards set by the American Assn. of State Highway Officials. In any case, he said, columns with the kind of supports described by See failed in the 1971 San Fernando quake and are no longer used.

If See is correct, Roberts said, then “a whole lot of people who are paid to review the construction, including the federal government, which comes back and does an audit inspection, didn’t do their jobs.”

Times staff writer Greg Johnson in San Diego contributed to this article.