BAY AREA QUAKE : Council Gets Bad News on L.A. Bridges : Safety: State engineers identify 48 spans and overpasses needing major reinforcement to withstand an earthquake. The city’s chief engineer says several in Los Angeles need shoring up.

California Department of Transportation engineers have identified 48 bridges and overpasses in the Los Angeles area that need major reinforcement if they are to withstand a serious earthquake, a Caltrans official said Tuesday.

The reinforcement, which would cost an estimated $32 million, is necessary to prevent the type of cracking of freeway and bridge support columns that occurred during the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, Jerry Baxter, Caltrans regional director, told the Los Angeles City Council.

“I wish I could make everybody feel comfortable, but I can’t,” Baxter said.

Baxter and other transportation officials were asked to appear before the council to report on the safety of the city’s freeways and bridges in light of the unexpected damage caused by last week’s Bay Area earthquake. The answers they got were discomforting. Council members were particularly concerned about the failure of a section of the Bay Bridge and the collapse of part of the double-decked Nimitz Freeway.

“Nobody knows for sure what went wrong,” Baxter said. “It’s going to be some time before our investigation is carried out.”

Baxter said he has asked the investigators, a panel of experts appointed by Gov. George Deukmejian, to travel immediately to Los Angeles to review the plans for a double-decked section of the Harbor Freeway under construction.

“I think it’s important that we have an outside review . . . as soon as possible,” Baxter said. He said he wants the review completed quickly so that construction will not have to be halted on the project. Later, he told reporters that the design of the Harbor Freeway double-decking is totally different from that of the Nimitz section that collapsed.

The council also got some discomforting news Tuesday from Robert Horii, the city’s chief engineer, who said that many of the 416 bridges and viaducts maintained by the city need shoring up.

“I’m not prepared to say whether they (city bridges) are safe or unsafe,” Horii said. Later, he told reporters the cost of the repairs could be more than $100 million. No money for the repairs, also to the columns supporting bridges and viaducts, has been allocated by the council or formally requested by the Department of Public Works.

“I don’t believe the urgency was there until what recently happened last week,” Horii said. “We knew it could happen, but probably didn’t understand the impact of it.”

Horii said no thorough study has been done, but estimated that about one-fourth of the city-maintained bridges and viaducts need reinforcement.

“The critical ones are the older bridges crossing the Los Angeles River. “They’re old and they’re very long.” For example, he said, the 6th Street bridge, which was built before 1932, is 3,500 feet long.

“They withstood the Whittier earthquake,” he said. “But if you want to be conservative, I’d say we should reinforce them now.”

In a letter Tuesday, Mayor Tom Bradley directed Horii to complete within two weeks an inspection of all the bridges in the city. “While last week’s earthquake is still fresh on everyone’s mind, I believe it is a good time for us to reassess the safety of our own bridges,” Bradley wrote.

Caltrans officials began identifying questionable bridge and highway structures after the Sylmar quake, Baxter said. Since then, all the bridge and road decks throughout the state that needed reinforcement have been repaired, he said. But work is just beginning on a second repair phase--the shoring up of columns with steel cables and concrete.

That work should be completed by 1993, he said.

“I think it’s extremely important that Caltrans get funds to do this work immediately,” Councilman Hal Bernson responded. “I don’t think we can wait and accept another ‘acceptable’ risk.” Bernson said he favors an increase in the gasoline tax “or whatever it takes” to provide funds.

Councilwoman Joy Picus, who had called the transportation officials to the meeting, said later she believed that they had been “straightforward,” but has asked that they re-examine the bridge and highway situation and report back to the City Council in 60 to 90 days.

“If we need to make major repairs in order to protect the health and welfare of the people, we’ll find the money somewhere,” she said, possibly through a bond issue.

As for the Caltrans highways and bridges, Picus said, “We’re not going to accept excuses.”