BAY AREA QUAKE : Freeway Seismic Safety Not ‘Highest Priority’ : Funding: A number of Caltrans engineers say they were pressured to instead fix roads that caused far more deaths than quakes.

In the 18 years since the Sylmar earthquake toppled a freeway interchange, a program to shore up 2,500 of the most vulnerable bridges and elevated roadways in California has never been a top state priority--getting less money, for example, than freeway landscaping or sound walls.

State Transportation Director Robert K. Best conceded Wednesday that earthquake safety “was not the highest priority in the department for the expenditure of whatever funds became available. It’s just as simple as that.”

However, the slow pace of beefing up bridges had long troubled a number of state Department of Transportation engineers, who wanted to get the work done before a major quake knocked down other highway structures. These civil servants said in interviews with Times reporters that they felt shackled by dwindling highway dollars and were under constant pressure to clean up the state’s many “blood alleys”--stretches of road that produced far more deaths than earthquakes had.

While the engineers blame a general shortage of money for the slow progress under three governors--Ronald Reagan, Edmund G. Brown Jr. and George Deukmejian--several top state officials disagree. They insist that there was money available for earthquake safety and that Caltrans got whatever it requested for that purpose.

With the deaths of at least 39 people caught in the collapse of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland during last Tuesday’s quake, officials are being asked whether they did enough, quickly enough to head off an earthquake disaster.

Bridge design engineer Oris H. Degenkolb was in charge of the Caltrans earthquake retrofitting program until he retired in 1981. It was Degenkolb who drew up the list of bridges supported by columns that might fall in an earthquake. He said he complained frequently within the agency that progress was too slow. But he never put his concerns in writing, and it is unclear whether they were forwarded to top Caltrans officials.

“You knew an earthquake was coming,” Degenkolb said in an interview. “There was going to be a catastrophe coming out of it and something ought to be done about it before we get caught with our pants down.”

Another retired Caltrans engineer, Arthur L. Elliott, said that Caltrans engineers felt lucky to get a commitment of $2 million to $3 million a year for earthquake improvements.

“We were all champing at the bit and wanting to get it done,” said Elliott, who was in charge of bridge design. “The money was the main drawback on why we weren’t moving faster.”

“The attitude was there was only so much money and that’s it,” said William J. Jurkovich, Caltrans chief of special bridge projects.

“It’s like a leaky roof,” he said. “You can’t fix it if it’s raining. When it isn’t raining, why fix it?”

During the first five years after the 1971 San Fernando quake, highway officials spent $7.7 million to reinforce bridges and elevated roadways for earthquake safety. The amount is less than the $8.6 million that the highway division spent in one single budget year--1971-72--on an ambitious tree- and shrub-planting program.

By the time of the 1987 Whittier quake, Caltrans had spent most of the $55 million budgeted for tying down bridge spans to keep them from sliding off during a severe quake.

However, the subsequent Whittier quake proved what Caltrans engineers had long believed--that the columns supporting many of the bridges built before 1971 could be severely damaged and even toppled in a major quake.

After the 1987 quake, James E. Roberts, chief of Caltrans’ structures division, wrote a memo urging his superiors to accelerate spending on reinforcing bridge supports “to prevent the collapse of major structures during an earthquake.”

As a result of the memo, Caltrans now has plans to spend $64 million over five years in a second phase of earthquake improvements. But the spending plan would not have addressed the problems now believed responsible for the Nimitz collapse.

Even under that accelerated spending plan, the total for earthquake safety is scarcely more than the $63 million the department has budgeted for new landscaping over the same period. It’s also less than the $75 million allocated for construction and reinforcing of sound walls.

This year alone, Caltrans plans to spend $44.5 million to maintain and care for 21,000 acres of landscaping along California’s freeways, compared to $18 million budgeted for earthquake improvements.

Allan H. Hendrix, chief of program development for Caltrans highway division, said that “there was never an explicit trade-off” made in budgeting money for earthquake safety versus budgeting for other programs. The amount allocated for earthquake safety, he said, “was the total that our technical experts told us was needed.”

Top officials with the California Transportation Commission, which generally decides how highway money is spent in the state, say they always gave Caltrans whatever it requested for safety programs.

William T. Bagley, who stepped down as chairman of the commission earlier this year, pointed out that the panel approved spending $64 million for retrofitting bridges and other elevated structures, just as the Caltrans staff had requested.

“We gave them what they asked for, in the face of arguments that we shouldn’t, that we were in effect stealing $64 million from new construction,” Bagley said. “Safety does come first when it’s on the table in front of you.”

State Finance Director Jesse R. Huff pointed out that the state is spending from $900 million to $1.3 billion each year on new highway construction projects--sums that dwarf what has been proposed for earthquake safety.

“We put a lot of money into highways--there has been a lot of rehabilitation, a lot of widening, a lot of safety work,” Huff said. “So it just doesn’t make any sense to say there is a chill in the air that has scared people away (from requesting funds for earthquake safety). It just doesn’t add up.”

But other top Caltrans and Administration officials disagree, contending that every aspect of highway construction and maintenance has been affected by a shortage of gasoline tax funds that began with the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970s. Changes in gasoline consumption--brought on in large part by higher costs at the pump--meant a sharp drop in federal and state gasoline tax dollars for California.

During the same period, several years of double-digit inflation also cut into the number of projects that could be funded each year.

A number of state transportation officials, past and present, have said that they found themselves having to choose between earthquake safety and making improvements in dangerous stretches of highways--the so-called “blood alleys.”

Pointing to other safety problems on the state’s highways, William Schaefer, chief Caltrans engineer, said at a recent press briefing that even if there were more money to spend, “I could not in good conscience say we would focus every dime on earthquake safety programs to the exclusion of every other program.”

A senior transportation official in a previous Administration stated flatly that earthquake safety was competing for funds with other safety programs--and usually losing.

The Nimitz Freeway “was always on the watch list of roadways to monitor,” said the official, who asked not to be identified. “But the debate always was whether you worked on a freeway such as this or fixed the blood alleys. The blood alleys always won out over questions of structural integrity. It was a case of some obscure engineering report that says there may or may not be a problem someday versus a freeway where people are getting killed now.”

Also contributing to this story were Times staff writers Daniel M. Weintraub, Richard C. Paddock, Virginia Ellis and George Skelton.