City Requests Inspection Reports on Collapsed Awning

Almost two months after a heavy, department-store awning collapsed in a busy shopping center, narrowly missing a group of lunchtime shoppers, the city building department is making its first formal requests for the store’s building inspection records.

Pete Lopez, the city’s chief of structural inspection, said he sent letters this week requesting the records from five different sources, all of which were connected in some way to the store’s construction in 1977.

Through those records, city officials hope to identify the special inspector who may have approved faulty welding that caused the 2-ton, concrete-and-metal awning above the main entrance to the Robinson’s department store in La Jolla to collapse.

Although no one was injured when the awning crashed onto the sidewalk at University Towne Centre June 15, Fire Capt. Al Macdonald said the incident had the makings of a “major disaster.”

City officials later determined that faulty welds, combined with the ravages of wind and weather, caused the collapse. What they could not find, however, was a series of periodic inspection reports that should have been included in the city’s building file for the project.

In an interview last month, Lopez said the city does not keep such records, which are routinely done by city-certified, independent inspectors, because filing them would be “a monumental task.”

Later, Lopez said city officials receive progress reports every two weeks during construction, plus a final report, and all of those records should be included in the building files.

The Robinson’s reports, Lopez said, could not be located because they had either been lost or misfiled.

“We file any document that we have and microfilm it,” Lopez said. “That’s the policy now, and that was the policy then.

“I knew what the procedure was, but knowing the procedure and verifying whether the procedure is carried out are two different things,” Lopez said.

This week, Lopez directed letters to Robinson’s officials and also to the architectural firm that designed the building, the construction firm that did the work, the engineering firm that oversaw development, and the company that supplied the inspector for the project, he said.

Lopez said he requested the records by telephone from Englekirk & Hart Consulting Engineers, the project’s engineering firm, last month. The firm responded by sending the city a copy of one special inspection report covering only part of the project.

That report was signed by Robert Lakin, an inspector who apparently died last year, Lopez said.

But, with only one report available, city officials could not determine how much of the work Lakin had personally inspected, said Richard Christopherson, the city’s director of building inspection.

“He may have been filling in for the regular inspector that day, or he may have done the whole project,” Christopherson said.

Meanwhile, City Councilman Ron Roberts has requested that the city manager’s office prepare a report on the Robinson’s incident specifically and the building department’s record-keeping procedures in general.

“When you have a failure and a file disappears, that concerns me,” Roberts said. “That’s a major screw-up if they can’t even find out who the special inspector was.”

Although Roberts said he hoped to hear the report at the Sept. 5 meeting of the Public Services and Safety Committee, one of the committee’s staff members said the councilman would have to formally request the report at that meeting.

That might mean that the city manager’s report would not be heard by committee members before November, said Raquel Beltran, a legislative specialist for the committee.

“This is getting awful messy,” Roberts said. “The deeper we get into this, the worse it stinks.”

Roberts said he was puzzled by the fact that the building department was only beginning to make formal inquiries for the records this week.

“I don’t know why they’ve waited,” Roberts said. “It’s been several months. I thought they had concluded their investigation.”