School District Races to Reopen on Tuesday

Inspectors scrambled Saturday to evaluate the safety of Los Angeles public schools while maintenance staff feverishly worked at cleaning up debris and making minor repairs to ready as many classrooms as possible for students scheduled to return to class on Tuesday.

By Saturday afternoon the number of uninhabitable classrooms--all but a handful in the west San Fernando Valley--had dropped to about 300 from a peak of 1,000, prompting school board President Leticia Quezada to say “my hope is that all children will be able to attend school one way or another” next week.

Some of the 97 hardest-hit West Valley schools--now slated to be closed Tuesday--may be ready for occupancy later this week and no school will be permanently closed, officials said.

Only 9,000 students are estimated to be without classrooms, dramatically lower than earlier estimates of up to 100,000, said Doug Brown, chief of district facilities.

By early Monday authorities will decide whether any West Valley schools can open Tuesday, according to Brown. Although portions of most of these campuses are structurally sound, many classrooms are in disarray and cleanup may take days or even weeks.

“I’m more optimistic today than I was yesterday,” Brown said. “But 640,000 students back in school? That’s really, really optimistic in my opinion.”

The earthquake’s impact on Los Angeles public schools ranged from severe structural damage at some school buildings to minor cosmetic damage, according to a report released Saturday by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The report, along with visits to schools from South-Central to the East Valley, show the scope of troubles ranging from broken windows and cracked walls to fallen ceiling tiles and buckled floors. More than half the district’s 640 campuses were virtually unscathed, the report showed.

“It’s the good, the bad and the ugly,” said a weary Vehah Assatourian, a Los Angeles school district construction inspector. “We’re seeing lots of architectural and cosmetic damage with minor structural damage and some unknown conditions that need further investigation.”

Assatourian, who was working in the West Valley for his sixth day Saturday, said repairs will be costly. District officials believe damage may run as high as $700 million.

The district damage report, which officials hope will be significantly pared down by Monday, contains the shorthand notes of structural engineers and school maintenance supervisors sketching the random impact of the quake:

Aliso High School, an 84-student continuation school in Reseda, will not reopen soon. “All buildings unusable; major structural damage to all buildings on site,” the engineers wrote. “One classroom building must be (demolished); two (bungalows) off foundations.”

Hubert Howe Bancroft Middle School in Hollywood, meanwhile, was deemed “ready to occupy,” suffering only “minor stucco cracks on main building.”

Canoga Park Elementary School was listed as having 35 unusable classrooms due to “major water damage” from a broken ceiling pipe.

At 93rd Street Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles, minor cracks crisscross four classroom walls and the rooms are “approved for occupancy.”

Almost every school in the Valley needs to be cleaned, walkways shored up and barricades erected to keep students away from crumbling plaster and unsafe corridors.

The majority of schools on the Eastside, in South-Central L.A. and the harbor area show white space in the damage column of the district report.

It is the Valley classrooms that will probably be in disarray Monday and Tuesday. Gas, water and electricity in some buildings still had not been checked or repaired on Saturday. Cafeteria stoves were overturned, lunch ground shelters were twisted, light fixtures dangled by wires.

At those schools and elsewhere, workers swiftly cordoned off damaged bungalows, swathed cracked support columns in orange plastic netting and segregated damaged buildings from safe ones with red and yellow tape.

Workers swept and shoveled debris out of corridors, and ripped down ceiling tiles to make rooms safe for habitation. Shattered windows were boarded, and water lines were patched and tested.

While officials hope to complete as much cleanup as possible by Tuesday, they said parents and students in many schools should brace themselves for classrooms without ceiling tiles and with cracked walls and soggy carpets.

The scene may not look reassuring, but it is safe and parents should not be alarmed, district leaders said. Cracks in walls and stairwells, water damage and broken windows are typically cosmetic damage and do not necessarily mean a building is unsafe.

“My people have instructions to not clear any classroom or building for occupancy that they would not send their own children or grandchildren into,” Brown said.

Mike J. Bargman, chief architect of Los Angeles Unified School District, said it will take weeks to clean up many West Valley classrooms, such as those at Reseda High School, even if there is no structural damage to buildings.

“We’ve got a lot of schools, where structurally they’re OK, but we’ve got to test them for gas leaks. . . . We have a lot of kitchen areas where equipment was juggled around and (the shaking) severed the electrical (wires). That has to be redone.”

Bargman said major structural work will be needed at Encino Elementary, Reseda High School, Holmes Junior High, Monroe High School and Danube Elementary School.

The worst damage occurred near the Northridge epicenter of Monday’s 6.6 temblor--and among the hardest hit was 2,300-student Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, where officials say the cleanup alone will take two to three weeks.

In a walk-through inspection of Kennedy Saturday, Assatourian and Jack Starlin, a state inspector, found a three-inch fissure in the earth snaking its way 200 yards from the baseball field through the girls’ and boys’ locker rooms and into the football field.

“That came out of left field,” said Starlin, a senior structural engineer with the State Architect’s Office. “This is one of the few sites I’ve seen that have so many deep ground ruptures.”

Two buildings on the campus, built in 1971 before the Sylmar quake that year, are structurally damaged and cannot be occupied. Other classroom buildings were found to be structurally safe but in shambles.

The inspectors walked through a two-story classroom building and discovered badly damaged ceilings, cracks in plaster and air-conditioning vents lying on the floors. But as they left, armed with clipboards, flashlights and hard hats, Starlin said: “Give it a green light” for occupation.

The early district report for nearby Nobel Middle School describes in one line that light fixtures are down and that there is structural damage to the student store and arcade.

Assatourian and Starlin, however, are making room-by-room assessments. Their method is simple: “If it looks questionable, we’re putting up braces and posts and then we’ll do another assessment,” said Starlin.

Starlin said the schools will be inspected several more times in the hardest-hit West Valley areas and that principals and plant managers should not be reluctant to contact the district’s construction staff--even if the school already was inspected.

“I’d rather see the same thing twice than have these people not call me,” Starlin said.

Bargman, the chief district architect, noted that the light damage to Monroe High School in Northridge “just goes to show you how well these schools were built. This is almost ground zero.”

Los Angeles public schools in the central and east San Fernando Valley suffered relatively minor damage. But maintenance crews were still out in force at those schools, repairing broken windows, lights and surface cracks in interior and exterior walls.

The back outside wall of O’Melveny School in San Fernando was blackened from a fire on adjacent Wolfskill Street that ignited when a crude-oil pipe ruptured during the quake. But the damage did not appear to reach inside the classrooms, and will not delay the elementary school’s opening, officials said.

San Fernando Elementary School is among the most severely damaged campuses outside the West Valley, the district report showed. While plans are not confirmed, officials said, students there may have to be transferred to O’Melveny.

At San Fernando, seven rooms are destroyed, two bungalows have slid off their foundation, and there is no water and no gas. Making matters worse, about 10 teachers whose homes are damaged or may be stranded may not be able to make it to work.

At Sharp Avenue School in Pacoima, administrators were working out the logistics of accommodating 800 additional elementary students whose West Valley schools are too damaged to be usable by Tuesday, according to plant manager Tony Moreno.

And when students return to San Fernando High School and Sylmar High School, they may find their gymnasiums still occupied by quake victims who have been sheltered at the schools since Monday. On Saturday, National Guard troops were on the school grounds helping run the shelters.

San Fernando High suffered minor damage to its auditorium, according to Principal Phil Saldivar. The hot water boilers also were knocked out of commission by the earthquake, and again on Friday by aftershocks. But maintenance workers had them going again Saturday.

Sara Coughlin, Valley regional superintendent, took one look inside Tulsa Elementary school in Granada Hills Saturday and said no one will set foot inside until at least Tuesday. “It is not safe for teachers and it is not safe for students,” Coughlin said. “That is the recommendation I’m going to make.”

While the district report and Coughlin said the damage does not appear to be structural, it’s those 102 dangling lights and fixtures and several gas leaks in the kitchen and main office that will keep everyone away from the campus.

At Van Gogh Street School in Granada Hills, rebuilt after the Sylmar quake in 1971, principal Maureen Diekmann pointed to a worrisome crack that runs through the hallway, outside courtyard and through fifth grade Room 10.

“This crack goes right across the street,” she said. “It goes into a house across the street and that house has been condemned.”

The district report says that no children are permitted in the main building, because the entire structure may be unsafe.

About 20 miles south over the Santa Monica Mountains, Konnie Fulcher, plant manager at Alexander Hamilton High School on the Westside, has spent all week supervising crews of electricians and maintenance workers who are replacing ceiling tiles, lights, pipes, windowpanes and myriad other building parts broken in the earthquake.

The district report for Hamilton lists three paragraphs of damage: structural damage to lab building, girls’ gym flooded, damaged bridge structure, loose stairway handrails, small asbestos cleanup.

Structurally, most of the buildings on Hamilton’s campus at 2955 Robertson Blvd. are intact. The exception may be the 63-year-old brick auditorium, site of performances by students in Hamilton’s renowned music program. Several ornamental columns inside the auditorium cracked, and as of Saturday, structural engineers had yet to declare the building safe.

The second and third floor pedestrian bridges linking the science building with Hamilton’s main building buckled in the middle. They have been declared unsafe and are roped off.

But almost a week’s worth of intensive work has removed most traces of the damage. Classrooms on Saturday were looking tidy, and most of the ceiling tiles had been replaced. And work previously done to earthquake-proof Hamilton’s three-story main building--built of brick in 1931--stood the test. The building suffered major damage in the 1971 Sylmar quake, according to Fulcher, and subsequently was reinforced with steel beams.

The damage was similar at nearby Crescent Heights Boulevard School, a fourth-through-sixth-grade neighborhood school a few blocks northeast of where the Santa Monica Freeway collapsed.

Movable walls that fell down have been righted, and most of the ceiling tiles have been replaced. But cleanup work probably will not be completed in time for students to re-enter those classrooms Tuesday, according to plant manager Michael Williams.

Typical of the condition is one fourth-grade room. Ceiling-mounted heating ducts are visible where tile from the dropped ceiling broke loose, and the carpet and desk surfaces are littered with debris.

Yet unscathed was a colorful display of children’s essays, under the title: “What Do You Know About Planet Earth?”

Damaged Classes

After Monday’s earthquake, inspectors found that more than 150 Los Angeles Unified School District campuses ad suffered damage that would render some buildings unusable. Subsequent inspections and repairs reduced that number to 97, all in the San Fernando Valley west of the San Diego Freeway. Officials hope to make some of them serviceable by Tuesday.