1st Freeway Repair Contract Is Awarded

The first major contract for reconstruction of freeway bridges damaged in the earthquake was let for $14.8 million Monday and officials said the work on Interstate 5 in Gavin Canyon should be completed by early June.

Caltrans Director James van Loben Sels said the E.L. Yeager Construction Co. of Riverside, which won the contract, will earn a bonus of $150,000 a day for each day it can beat the 130-day deadline.

“Normally, it would take up to a year to complete a job like this,” he said. “This time, they’ll be working 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Federal officials said that if the work on the bridges southwest of Santa Clarita is completed within 180 days, the federal government will pick up the entire tab.

Caltrans regional director Jerry Baxter said his agency is moving swiftly on all other freeway reconstruction efforts.

“We expect to let the contract for the work on the Santa Monica Freeway on Friday,” Baxter said.

The contract for the Simi Valley Freeway “should follow on the heels of that,” he said. “We hope to complete all (the freeway reconstruction) within a year.”

Yeager, one of the largest transportation contractors in California, has had a hand in many highway projects, including construction of the interchange between Interstate 15 and the Riverside Freeway in Corona.

The firm won the contract to rebuild two quake-damaged I-5 bridges with a bid of $14,819,000, just $13,000 more than the Caltrans engineers’ estimate, Van Loben Sels said.

Caltrans engineers said the work will involve the replacement of two parallel bridges in Gavin Canyon--one for northbound and one for southbound traffic. The original bridges, built in 1968 and never retrofitted to increase their resistance to earthquakes, collapsed in the 6.6 quake Jan. 17.

The engineers said the bridges failed at points where sliding “hinges” had been incorporated to permit the spans to expand and contract with the weather. They said that during the earthquake, the horizontal movement was greater than the length of the hinges, and the spans pulled away from their supports and tumbled into the canyon.

The new bridges will be continuous spans without expansion hinges, the engineers said. To allow for expansion, the bridges will rest on sliding abutment footings designed to permit more horizontal movement than is expected in any earthquake.

Until the reconstruction is completed, two lanes of traffic in each direction are being routed over a temporary detour that opened Monday, connecting to The Old Road, a section of the original U.S. 99 that predated the Golden State Freeway.

“It’s beautiful, but I’m afraid tomorrow the rest of the valley will discover it,” Santa Clarita Valley resident Debbie Gianella said after arriving Monday morning at her Downtown office.

Baxter said the temporary detours around the damaged I-5, Foothill, Santa Monica and Simi Valley freeways generally are “moving pretty well.” He said motorists seeking alternate routes have created congestion on other highways, with the Ventura Freeway between the Hollywood and Glendale freeway interchanges now carrying about 7% more traffic than normal.

In an attempt to ease the congestion on the detours around the shattered Santa Monica Freeway bridges over Washington and Fairfax boulevards, transit officials have opened a new park-and-ride facility at Constitution Avenue and Sepulveda Boulevard in Westwood, served by a new express bus line to Downtown Los Angeles.

Unfortunately, the public has been slow to get the word.

“This morning, we had zero ridership,” James Okasaki, a spokesman for the city Department of Transportation, said Monday.

Metrolink officials said a new station on the Los Angeles-to-Lancaster line opened Monday at Acton as scheduled, with another station expected to open in Santa Clarita this weekend.

Richard Stanger, Metrolink’s executive director, said station platforms in Sylmar and Burbank have been lengthened to accommodate the longer trains that have run since the quake.

In other developments Monday:

* Richard Andrews, director of the state Office of Emergency Services, said 215,898 people have registered under a variety of federal assistance programs, exceeding in only nine days the six-month total of applicants from Hurricane Andrew in Florida.

Of those, 208,844 have applied for temporary rental assistance, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has responded by mailing out 12,831 checks worth $39,398,801.

More than 7,300 of the applicants have applied for loans from the Small Business Administration. The SBA said 550 of those applications have been approved, for a total of $16,779,800.

Officials said 112,783 of applicants have asked for emergency food stamps. Of those, 2,168 applications have been denied and 90,323 applications have been approved for a total value of $25,477,295. The others are being processed.

*

More than 3,000 people waited in the parking lot at Dodger Stadium to apply for a onetime allotment of food stamps, but a new three-day waiting period left some disappointed and hungry.

“I still have to wait to get something to eat. It doesn’t make sense,” said Deborah Dennis of South-Central Los Angeles. “I have to wait three days to find out if we can go home and have a full meal.”

The wait was enforced to deter cheating.

* The city’s Building and Safety Department said 43,449 structures had been inspected by midday Monday, with 26,920 dwelling units declared unsafe for occupancy.

The Los Angeles Police Department, confronted with the problem of trying to keep people out of buildings that have been declared unsafe, announced that it has drafted a policy for arresting anyone who persists in returning to those structures.

That policy, dubbed “three strikes and you’re out” by department wags, was outlined in a department memo obtained Monday.

Under that policy, police officers will not usually initiate arrests but will wait for requests made by building and safety inspectors, who are notifying the city’s Emergency Operations Center when they see or hear of people entering red-tagged buildings.

Entering any building posted as unsafe is a misdemeanor, but the LAPD policy makes clear that arrests will be made as a last resort.

“Although the arrest may be made anytime the offense is committed, people who reoccupy red-tagged buildings will be given two warnings before an arrest is made,” the memo states.

There is one exception: If people refuse to leave buildings when asked to do so by police, the officers may make an arrest then.

“This was put together because we had some real concerns” from building and safety inspectors, said Capt. Robert J. Martin, author of the memo.

“They wanted squads of Metro officers out throwing these people in the Bastille. . . . We thought we needed a policy, but we didn’t want to go too far. These people are not criminals. They’re nice people who have a problem.”

Martin said there were a few flare-ups Friday and Saturday, but that the problem seemed to subside by Sunday. “I think it’s kind of resolving itself,” he said.

Fourteen schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District reopened after two weeks of structural inspections. At least 21 quake-damaged schools in the sprawling district remain closed, but officials said some campuses will reopen this week.

The Red Cross said that 4,177 people were still being housed in 30 shelters and 518 were camping in tents outside the shelters. The Salvation Army sheltered 492 indoors in one shelter and an additional 382 in two tent sites erected by the National Guard.

* City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, chairman of the council’s Budget and Finance Committee, estimated that the city will lose at least $33 million in revenue as a result of the quake.

“Even before the earthquake, we were facing an approximately $150-million shortfall for the 1994-95 fiscal year,” Yaroslavsky said. “With an additional $33-million loss, we are looking at a very serious money problem.”

The councilman said utility tax revenues will drop because of power outages, closed businesses and destroyed homes. Property taxes will drop because of reduced property values, and Municipal Court fines will dip because police officers--diverted to other duties--are and will not be writing as many traffic tickets.

Also, he said, damage to retail businesses will reduce the city’s share of sales taxes. Business taxes will drop and reluctance to purchase real estate will trim documentary transfer tax revenues, he added.

* Lucy Jones, a seismologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, said the area was averaging two or three magnitude 3.0 aftershocks a day--compared to 150 of them on Jan. 17. She said the aftershock pattern should continue to taper off, although there could be another 5.0 aftershock in coming weeks.