Damage to Coliseum Clouds Football Season : Quake: Some fear stadium may have to be torn down. A report on its status is expected in two weeks.

Earthquake damage to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum is so extensive that the historic stadium might not be repaired in time for next fall’s football season, officials said Monday. One Coliseum aide said that a structural engineer’s report is pending, but there is a possibility the building might have to be demolished and rebuilt.

In any event, the officials now believe that the costs of reopening the stadium could vastly exceed the estimate of $35 million made last week.

Coliseum officials have not foreclosed the possibility of repairing and reopening the facility--which was red-tagged Sunday by city building inspectors--in time for the next football season, but they concede that time is short, and that work is contingent on a quick decision by federal authorities to assume most of the funding.

A spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Monday that consideration of Coliseum aid could take time, and added that earthquake-damaged schools would have a higher priority.

During a tour of the stadium Monday, Don C. Webb, the Coliseum Commission’s project director for recent renovations of the facility, said a fairly complete report from structural engineers is expected in two weeks.

“A (crack) runs through the concourse, through the tunnels and into the base of the foundation,” Webb said. “What we don’t see is extremely important. The question is whether this (facility) can be fixed, or whether it will have to be demolished.”

But the principal structural engineer retained to assess the damage said he believes that demolition will not be necessary.

Nahih Youssef said, “Technically, the Coliseum still has capacity to withstand earthquakes. There is a lot of damage, but it is not all to the lateral earthquake resistance system of the building. There is some residual strength and we can build on that.

“There is a separation of the outer Coliseum wall from the superstructure,” Youssef said. “The outer structure was displaced differently from the inner side, where the seating is located. . . . But the structural integrity may not have been fatally compromised.”

Nonetheless, Youssef said, Saturday’s magnitude 5.0 aftershock caused additional damage at the Coliseum, and the $35-million estimate of damage made last week is too low.

“Repairs will take six months to a year,” once they begin, Youssef said.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Deane Dana, who also toured the facility and has an engineering degree, said he believes the lower levels of the Coliseum are on “solid ground” and that most of the damage is confined to the “higher tier” at the concourse, or upper concessions and restroom level, and above.

“The higher tier will have to be taken down and replaced,” he said. “It’s going to be very expensive. But I think repairs are feasible, and we are applying to FEMA for funding.”

The incoming Coliseum Commission president, Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, said she had been informed that “it would not necessarily be required to remove the entire upper tier.” And while “some real fast moving” would be necessary to reopen the Coliseum by the football season’s first game, she believes political pressure will be considerable on FEMA to promptly come up with the money.

The Coliseum has no earthquake insurance, officials said, and no appreciable funds in reserve for repairs.

Jay Hagerman, the Coliseum’s general manager, who was present for Monday’s tour, said that everything is contingent on what the structural engineer reports about the severity of the damage.

During the tour, Hagerman expressed exasperation that cracks in the facility’s superstructure and gaps between its sections have grown deeper and wider since the Jan. 17 earthquake.

As the tour drew to a close, Webb, Hagerman and Margaret Farnum, executive secretary to the Coliseum Commission, noticed for the first time that the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety had red-tagged the Coliseum. A sign posted on the outer fence at the peristyle end declared that it was unsafe to enter.

The sign indicated that it had been posted at 11:30 a.m. Sunday.

Monday, the city’s chief building inspector, Russell Lane, said he took a team to the Coliseum on Sunday, but they were unable to enter the locked facility.

He said the decision to red-tag the building had been based on cracks that could be observed from the outside, and that city inspectors had yet to examine the inside.

Inside, the principal damage displayed Monday by Webb and Hagerman was a deep crack running the entire length of the upper level concourse, which the two officials said showed how the Coliseum’s outer wall had separated from the inner seating structure.

Gaps could be seen between sections of seating, and chunks of fallen concrete littered parts of the concourse.

In addition, the lower part of the stadium seating, built in the early 1920s, had sunk away several inches from the upper section, which was added for the 1932 Olympics.

There was also serious cracking of some pillars and beams in the peristyle end of the stadium--the only facility in the world to have twice been the site the modern Olympic Games, as well as the site of a World Series and many important political and entertainment events.

“One problem we have is that different parts of the stadium moved in different directions,” Webb said.

Webb also expressed concern that the earth berm on which the Coliseum was built is alluvial fill that may have been substantially weakened by the earthquake and could have compromised vital structural elements of the facility. Farnum, who has worked for the Coliseum Commission for 25 years, said she was shocked when she viewed the damage the day of the earthquake.

“After the 1971 (Sylmar) earthquake, the structural engineers told us the Coliseum was well protected against quake damage,” she said. “We had only minimal damage then.”

Several Coliseum officials Monday expressed confidence that federal funds would pay for most of the repairs.

N. Matthew Grossman, the outgoing commission president, said, “I just can’t imagine doing away with the Coliseum and all the history that has gone with it. I just can’t accept that kind of alternative.”

Terry Hamlin, a spokesman for FEMA, said under guidelines adopted for the Northridge earthquake, the federal government will pay 90% of the cost of repairs on appropriate public facilities and matching funds from state and local government need total only 10%. In the past, the split has most frequently been 75%-25%.

But, Hamlin said, any federal action will have to await a complete engineers report and then the amount appropriated may be contingent on such factors as to how old the facility is, how much deterioration existed before the earthquake, and how much of the damage was covered by insurance.

Both he and Webb stressed that fast action is necessary if there is to be any chance of getting the facility ready for next fall’s football games of the Los Angeles Raiders professional franchise and USC.

A USC spokesman said Monday that the school will await the engineer’s report before commenting.

The Raiders did not return calls for comment. There were reports on Monday in eastern publications that the Raiders have been exploring a move from Los Angeles to either Hartford or Baltimore. Even after renovations to make the stadium more suitable for viewing football action, Raider attendance in the recently completed season was often disappointing.