Seismic Experts See College Buildings as Potential Deathtraps : Quakes: Officials have known of hazards since 1979. Funding difficulties and a desire to avoid disruptions have combined to delay correcting them.

California’s public universities are dotted with scores of classroom buildings, faculty offices and student hangouts that seismic experts warn could become deathtraps during major earthquakes like the one centered in the San Fernando Valley last month, records show.

State lawmakers and college officials have known about the earthquake hazards since at least 1979, when the state Seismic Safety Commission released a benchmark survey urging that 434 campus buildings be examined because they could pose significant risks to life.

But it has only been in recent years that the universities--which are exempt from state and local earthquake standards--have begun or stepped up construction programs aimed at shoring up walls, securing foundations and reinforcing the masonry skin on potentially unsafe structures.

Among the campus buildings in Southern California that have seismic hazards scheduled for retrofitting are UC Irvine’s central plant and dance rehearsal addition, and Cal State Fullerton’s library, bookstore/commons, humanities and social sciences, Langsdorf and physical education buildings and the health center.

The delays in repairs have resulted from a combination of funding difficulties, the desire to avoid campus disruptions and a push to put up new buildings to keep up with growing enrollment, say university officials and their critics.

“I wish they would go faster, I wish they were completed by now,” said L. Thomas Tobin, the commission’s executive director. “There’s such a threat to life in these major buildings but the fact is that you can only do so many buildings at one time.”

In the 20-campus California State University system--with 327,000 students, the second-largest higher education system in the nation--administrators have only recently compiled a list of 101 structures or “falling hazards” that need retrofitting.

Topping the list are such heavily used areas as the John M. Pfau Library at Cal State San Bernardino; Humboldt State University’s Jolly Giant dining commons, where all on-campus residence meals are served; the McIntosh humanities building and Fine Arts buildings at Cal State Long Beach and a library at Cal State Fullerton.

Also high on the list is Cal State Northridge’s Sierra Tower, a seven-story complex of faculty offices and classrooms that sustained some of the school’s heaviest damage during the Jan. 17 temblor. The structure, a mile from the epicenter, was to receive a $167,000 earthquake make-over this year, Cal State records show.

Meanwhile, University of California officials have identified 87 structures on their nine campuses yet to be fixed despite being considered poor or very poor seismic risks. These structures include landmarks on the two campuses with the highest seismic risks--UCLA and Berkeley, records show.

Among them is Royce Hall, the 1929 architectural symbol for the UCLA campus and the frequent backdrop for college scenes in movies.

The UCLA landmark, which had been scheduled for retrofitting in 1996, was closed for a week after the Northridge quake because its twin brick towers, weakened by cracks, threatened to fall. Portions of Royce Hall were reopened last week but only after crews built a special tunnel as an emergency exit.

Administrators admit they are racing against the seismic clock but blame the Legislature for being slow to provide the hundreds of millions of dollars needed for wholesale retrofitting.

Projects that get financed still face long delays because each phase--planning, design, construction--must go to Sacramento for budget approval. Even if the money were to suddenly materialize, university officials said, retrofitting is a logistical nightmare on a busy campus.

Case in point: The current retrofitting of UCLA’s Powell Library. It took eight years to plan and required relocating 200,000 books to a specially constructed tent. And while the actual seismic work cost $11 million, other building and fire code upgrades for the 64-year-old building brought the price tag to $36 million.

“It would be difficult to take all of the (older) buildings down at once and keep the campus functioning,” said Cynthia Ingram, UCLA’s assistant director for capital planning.

But critics and seismic experts say university officials have been part of the problem, largely ignoring--and sometimes flouting--the earthquake dangers on their campuses.

“If you want to attract more faculty, more students, more donors, it pays off to be opening handsome new buildings,” said state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica). “The alternative is admitting that some buildings are dangerous to human life and that’s really difficult to take responsibility for. . . . “

“Faced with that, they cross their fingers and tap the table and hope the Big One doesn’t hit,” he said.

And sometimes, campus administrators made matters worse, according to a November, 1990, Seismic Safety Commission report. In one glaring example, the agency scored UC Berkeley administrators for building weight rooms and coaching offices under Memorial Stadium, although they had been warned that the unreinforced 1920s structure straddles a fault that creeps noticeably each year.

The report applauded UC for deciding to borrow $50 million on its own for retrofitting work after the Loma Prieta earthquake, but pointed out that 49 of the structures most in need of work were left off the repair list.

The 1990 report also reached the “unavoidable conclusion” that the Cal State system, where 1950s and 1960s concrete frame buildings pose serious earthquake hazards, had no retrofitting program at all.

“The university system (is) not going to get to some of those buildings for 10, 20 years,” lamented Commissioner Lloyd S. Cluff at a commission hearing just before the report was released. “And so we’re guaranteeing that the crisis is going to be created out of killing a lot of people on the campuses.”

No one was killed or injured on university campuses in the Northridge quake, which struck at 4:31 a.m. of a day on which no classes were scheduled. A student was killed at Cal State Los Angeles when a concrete slab fell from a parking structure in the 1987 Whittier quake. Her family agreed to a $1.4-million settlement from the state and a construction company.

The Seismic Safety Commission and Hayden sponsored a bill in the Legislature to require warning signs on all of the seismically vulnerable campus buildings. But UC lobbyists blocked the move, arguing that the warning signs would be disruptive and unfair.

Compounding that bureaucratic resistance, say seismologists and structural engineers, was the fact that California’s universities do not have to follow the state and local earthquake codes imposed on other public schools.

The codes cover classrooms for kindergarten through community college students and require some load-bearing walls to be 15% stronger than normal. The act required public school districts to strengthen or raze all pre-1933 buildings by mid-1977 and mandated that all classroom designs and construction be supervised by the state architect’s office as a double check.

As state entities, however, universities do not have to follow those rules. Had the same standards applied, said Dennis Bellet of the state architect’s office, there would be no wondering about Royce Hall today. “That would have either been retrofitted or closed down by June 30, 1977,” he said.

Instead, UCLA’s immunity allowed administrators to use $13 million in private funds to renovate the historic structure before the 1984 Olympics without dedicating anything for retrofitting.

A campus committee denounced the move when it warned in 1985 that Royce and 24 other buildings could kill 2,000 people during a major quake along any of the three nearby faults.

UCLA officials say they begged for state money to retrofit Royce but were turned down. Still, others say, they now look foolish not to have found a way to make the seismic improvements.

“If I were the people who made the private donations, I’d be pretty upset because it just went down the toilet, didn’t it?” said Bill Petak executive director of USC’s Institute for Safety and Systems Management. “It’s now a building with major problems.”

Private colleges have had a better retrofitting record. The 1990 Seismic Safety Commission report made a strong point of showing how, in contrast to UC, Stanford officials diverted nearly all of their discretionary funds to upgrade their buildings after the Loma Prieta quake did major damage there.

As a private institution, USC spent $18 million to upgrade or demolish its older buildings after the city of Los Angeles passed a 1983 ordinance calling for the retrofitting of unreinforced masonry structures. USC architect Mark M. Jones said the school will have to spend “tens of millions” more if the city passes another ordinance requiring the upgrading of unreinforced masonry “fill” buildings with concrete frames.

Since 1992, said Tobin of the state’s seismic commission, Cal State administrators have been showing increased concern. They have hired the state architect’s office to help monitor construction and have compiled the list of 101 future retrofitting projects.

Times staff writers Mark Gladstone and Jeff Rabin contributed to this report.