Public Safety Must Never Take a Back Seat : Few overpasses had been retrofitted before the quake

For more than two decades state transportation engineers have been acutely aware of the danger of building freeways near earthquake faults. Indeed, the lessons learned from the extensive damage caused to freeways by the 1971 Sylmar earthquake and the 1989 Loma Prieta quake were the basis for an aggressive statewide program to retrofit elevated roads, bridges and overpasses.

Unfortunately, in Southern California many of those upgrades were not completed before Jan. 17’s devastating Northridge quake. Of the 1,033 bridges scheduled to be retrofitted statewide, construction on only one-quarter had been finished.

Substantial structural failures occurred on five of Southern California’s most heavily traveled thoroughfares in last month’s 6.6 temblor, and some critics attribute most of those failures to the fact that retrofitting was not done. Repair of the five freeways--the Santa Monica, the Golden State, the Antelope Valley, the Simi Valley and the San Diego--is expected to cost $900 million and take up to a year.

A reason for the delay in retrofitting--only one reason among several, but a significant one--is a court battle between the California Department of Transportation and the union representing its engineers, according to top officials of that agency. The legal wrangling began in 1989, when the Legislature passed a bill (SB 516) giving Caltrans the authority to award contracts for highway design projects to private-sector engineering firms. In 1991 the Legislature passed another bill (1219) reaffirming Caltrans’ authority in this regard, but the program was stalled by a subsequent ruling of a Sacramento Superior Court judge in a challenge brought by the engineer’s union.

Last year the Legislature again exempted private contracts for earthquake repair projects from the court’s more general order prohibiting private contracting. But in the meantime, as Caltrans Director James W. van Loben Sels and the agency’s chief engineer, James Roberts, told the Assembly Transportation Committee last week, the opportunity for headway on these vital repairs was lost.

It is too soon to say to what extent the litigation, or bureaucratic inertia, delayed work on bridges and overpasses along the Santa Monica Freeway, among the nation’s busiest highways. Retrofitting on the parts that collapsed Jan. 17 had been scheduled to begin this month. Now rebuilding of major stretches will be necessary.

Clearly, investigation is warranted in this matter. And to prevent more delay, Gov. Pete Wilson should expand procedures he implemented to streamline repair contracting to include the retrofitting work. And for its part, the engineers union should stop its obstructionism. Two major earthquakes in California in the last five years are a wake-up call like no other.

Los Angeles, and for that matter much of California, has grown up around a vast network of freeways. That system, much of it laid out between the end of World War II and 1970, helped to fuel what is perhaps the greatest sustained economic boom in the history of the nation. Repair of these roads--to make them as earthquake-resistant as possible--must be done as fast as possible.