More Structural Damage Found at CSUN Library

In twin jolts to earthquake-battered Cal State Northridge, engineers Tuesday discovered serious structural damage that will probably delay the reopening of the Oviatt Library, the campus’ centerpiece building, and administrators discovered rain damage to some of the library’s most prized books.

University officials had been talking of reopening the 220,000-square-foot library on a limited basis by mid-March, only a month after resumption of classes, which is planned for next Monday.

Following the latest damage discovery, however, CSUN Dean of Libraries Susan Curzon said that date probably will be delayed indefinitely and that she will explore alternate means of providing library services.

Just before engineers working for the school declared the building strictly off-limits to all occupants at midday Tuesday, a group of a dozen university library workers and students succeeded in removing about 15 boxes of water-damaged books from the library’s special collections area, which houses old and rare books, scripts and pamphlets.

The books were damaged by rainwater flowing through the building’s quake-damaged roof in the storms Friday and Monday, administrators said.

The curator of the special collections, Tony Gardner, said he believes the materials can be restored by freeze-drying, as was done to save books damaged by water from firefighters’ hoses at the Los Angeles Central Library in 1986.

The four-story CSUN library has been closed to the public and students, as has the rest of the 353-acre campus, since the Jan. 17 Northridge earthquake.

Although portions of its roof overhang collapsed in the quake and other unstable portions have since been removed, university officials previously had considered the building’s core to be stable.

However, engineers discovered Tuesday that the quake snapped the welded connections that anchored some of the building’s vertical steel frame supports to its foundation.

The breaks were discovered both in the library’s east and west wings, said Mike Devlin, a structural engineer with Law/Crandall Engineering of Los Angeles, which is working for CSUN.

The original 130,000-square-foot Oviatt Library, named for the university’s first dean of instruction, opened in 1973 at a cost of about $7 million. The two wings, totaling about 90,000 square feet, were completed as expansions in 1991. The east wing includes CSUN’s state-of-the-art $2-million computerized book storage and retrieval system.

Devlin said problems were discovered in all four of the connections that engineers have uncovered thus far, and they now plan to cut into the building to gain access to the several dozen other similar column connections.

The integrity of the connection between the steel frame and the foundation is crucial because the frame supports the building’s concrete walls, Devlin said.

Asked how long that examination, which will include an ultrasound inspection of the connections, will take, Devlin said, “We’re looking at a couple weeks easily, and probably a lot longer than that.”

Devlin said he expected that the building, which holds 1.1 million volumes, would remain closed during that period of review.

For the first month of classes, despite the new discovery, Curzon said she intends to stick to her previously announced plan to shuttle CSUN students to libraries at UCLA.

The Westwood campus has offered to allow CSUN students to use its library until mid-March, Curzon said, but had not wanted to extend the privilege any longer because that would run into a final exam period when UCLA students heavily use the facilities.

Now that CSUN’s Oviatt Library may not be available by then, Curzon said she plans to begin exploring alternatives that may include asking UCLA to extend its offer, setting up a scaled-down temporary library at CSUN in a dome-type structure, and seeking help from other libraries in the region.

“We sort of go to a Plan B,” she said.

Curzon said that most of the about 600,000 volumes on the library’s open shelves were dumped onto the floor by the quake, but do not appear to have suffered any other extensive damage.

Because there has been no electricity in the building since the quake, she said it is too early to assess any impact on the massive “robot” retrieval system, which holds another 500,000 volumes.

The problem in the library’s special collections, located on the second floor of the west wing, occurred because most of its shelved materials also were dumped on the floor, Gardner said.

When rainwater seeped into the room’s carpet last week and again Monday, the books on the floor became wet, Gardner said.

The damaged items came from the library’s Bullough Collection on Human Sexuality, one of its most noted possessions, and radio comedy scripts from the 1930s and 1940s, a collection of 18th- to 20th-Century play booklets, its Patrick Collection of revolutionary Russian political pamphlets, and its Guernsey Collection on British Politics from 1815 to 1914, Gardner said.

The damaged materials were to be turned over today to Document Reprocessors, the San Francisco-based company that restored hundreds of thousands of volumes damaged in the two arson fires that hit the Los Angeles Central Library in 1986, described at the time as the largest such project ever.

Gardner said he believes that the remaining materials still in CSUN’s special collections area are safe for now.

Eric Lundquist, president and founder of Document Reprocessors, said the CSUN materials will be taken by refrigerated truck to the company’s freeze-drying chamber in the Bay Area city of Hayward, where they will be treated for about two weeks to vaporize and extract the moisture.

Otherwise, the materials could be ruined by mold and mildew, he said.