Earthquake: The Road to Recovery : For Many, Quake Has Rattled Confidence in Parking Garages

To the list of things shifted and set awry by seismic forces, add this: parking behavior.

Back before the Northridge quake, folks would sell their children for that convenient covered space--preferably next to the elevator entrance--where the elements would not dull the resale value of their Lexus.

But now there’s often a mini-rush for the top deck and other open-air spaces, out from under any floor that could collapse in the next quake.

Apparently fueled by the repeated appearance of news photos and TV coverage of pancaked parking decks squashing parked cars to the thickness of a wallet, motorists appear to be crowding onto the previously undesirable top floor, or skipping garages entirely.

To be sure, thousands of people haven’t given parking much more than a second thought. But a random survey found plenty who do.

Sirkka Manning wheeled her Pathfinder into a rooftop space at Media City Center in Burbank recently and all but bolted for the staircase down to the Ikea home furnishings store.

Could she be rattled by tremors?

“You got that right,” she said. “That’s why I’m off this thing right now.”

Once on solid ground, the Van Nuys resident tried to put her anxiety in perspective. “This is the first time on the top,” she said. “Usually, I park underneath. When you see the parking structures that came down, it makes you wonder. I’d rather be on top than the bottom.”

Lewis Stanton, an accountant leaving a meeting in Sherman Oaks, said cracked concrete and valet parking attendants in hard hats hardly inspired confidence in the McNeill Plaza garage, where drivers were not allowed to enter the parking structure themselves.

“I tell you, we had five people at our meeting this morning and three of them wouldn’t park in here,” even with the valets running the risk, Stanton said. “They parked on the street.”

Many top-deckers may be operating from fear alone, but they get some expert support. Helmut Krawinkler, a Stanford civil engineering professor and specialist in earthquake engineering, reluctantly acknowledged that he too might opt for a rooftop or open parking spot if he were in Los Angeles.

“I guess if it’s a blind shot, I would prefer to be on top,” he said.

If it’s good enough for Krawinkler, it’s good enough for visitors to Universal Studios. Visitors there keep asking for parking spots out in the open, two parking attendants said. “We fill the open lots, but then there’s no choice,” said one, who asked not to be identified.

Randel Urbauer tried hard to blame his wife for his choice of rooftop parking at Media City Center recently. “She brought up whether it was built on-site or precast,” he said, displaying his newfound knowledge of garage construction techniques, and their seismic safety effects.

But Urbauer eventually confessed that this parking anxiety was community property: “It’s probably the first time we thought about it,” he said.

Roberta Shuken has no choice where she parks--but wishes she did. She wheeled her Lexus LS 400 into a ground-floor garage on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks on Thursday morning, then walked out briskly.

“I started working here yesterday and that’s where I have to park,” a shaken Shuken said. “I’m not happy about it. . . . If I didn’t have to park in a parking structure, I wouldn’t. My daughter works in the (Sherman Oaks) Galleria. I was such a wreck. I begged her not to park under there, and she didn’t.”

The newfound fear of the lower decks doesn’t sit well with designers at The SyArt Co., which builds parking structures the way seismic-safety experts say is best--using concrete that is poured in place, not precast. More than 40 of the firm’s quake-zone structures held, and only two had any damage--at Sherman Oaks Fashion Square and Northridge Hospital Medical Center--said Karen Rappaport, a company spokeswoman. Both are standing, and none of the damage is critical, she added.

“In the last 10 years, I’ve designed 43 (parking structures), all concrete, all of them standing up, all of them in service,” said Moises Witemberg, president of Witemberg & Associates structural engineers, which designed many of the SyArt structures. “People should be afraid of being in residences.”

But there are still those who scoff at doom, such as John Elejalde, a New York City transplant who calmly left his Honda in a ground-level garage on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks.

“I just can’t let the paranoia get to me,” he said. “It’s like a lot of paranoias, including drive-by shootings or carjackings. . . . L. A. has all kinds of paranoias.”