EARTHQUAKE / LIFELINES OF L.A. : Crisis Gives Bridge Expert Starring Role : With a career spanning four decades, Jim Roberts is dubbed the father of the state’s seismic retrofitting program. ‘He’s a straight shooter and he’s unflappable,’ says one consultant.

For one fleeting moment after the Northridge earthquake, the state’s chief bridge engineer allowed himself to indulge in regrets.

“I wish,” Jim Roberts confided to a colleague, “that I had retired before this.”

The next moment the pathos was gone and the brief window into any inner feelings was shut. Roberts, the engineer, was back in his familiar role, barking orders to bridge designers, setting up meetings with legislators and preparing for interviews with the news media.

Since the early morning temblor in Los Angeles shook apart six of the state’s prized bridges, James E. Roberts has been a man in constant motion. On his shoulders fall the responsibility for overseeing the rebuilding effort as well as explaining to lawmakers and the news media why the structures fell.

Much praised as the father of California’s highway seismic retrofitting program, Roberts is now the man who must answer for its failure to prevent the collapses in the Los Angeles Basin.

The questions are often hostile; the answers patient and unemotional. If the bridges had been retrofitted, he insists, they probably would not have failed. Five of the six structures, he adds, had been slated for retrofitting but the program had not gotten to them.

“We were one earthquake behind,” he likes to say.

A television reporter at one media briefing shoves a microphone close to his face. Doesn’t he feel some responsibility for the death of the Los Angeles policeman who plunged off a collapsed ramp of the Golden State-Antelope Valley interchange, she asks.

“No,” he replies calmly. “I sleep well at night. I think we’ve done the right thing.”

Earthquakes have placed Roberts in the most unlikely of roles. They have made him, if not a television star, at least a familiar figure on the evening news. After each event--first Loma Prieta and then Northridge--his was one of the first visages on the television screen.

Neither the face nor the voice lend themselves to the tube. The face is lined--a testament perhaps to his 63 years of age--and the hair is styled in an old-fashioned crew cut. The voice has little inflection as he talks of the complexity of earthquake forces and the stresses they place on bridges.

But his willingness to answer an endless stream of questions conveys a sincerity that causes reporters and lawmakers to turn to him repeatedly for explanations.

“He’s a straight shooter and he’s unflappable,” said Arthur Bauer, a transportation consultant who once sat on a board that oversaw Roberts’ engineering of a light rail project.

Roberts is in many ways tailor-made to represent the California Department of Transportation’s bridge program. His 41-year tenure with Caltrans encompasses the great freeway road-building years of the 1950s and 1960s, and he worked in the department when most of the state’s highway bridges--about 8,000 of the 12,000--were constructed.

“Jim Roberts is the quintessential bridge engineer,” said Richard Katz (D-Sylmar), chairman of the Assembly Transportation Committee. “If you were going to look in the dictionary under bridge engineer, you’d find a picture of Roberts.”

A native of Jameson, Mo., a small town near the Oklahoma border, Roberts came to California in the mid-1930s. His family, like thousands of others, had lost their farm in the great Dust Bowl.

A summer job at Caltrans near the end of his college years at UC Berkeley convinced him that bridges would be his life’s pursuit. To hone his skills as a bridge designer, he got a master’s degree from USC.

Roberts’ love of bridges is legendary. After attending a conference in New Zealand, he was asked if he had taken time out to see the sights. “Oh yes,” he told a colleague, “I visited most of the bridges.”

In California there are only a few bridges Roberts cannot describe from memory, and when he speaks of some structures, it is with a reverence and awe that others might use to describe a fine painting. “The Golden Gate Bridge is one of my favorites,” he says. “It was built in the 1930s, and it’s still one of the wonders of the world. It’s an architectural masterpiece.”

His own masterpiece that he helped design is a half-mile bridge over the New Melones Reservoir between Sonora and Angels Camp that sits on 400-foot-high piers dug into what was once a deep canyon.

The bridge design was completed just a few months before the Sylmar earthquake that would dramatically change the way California bridges were designed and send Roberts’ career in a new direction.

The 1971 temblor damaged many state bridges and for the first time demonstrated that highway structures were vulnerable to earthquake forces. It spawned a seismic retrofitting program and extensive changes in the designs of bridges.

Roberts worked on the retrofitting in its early years, then left that division of the department and did not return until 1985. When he came back he found the program was barely limping along. It had been underfunded and had yet to tackle one of the most serious bridge vulnerabilities--the weakness of columns.

Roberts began writing memos, demanding more money for research and retrofitting and warning that the death toll could be heavy if the bridges were not strengthened. It took several years but funding was increased and column retrofitting got under way.

Then the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989 turned Roberts’ early memos into a prophecy. This time when roadways went down they took 43 people to their deaths.

Roberts, as the department’s chief authority on bridges, has taken heat for the slowness of the retrofitting program. He used the heightened interest in retrofitting to push for more funding, winning assurances that $750 million would be put aside for the program and it would become one of the department’s top priorities.

But even the accelerated program did not move fast enough to get all the bridges retrofitted in time for the Northridge quake. Those that were retrofitted stayed up. Six that were not fell down. And once again Roberts is before the cameras, explaining why bridges failed.

In private he admits to a few frustrations. “Does it bother me? Sure it does,” he says. “Because a lot of people that make comments about the program don’t have any concept of how complicated this is. Earthquakes are random. You don’t know what one is going to do from one second to the next and they’re all different.”

Does he really want to retire? “No, not really,” he admits. “What I would like is to have the retrofit program finished when I retire. It would be nice to know that when I leave that somebody else is not going to get hit with this.”