Don’t Go Slow on Freeways : Wilson gives green light on retrofitting speedup

Pete Wilson deserves credit for giving the state Department of Transportation the emergency authority to speed up the retrofitting of hundreds of freeway overpasses and bridges in the Los Angeles area that are in danger of collapsing during earthquakes. That should help revive a retrofitting process that had become bogged down in bureaucracy and legal wrangling before the Northridge earthquake came along to quite literally shake things up.

Who or what caused those retrofitting delays? Were they preventable? Both Wilson and the Legislature must ask these tough questions of Caltrans officials, be they political appointees or professional staffers, to determine why more retrofitting wasn’t done before the Jan. 17 earthquake collapsed parts of six highways.

Wilson announced that he had given Caltrans emergency contracting authority on Thursday, the one-month anniversary of the Northridge quake.

The governor’s action will allow the state agency to speed contracting procedures for highway retrofitting--much as Caltrans rapidly moved to start taking down damaged portions of the Santa Monica, Golden State, Antelope Valley and Simi Valley freeways in the first few days after the temblor.

Normally, it takes weeks or even months for Caltrans to award a contract, but the emergency authority should reduce that time to a few days. It is worth remembering how, in the first days after the quake, a few Caltrans contracts were awarded in mere hours--proving that at times a bureaucracy can respond efficiently indeed.

Caltrans won widespread praise for its initial response to the crisis, and the agency deserved it. But now troubling questions have been raised about its performance before the quake.

A special Times report, published Wednesday, documented the fact that 80% of the 1,313 bridges identified as quake-vulnerable in the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta quake--in which 43 people died when two Bay Area freeways collapsed--still have not been retrofitted. In Los Angeles County alone, 84% of the 716 designated bridges still have not been retrofitted.

An especially worrisome aspect was that Caltrans focused on bridges supported by single columns before retrofitting those with multiple-column support. It turned out that both types of bridges collapsed in the Northridge temblor. This while not one of the Southern California bridges that had been retrofitted failed in the magnitude-6.8 earthquake.

Clearly, much more needs to be known about what was done and not done to make California’s bridges and freeway overpasses safer in those critical four years and four months between the Loma Prieta and Northridge earthquakes.