Getting In on the Ground Floor

For the first time since the Jan. 17 earthquake, students and faculty members resumed classes in a handful of major buildings at battered Cal State Northridge on Monday, marking a small milestone on the long road to recovery.

After a rush of preparations, university officials were able to open the ground floors of three science buildings and the engineering building solely for lab classes. The move provided some much-needed work space for biology, physics and computer lab classes that had been held over the past month in portable trailers with no equipment.

It also made some students nervous about returning to the multistory concrete buildings where cracks were still visible on walls. “I’m scared to be here in this building right now,” conceded Haleh Kia, 22, a senior biology major taking a lab in the relatively undamaged Science 4 building.

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But most students, including Kia, said they were glad to get back to their normal quarters, and she said of the nervousness: “We’ll get over it.”

Professors, meanwhile, said they expect to recover lab time lost during the past month during the rest of the semester and predicted students’ academic performance will not suffer.

“I think we’re a little bit behind. We’ve overstressed the theory and understressed the physical contact thus far. But I think it’s something we can make up,” said Duane Doty, a professor of nuclear physics who had just one of four scheduled students show up for his morning lab class in experimental techniques.

Of the three no-shows, Doty said one was out of town on a trip, the other had voiced concern about returning to the Science 1 building after the earthquake and Doty was unable to contact the third student with the news that their lab class, for the first time this semester, would no longer be held in a bungalow.

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Because of the earthquake, classes at CSUN began two weeks late on Feb. 14. And because the temblor closed virtually every major building on campus due to varying degrees of damage, most classes until now have been held in several hundred portable classrooms trucked to the campus or moved to about two dozen off-campus locales.

University officials said they made it a top classroom priority to restore the on-campus lab space because the lab areas house equipment and other materials that were difficult to duplicate elsewhere. Only a handful of classes were held in the reopened portions of the buildings Monday, where equipment appeared to have survived surprisingly well.

The ground floor portions of the one engineering and three science buildings were the first among the university’s roster of major classroom buildings to reopen since the quake.

University officials said they expect to gradually begin restoring more permanent classroom space, with the next priorities being more science and engineering labs. Officials said the second floors of the Science 1 and 3 buildings may reopen later this week. The ground floors of Sierra South and the Speech/Drama building also will be forthcoming.

Said computer science professor Philip Gilbert, whose students worked on computers in class Monday: “If we had to wait any longer, I think you would have had some very unhappy faculty. But here it’s only the fifth week of the semester and we’re more or less back to a semblance of normalcy.”