HOME SAFETY : Basics Completed in Quake-Proofing Project

If the aftershock that rocked the San Fernando Valley last Sunday had made itself felt around my house, I’d have learned right away how successful my efforts have been to make it quake-safe.

As it was, when I read about the 5.3 magnitude quake on Monday morning, I almost felt left out.

For the past few weekends I’ve been working to make our house better able to ride out a shaker. While Sunday’s aftershock to the Jan. 17 Northridge earthquake didn’t give me a chance to see how well I’ve done--for which I’m actually quite thankful--it did reinforce my doing it.

The earth will keep moving in Southern California, and sooner or later it will move enough to rock and roll Orange County.

After years of feeling somehow above it all, I decided it would be better to be safe than lying under a toppled bookcase wondering why I hadn’t bothered to bolt the silly thing down when I had the chance.

Earlier I wrote about the things I’d done--securing knickknacks, adding latches to cabinets, securing boxes on shelves, attaching a tall cabinet to the wall, protecting the china and securing the refrigerator and home computer.

I have a few long-range jobs still to get to, but I finished the basic battening down last week, trimming tree branches away from phone lines to reduce the chance of losing telephone service, securing the water heater and double-checking that other safety preparations were up-to-date.

Reviewing my list of projects, I find that it hasn’t been that difficult, or expensive, to increase the chances that our household will weather a big temblor without injury to the people inside or damage to some of the more significant of our possessions.

Here’s how things went on my most recent efforts:

Job: Fastening Water Heater

Fastening the water heater took about an hour, $8.46 worth of material and involved several skinned knuckles and a scorched forearm.

I installed steel strapping that encircles the water heater to keep it from toppling. I used straps at the top and bottom of the heater, cut from 10-foot lengths of 22-gauge strap that is typically found in the lumber section of home improvement stores (Simpson Strong Tie is the brand most lumber yards and home stores carry). Each strap is made of two pieces fastened together with bolts and wing nuts at the front of the heater. That makes it possible to unfasten each strap and remove the water heater without unbolting the straps from the wall.

You’ll need a pair of tin snips to cut steel strap, a power drill and assorted bits for pilot holes for the screws that fasten the straps to the wall and the appropriate screwdrivers or screwdriver bits for the power drill.

The benefit, in addition to keeping the heater from spilling 30 or 40 gallons of hot water, is that it helps protect against the gas line ripping loose and igniting a fire.

The drawback is that unfastening the straps is one more thing you’ve got to do when the heater goes bad and needs to be replaced.

If your heater is in a tight space, you might want to mark the position of the straps where they will be fastened to the wall studs, then remove the heater, install the straps to the wall and replace the heater; otherwise it’s difficult working around the heater.

Don’t anchor the straps to drywall or plaster with hollow wall fasteners--there’s not enough strength to hold several hundred pounds of bouncing water heater. Always screw directly into the studs. If they aren’t conveniently located (and they weren’t in my cabinet), attach a 2-by-3 or larger board horizontally across the wall studs in the heater cabinet wall and then fasten the straps to it in order to have a solid platform to anchor them to.

And remember, the hot water line leading out of the heater is hot enough to raise blisters on unprotected knuckles and forearms.

Job: Tree Trimming

The tree trimming was relatively easy--a tall pruning pole with a saw blade attachment allowed me to stand firmly on the ground under our front yard shade tree and remove several offending branches that had grown into the path of the phone lines. I cleared a path through the head of the tree so the lines won’t be in danger of being torn down by branches whipping back and forth in the shock of a quake.

Job: Attach Foundation

The big chore remaining is to fasten the 68-year-old house to its foundation. My house has about 180 linear feet of mudsill to secure to the raised foundation--a job that would entail renting a powerful masonry drill and spending an uncomfortable day or two flat on my back in the three-foot crawl space under the house. I’m estimating the do-it-myself cost at $400. It will probably zoom to $2,000 or so if I hire a contractor to do the work.

Building codes since the 1933 Long Beach earthquake have required houses to be bolted down, so unless your abode predates that shaker, and not that many in Orange County do, this isn’t a job you will have to worry about.

As for me--I figure the house has stayed on its foundation in all the nasty Southland quakes over the past six decades, so while I plan to get it done sometime this year, I’m not in a terrible hurry.

Job: Review Other Preparations

I went back through the house one last time to look for potential problems and to make sure the few things I’d done before my latest push were still in place.

I checked to make sure that the special wrench attached to the outside gas meter was still there. It was. The wrench is used for turning off the gas. The tool cost $10.72, and it took two minutes and a penny’s worth of wire to fasten it to the meter so that it doesn’t get lost. You shouldn’t turn off the gas unless there’s a leak, but if there is one it can save precious time to have the right tool.

The only problems I spotted are a few pictures in the bedroom that should get their glass covers replaced with shatter-proof plastic; a bathroom cabinet that needs a new latch and a makeshift bookcase in my wife’s office that is not too tall but is overloaded with papers and junk that will make a big mess in a big quake.

We have kept several small earthquake emergency kits in the house for several years now, but I decided it might be smarter to keep one in the trunk of each car and leave just one in the house. If the house were severely damaged in a big quake, the stuff in the cars might be easier to get to.

Those kits, which cost $29.95 each, contain emergency water, food, medical supplies and a heat-retaining Mylar blanket, all of which will supposedly last one person at least two days.

I intend at some point to buy a special 55-gallon water drum and put it in the back yard, probably in a corner at the very back of the lot, far away from structures that could fall on it. That drum will be our emergency water supply. To keep it fresh without waste, I’ll change the water every month or so, using the old stuff to irrigate the shrubbery and roses.

I still haven’t decided what, if anything, to do about setting up an emergency food supply, but I know that water is more important, so that will be my priority job this spring.

Finally: The Bottom Line

I’ve finished the earthquake safety projects I originally set out to do and now know what I’ll be tackling down the road.

Not counting the time I spent thinking about how to approach each project, the investment in work time was just under 11 hours, which I spread out over two Saturdays and a Sunday.

The cost of materials, including the gas meter wrench I bought earlier, was $188.12.

That’s not much if it means that the good china or our entertainment cabinet and its contents escape damage. And it’s nothing at all if it helps prevent an injury.