Congressmen Tour Valley Quake Sites

Far from his rural New Hampshire home, Republican Rep. William Zeliff Jr. stared Sunday at the broken steel beams in the severely damaged library at Cal State Northridge.

And he found himself in awe of the immense force unleashed by the January earthquake.

“Incredible,” Zeliff said, as a procession of hard-hatted congressmen stood in a dimly lit stairwell looking at beams that had been ripped from their anchor bolts when the 6.8-magnitude quake thrust the modern library upward and then slammed it back down on its concrete foundation.

For Zeliff, who had only seen television news of the temblor’s damage, the real thing was sobering. He saw it up close on the House Public Works and Transportation Committee’s daylong helicopter and bus tour of quake-ravaged areas.

“This has been devastating, particularly the library--to see that kind of damage (is) unbelievable,” he said. “You see spots where bridges cave in and highways cave in. . . . You see all these apartment buildings that are squashed and the parking garages.”

And he found the tour a helpful backdrop to today’s hearings here on the disaster response.

Back in February, Zeliff had voted against an emergency $8.6-billion aid bill. Although he said he was concerned about quake victims, he said he was also worried about adding to the federal deficit and forcing future generations to pay the cost.

But after seeing damage from the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum to the Northridge Meadows apartment building and the Newhall Pass, this fiscally conservative congressman had only high praise for federal, state and local agencies that responded to one of the most expensive natural disasters in the nation’s history.

“From what I can see here, all the agencies have worked very, very well together. I’m very proud of what FEMA has done, unlike the problems that they had in Florida” after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, he said. “I think this will go down in history as one of the best examples of everybody working together very quickly to get the job done.”

Indeed, on the eve of today’s hearing at the Los Angeles County Hall of Administration, committee members, both Democrats and Republicans, had nothing but kudos for the performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

For Committee Chairman Rep. Norman Mineta (D-San Jose), the tour “just reinforces the fact that . . . we have responded very well and very quickly to the disaster of the Northridge earthquake.”

Mineta said today’s hearing with disaster officials will examine “how well we’ve done” as well as the shortcomings of the response to the Jan. 17 quake.

“We want to know what we can learn from this, so we can know how to do things better in the future,” he said, outside a closed-door briefing at a Van Nuys quake assistance center.

Richard Andrews, director of Gov. Pete Wilson’s Office of Emergency Services, also spoke favorably of federal actions after the quake. “We’ve been through a lot of disasters (in California),” he said. “This is by far the most effective response we’ve seen from FEMA.”

Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City) emerged from the briefing to say that he too is pleased with the federal government’s response. “It’s not perfect, but given the quake’s magnitude, it is better than any of us had any reason to expect,” Berman said.

He said a number of quake aid issues must still be resolved, including how to help financially strapped homeowners obtain low-interest loans from the Small Business Administration when they may still have a large unpaid mortgage on a dwelling that was heavily damaged or destroyed in the quake.

The five committee members who took the helicopter tour saw the soon-to-be reopened stretch of the Santa Monica Freeway, the crippled interchange of the Antelope Valley and Golden State freeways near the Newhall Pass, and parts of the San Fernando Valley before arriving at Cal State Northridge.

At the university, which is near the quake’s epicenter, “the damage has been very extensive,” said CSUN President Blenda Wilson. “The bill will be very large.”

During a luncheon briefing, Wilson told the congressmen that estimates range as high as $300 million to repair buildings across the campus, which only reopened on Valentine’s Day. Many classes are still being held in temporary quarters, including hundreds of portable classrooms, trailers and off-campus locations.

Wilson thanked the delegation, which included FEMA Director James Lee Witt and other Clinton Administration representatives, for the agency’s “prompt and sensitive response.”

As she showed slides of quake damage, from the shattered glass entrance of the bookstore to vast structural damage to a new parking garage and the Fine Arts Building, Wilson reminded the group that much work also remains to be done to determine how campus buildings can be rebuilt.

That point was driven home to the delegation inside the Oviatt Library, where the force of the quake sheared off metal anchor bolts at the point where steel beams meet the building’s foundation. In some places, the concrete base beneath the beams shattered.

“The structural strength of it is gone,” Chris Baylis, project manager for the engineering firm of Law/Crandall Inc. told the congressional delegation.

Witt wanted to know what was the answer to ensure the seismic safety of modern steel buildings. “It’s going to take some serious review,” Baylis said, including possibly a major change in building design.

The damage extended to a 1991 addition to the library, built to the latest earthquake codes--a fact that surprised Mineta.

“It always amazes me just to see what happens, despite all of the best engineering practices,” Mineta said. “Mother Nature has an upper hand over man-made structures. The question always comes up, how far can we go in terms of making a safe working environment or a safe building.”