High-Rise Jitters : New Doubts About Safety After Jan. 17 Quake Haunt Upper-Floor Office Workers

From their 10th-story offices on the corner of Wilshire and Westwood boulevards, Darrell and Elizabeth Yamada command a mini-panorama of Westwood Village and the Hollywood Hills beyond. The view has given the husband-and-wife dental team much pleasure--and, in post-earthquake Los Angeles, a dose of anxiety as well.

Their jitters have diminished as the aftershocks have subsided, but both say spending many of their waking hours in a 12-story building in an area prone to shaking still gives them occasional pause.

“Every once in a while, I think about it, but you have to go (on) with your life,” said Darrell Yamada, who has occupied the offices for seven years. “You accept it as part of the price of living and working in Los Angeles.”

That trade-off might be getting trickier for workers in steel-frame mid- and high-rise buildings as concern mounts about their safety.

Steel structures were long thought to be among the safest places to be in an earthquake because they can bend without breaking. But the Jan. 17 quake caused widespread cracking in the welded connections of beams and columns in at least 90 such buildings, most of them in the San Fernando Valley and on the Westside.

In response, the City Council recently ordered inspections of about 400 steel-frame buildings. Retrofitting is already under way at many of the buildings damaged in the earthquake, but recent tests have shown such repair methods to be ineffective when subjected to the stresses of a 7.0 quake.

So where does that leave the denizens of the Westside’s steel-and-glass structures?

Mostly in a state of necessary denial.

“I thought about it a lot directly after the earthquake, but on a day-to-day basis, I don’t think about it,” said Nathlie Woods, an executive assistant at an accounting firm on the ninth floor of a 24-story building in West Los Angeles. “Until you brought it up.”

Woods, a Los Angeles native who has experienced all the city’s recent quakes, had never worked in a high-rise until she began her current job six months ago--just in time for January’s temblor.

She remains undaunted, saying, “There’s always going to be something.”

Yet, to many who toil in the city’s towers, memories of the massive damage caused by January’s quake have not faded.

Indeed, evidence of the destruction is not hard to find. Just a few miles from Woods’ office, for example, a six-story medical office building at Olympic Boulevard and Barrington Avenue had to be demolished shortly after the quake. The building did not topple but it was considered too severely damaged to be repaired.

“I never thought about this (happening),” said Alvin Rosenblum, a dentist who had offices on the building’s third floor and who suffered $450,000 in uninsured losses from the temblor. “I assumed that was the safest place to be.”

Although he tries not to dwell too much on the disaster, Rosenblum acknowledges that his next permanent offices will be on a building’s ground floor. “It’s preferable to me after the earthquake,” he said.

Likewise, a generally calm Elizabeth Yamada admits to being visited by an unnerving vision: that of the adjacent mid- and high-rise structures on Wilshire Boulevard toppling over like dominoes during a massive quake. “They’d be right on top of us,” she said.

Others, however, put their faith in modern construction technology. Despite the cracking in the skeletons of some steel-framed buildings in the city, none came close to collapsing in the quake.

This knowledge puts people such as Lee Alvarez at ease. Alvarez, general manager of Monty’s Steakhouse on the 21st floor of a Westwood high-rise, has experienced many bumps and jolts during her 17 years at the restaurant. January’s quake may have shaken up some of Monty’s employees, but she wasn’t one.

Even right after the quake, Alvarez said, the thought of the building’s possible collapse, or of her being in danger, never entered her mind. “It doesn’t bother me a bit.”