Quake-Damaged Building Evacuated After Testing : Recovery: Westside structure with steel frame is found to be dangerous 10 months after the temblor. Officials fear others may be in jeopardy.

Ten months after the devastating Northridge earthquake exposed troubling weaknesses in modern steel-frame office buildings, tenants Wednesday were forced to evacuate an 11-story Westside structure that engineering studies concluded had been dangerously weakened.

The order to move out of the Olympic Centre complex was issued to 22 tenants Tuesday afternoon by the building’s owner and prompted renewed concerns about the hidden dangers of structures that have yet to be examined.

“It’s just so worrisome,” said L. Thomas Tobin, executive director of the California Seismic Safety Commission, when informed of the building vacated today. “Here we are a year later and still finding buildings” that were seriously damaged.

The building was surrounded all day by double-parked moving vans, while inside movers jockeyed for elevators. Employees of a bank, a book publisher, several law firms and other tenants packed up records, photographs, computer equipment and furniture and scrambled to find new places to operate. Anyone entering the building to retrieve property was required to sign a waiver acknowledging that the building was hazardous.

“Something like this is really a great test that pulls together the teamwork of an organization in a very short period of time,” said John Maloney, president of Marathon National Bank, which was hoping to negotiate a lease of new offices nearby by today.

Bank officials said they were prepared to conduct business on the sidewalk for any customers concerned about the building but did not have to put those plans into action.

The copper-colored structure at 11150 Olympic Blvd. is one of more than 110 that the city Department of Building and Safety has identified as having parts of an internal steel frame that cracked during the earthquake. Damage to some of the buildings was discovered within days of the quake and already has been repaired, but many others with less exterior damage have yet to be closely studied.

Such buildings had been thought to be the safest type of structure in which to ride out a quake and none came even close to collapsing. But the cracks in the steel frames surprised engineers and architects, who had expected the frames to deform rather than break.

Because of the obvious disruption of evacuation orders and the cost of analyzing and repairing the steel frames, the owners of some buildings have waited to conduct such tests until forced to do so by the city of Los Angeles.

The city in June proposed requiring the owners of 300 buildings on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley most likely to have been damaged to retain a structural engineer to do that testing. But the program was derailed when testing at the University of Texas at Austin showed that the recommended method of strengthening the damaged joints between columns and beams would be inadequate. Additional research is being conducted.

Rather than forcing owners to make costly repairs that might later have to be upgraded, the city put the ordinance on hold.

Karl C. Deppe, assistant chief of the city’s Building Bureau, said a committee is trying to come up with safe and reasonably economical repair recommendations by the end of the year.

Any buildings found to be unsafe through voluntary testing must be vacated, Deppe said. He said he did not know specifically how many buildings have been emptied.

Many building owners, however, are going ahead with the work and have spent millions of dollars on computer simulations and ultrasound and visual inspections of possible damage.

Geoffrey Ely, executive director of the Building Owners and Managers Assn., said he is recommending to his members that they inspect their buildings, and many are already doing so. “The point is that they can’t afford to have buildings that people don’t feel safe in,” he said. “Even the perception that a building is not safe is not one that owners can afford.”

TCW Realty Advisors operates the evacuated building on Olympic and 10 other steel-frame structures for a group of institutional investors.

Richard Grantham, the firm’s senior partner, said the initial voluntary tests on the Olympic building, which was built in 1983 and includes a parking garage, showed that it was less likely than others managed by the firm to be seriously damaged. Additional tests, however, determined that at least 221 of 918 welded connections had cracked, and that prompted the decision to evacuate.

Grantham said more testing will have to be done to determine what the repairs will cost and how long they will take. He said the company decided to have the building inspected “because we just had a very vital concern for the well-being of our tenants and for the users of the building.”

He urged other building owners to do the same.

Although some tenants praised TCW for giving them timely information about the results of the inspections, others were critical.

Donald A. Garrard, a founding partner of the law firm Fonda & Garrard, predicted that the firm will be resettled elsewhere by the end of the week but said the interruption will cost the firm half a million dollars in lost revenues.

Garrard said the firm had been aware that it might be forced to move but faulted TCW for failing to give them more warning.

Times staff writers Tracey Kaplan and Sonia Nazario contributed to this story.

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