Retrofitting Lag Blamed for Quake Freeway Toll : Roads: Engineers’ panel says fast pace begun in 1989 wasn’t kept up. Many projects years from completion.

The greater-than-expected damage to Los Angeles’ freeway system in the Northridge earthquake can be blamed on the slow pace of a seismic strengthening program that is still years away from fixing some of the state’s most vulnerable bridges, a panel of engineers has found.

If the state had continued to retrofit bridges at the accelerated level established after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, far fewer may have collapsed or sustained heavy damage in the Northridge temblor and Los Angeles may have been spared months of disruption, said the state’s Seismic Advisory Board.

But the panel said the program, burdened by budget constraints and administrative bottlenecks, had completed only a fraction of the needed strengthening when the quake collapsed seven bridges at six locations and damaged 233 more on Jan. 17.

The board’s report, scheduled to be released today, represents the first time that an official government body has criticized top state leaders for the sluggish pace of retrofitting before the Northridge quake. It also sounds a clear alarm that it will be several years before hundreds of bridges--especially heavily traveled toll bridges--will be considered safe in an earthquake.

While California Department of Transportation officials say they already have begun to implement most of the recommendations and have dramatically accelerated the retrofitting, the chairman of the advisory panel said there are disturbing signs that the program could slow down again.

He said there is still no clearly designated source of funds to pay $650 million to strengthen the toll bridges. Tracking by Caltrans, he said, shows it is taking longer to move projects from the design to construction stage.

“It is clear the engineers are busy working away (but) things aren’t getting into implementation as fast as they should,” George Housner, a Caltech professor emeritus, said in an interview.

He said the panel fears a repeat of the pattern after each major earthquake: When memories of the disaster are still fresh, retrofitting proceeds at a frantic pace. But as recollections dim, funding is siphoned to more politically rewarding projects and the retrofitting program slows down.

Caltrans officials insisted the Administration was “fully committed” to rapid completion of the retrofit work and set the end of 1997 as a target. Gov. Pete Wilson ordered a major acceleration after articles in The Times after the Northridge quake revealed the slow pace of the program.

Since then, officials said, hundreds of engineers have been reassigned to the retrofit program and contracting red tape has been reduced. “Seismic retrofit is our highest priority for funding,” the department said in response to the engineers’ findings.

In its 77-page report, the advisory board pointed out that governors and legislatures had allowed the program to languish. The report noted that it had been known since the 1971 Sylmar earthquake that hundreds of the state’s highway structures “could not survive intensive ground shaking”--and this knowledge had been reinforced by the 1987 Whittier Narrows quake and Loma Prieta.

“All seven of the Northridge bridge collapses could have been prevented with current seismic retrofit technology,” the panel wrote. “The critical element was not a lack of technical understanding . . . but the retrofit implementation time factor.”

The board submitted its findings to Caltrans Director James van Loben Sels, who had asked the panel six months ago to assess the bridge strengthening program’s performance in light of the heavy damage sustained by highway structures in the earthquake. Van Loben Sels said in a statement that he agreed “wholeheartedly with the experts’ findings and recommendations.”

The same board was directed to investigate the retrofitting program after the Loma Prieta quake toppled bridges and killed 43 people. The 264-page report it produced from that investigation was far more critical than the one presented to Van Loben Sels. It not only found fault with the pace of the program but also criticized Caltrans for its approach to retrofitting design and its failure to properly assess the vulnerability of vital bridges.

Some elements of the latest report, however, amounted to a review of the panel’s own work. Since Loma Prieta, several of the eight academics on the advisory panel have worked on Caltrans contracts, providing research and testing of new strengthening techniques. As a panel, they have continued to review and evaluate the agency’s seismic policy and technical procedures.

In their report, the engineers gave the department high marks for its retrofitting design techniques, saying Californians can feel confident that newly constructed or recently strengthened bridges are safe. They emphasized that there was much evidence to support that finding.

“All structures in the region of strong shaking that were retrofitted since 1989 performed adequately,” the report said, “thus demonstrating the validity of the Caltrans retrofit procedures.” It noted that there were 24 retrofitted bridges in a region of very strong shaking and 60 in an area buffeted by heavy ground motion.

At the same time, the engineers expressed great concern that the 11 toll bridges in the state would be among the last to be retrofitted. Calling those bridges “too important to the economy of California to be left at risk to earthquake destruction,” the panel repeatedly warned that funding problems must be resolved.

“Retrofitting of toll bridges is proceeding at a slow pace, limited by budgetary constraints, even though their vulnerabilities are high,” the report said.

Wilson has maintained that the bulk of the cost should be borne by toll revenues, but he has met stiff resistance from Bay Area legislators who argue that voters approved $1 bridge tolls with the understanding that they would be used for other projects. Furthermore, they complain, bridge users are doubly taxed because they are forced to pay both tolls and gasoline taxes.

Caltrans officials defended the pace of the toll bridge retrofitting, saying it had taken years just to figure out how to strengthen the huge, highly complex structures, especially the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

The report recommended that Caltrans revise its system for setting retrofitting priorities, suggesting that instead of strengthening bridges by categories--those having single columns or multiple columns, etc.--it should fix “the most hazardous highway bridges . . . as quickly as practical.”

The engineering panel said the agency’s method of establishing priorities also had not given enough weight to certain important factors. For example, it said Santa Monica Freeway bridges should have had a higher priority for retrofitting because there were so many bridges along the highway that there was a greater likelihood that collapse of any one of them could shut down the entire freeway.

Two of the bridges that fell in the earthquake were on the Santa Monica, at La Cienega and Venice boulevards. Although they had been scheduled for retrofitting, they had not been given top priority.

Housner said the panel also believed the agency should have paid more attention to soil conditions there, especially since la cienaga in Spanish means the swamp, indicating that the area had once been marshland.