Office to Stay in Use Despite Seismic Risk : Safety: State ordered its Downtown garage closed, but a Caltrans building rated at the same hazard level will remain open pending retrofitting.

While state officials earlier this week ordered a Downtown parking garage shut because of concerns that it could collapse in an earthquake, they chose not to close a nearby Caltrans office annex with 800 workers that is officially rated as posing the same risk.

The decision has triggered outrage among some who work in the Caltrans building.

“Is a Fiat convertible more important than a human life?” asked D.T. (Doc) Maloney, chief of Caltrans’ office of business management.

The issue raises a question about the inexact science of quake-proofing buildings across the state: How do officials decide which facilities should be shut? During a time of scarce state funds, how much risk is acceptable?

State officials say the answers entail an elaborate balancing of various factors.

“It’s sort of like driving on the freeway,” said Joel McRonald, head of seismic safety for the state architect’s office. “The state says the acceptable risk of driving on city freeways is no more than 55 m.p.h. So 65 or 90 m.p.h. are unacceptable but still, a lot of people do it.”

The Caltrans office annex and the state employee parking garage were both on a list of the 20 most seismically unsafe state buildings in California released in April. Both were assigned the same grade of unacceptable risk. But the office annex at 120 S. Spring St. was kept open because Caltrans officials expect to begin retrofitting the 37-year-old building by February, as employees continue working there.

McRonald said his office did not shut the office annex because no earthquake is considered imminent, and it would be too costly and inconvenient “to move the employees elsewhere during the short period (while) the retrofit is done.”

State officials ordered the 905-car garage at 145 S. Broadway shut after today when a structural engineer found that the facility could collapse from shaking during an earthquake.

A building next door, the Junipero Serra State Office Building at 107 S. Broadway, although rated as a possible failure in a severe earthquake, is being kept open without retrofitting because it is considered stronger than either the Caltrans annex or the parking garage.

State officials rated the state garage and the Caltrans annex as “Category 6” buildings on a risk scale of 1 to 7, with 1 indicating the safest structures and 7 indicating that a severe quake would pose “imminent threat to occupants,” according to a report by the office of the state architect. The Serra building was rated 5.

The report lists no Category 7 buildings. It does, however, list seven Category 6 structures, located in Los Angeles, Norco, Norwalk and Long Beach.

In a severe quake, Category 6 buildings would cause “extensive but not imminent” risk to occupants, whose extrication would be “protracted and difficult,” according to the report. These buildings would suffer extensive structural damage and are likely to collapse, the report said.

*

According to the report on the 20 most unsafe state buildings in California, “these buildings should receive the state’s immediate and highest priority for correction of seismic deficiencies by retrofitting and/or replacement. These few buildings . . . have been determined to have the highest potential risk to life safety.”

However, with little funding available to retrofit or replace these facilities, little has been done except for shutting the garage and planning the retrofitting of the Caltrans annex, a $4.5-million project that is expected to take 90 days, state officials say.

At Caltrans, officials hired structural engineers last spring to inspect their main Los Angeles building and the slightly newer, more problematic annex. Based on those findings, Caltrans decided to proceed with retrofitting as an interim measure to strengthen the annex, making it significantly safer for workers until a planned move to a new facility within five years, Caltrans official Maloney said.

The report on unsafe government buildings has placed state officials in the uncomfortable position of having publicly identified potential problem buildings without necessarily having the money to fix them, he noted.

“They are stuck between a rock and a hard place,” Maloney said. “They came up with a report and may not be able to deal with the outcome. . . . It’s a real mind-boggling task.”

Jerry Baxter, who recently stepped down as director of Caltrans, said he fought to get funding for retrofitting as soon as he learned in February of the annex’s status. The money was finally allocated from Caltrans’ budget earlier this month--after Baxter’s departure.

When Baxter--now a deputy director for construction management at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority--learned that the Downtown parking garage had been shut while the Caltrans building would remain open, he was stunned.

“They found the garage was in so much jeopardy they closed it down, when we’ve got a building full of people that’s an equal hazard and that’s still there,” he said.

Voters approved $250 million in bonds in 1990 to strengthen state buildings--a measure requiring the seismic evaluation of the state’s 14,000 buildings. Today, half have been inspected. Of those, 106 were viewed as questionable enough to warrant structural engineers’ closer investigation, McRonald said.

However, last summer the Legislature refused to approve appropriation of the $200 million in bond money that remained available--an action that halted progress on other buildings, said Kevin Eckery, deputy secretary of the state Consumer Services Agency.

“It left a lot of the state employees at risk,” McRonald said.

McRonald noted that there is no requirement for such inspections in the private sector. “I’m sure if they used the similar type of methodology we’ve utilized, you would find there are many (private) buildings around the state that are deficient.”

As an example, McRonald cited a Times Mirror parking garage, examined for possible rental for state employees who could no longer park at the South Broadway facility. He said engineers concluded that the private structure posed as much risk as the one officials ordered shut.