COSTA MESA : Japanese Build Their Safety Knowledge

After two weeks of training, seven Japanese students are hoping that construction skills they have learned at Orange Coast College will soften the impact of future disasters like the recent earthquake in Kobe, Japan.

The students today will finish a two-week course on light steel-frame residential construction. Orange Coast is the only institution in the United States that teaches the construction method, said Alan MacQuoid, chairman of education and promotion for the American Iron and Steel Institute.

Coincidentally, the students began their training two weeks after a massive earthquake on Jan. 17 destroyed more than 100,000 buildings in Kobe and killed more than 5,000 people.

Steel-frame homes probably will not be used to help rebuild the city because Japanese building codes currently do not permit the use of steel-frame construction for houses, students said.

But steel-frame houses, which are lighter than wood-frame structures and just as strong, could prove safer in an earthquake, said Mitsuhiro Iwane, 24, a Japanese developer and real estate agent in the program.

“We’re anticipating that steel-stud (construction) is going to be very popular someday in Japan,” Iwane said through an interpreter. “We have to take every chance to study it.”

American Silverwood Inc., a Japanese-owned construction company in Los Angeles, funded the students’ trip to Orange County for the course, said Mako Kobayashi, the firm’s vice president. The students will return to Japan to pass on the information to others in the event that Japan allows this type of steel-frame construction.

“Now, (the Japanese) have no workers who can do these types of jobs,” Kobayashi said through an interpreter. The students in the course here “are not really construction workers, but they are going to instruct and teach them how to do the steel framing.”