Quake Panel Assails Builders, Code Enforcers

The Northridge earthquake would have inflicted far less damage if building codes had been rigorously enforced, according to a state Seismic Safety Commission report that castigates engineers, designers and building officials for failing to heed the lessons of other disastrous temblors.

The commission found that California has slipped behind schedule in meeting goals established a decade ago to bolster the state’s efforts to safeguard buildings, utilities and roadways from earthquake losses.

“Much of what we have learned in past earthquakes--and were reminded of by Northridge--is not applied with the appropriate level of commitment, consistency and priority,” the panel concluded in a 195-page report being submitted today to Gov. Pete Wilson.

The report also found that some types of buildings constructed under code changes resulting from the San Fernando earthquake in 1971 fared little better than earlier versions--and that land-use laws restricting construction along fault lines have been inadequate in several recent quakes.

Among the commission’s 168 recommendations:

* The Alquist-Priolo Act, adopted in the early 1970s to limit building in fault zones, should be strengthened, widening the restricted quarter-mile zones and broadening the definition of active faults. “The Northridge, Whittier Narrows and Coalinga earthquakes all occurred where there was no [such designation],” the report noted.

* The University of California and the California State University systems, which are not subject to the same seismic safety standards as other public schools, should be required to adopt a goal of retrofitting all life-threatening seismic hazards by 2005.

* The governor should petition the Federal Communications Commission to limit access to cellular phone service to essential agencies, such as police and fire, after a disaster.

* Automatic gas shut-off valves should be made mandatory at the service entry point of all mobile home parks, and mandatory shut-off valves for all private residences should be considered by government officials and utilities.

* Caltrans should accelerate its $600-million toll bridge retrofit program “because of the critical importance of those structures.” The report notes that retrofitting of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which lost a segment of roadway in the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, is scheduled for completion by the end of 1997, but Caltrans has set no completion dates for six other toll bridges.

The report repeatedly called the magnitude 6.7 Northridge quake a “moderate” temblor with a “short duration” of only nine seconds, while warning that buildings are apt to be tested in years ahead by more powerful and longer quakes.

Both the Northridge and San Fernando quakes occurred in the early morning when many buildings and freeways were nearly empty, the report noted, saying, “The state can’t rely on being so lucky in the future.”

The report stated that the Northridge quake “affected the lives of more people than any previous natural disaster in the United States.” The commission said the $20-billion official damage estimate does not reflect many costs related to the loss of business and productivity.

The commission reserved some of its harshest comments for officials responsible for improving quake mitigation efforts in the state.

“Since 1985, California’s laws have called for the state to reduce earthquake risk significantly by the year 2000,” the report noted. “The California Earthquake Hazards Reduction Act of 1986 mandates [that government and private entities implement] initiatives to meet this goal.”

But, the commission found, “at the time of the Northridge earthquake, 35 of 42 initiatives were behind schedule. Because seismic safety programs are a secondary concern for most agencies, these initiatives often do not receive the priority needed.”

The report is more than 10 months late. In an executive order, the governor had directed the commission to study the lessons of the Northridge quake and report back to him by last Sept. 1.

However, research by the 17-member commission, its 14-member staff and 18 outside consultants took longer than expected, and was followed by months of sometimes divisive debate over the final language. The report now will be considered by the governor and the Legislature.

Engineers, Designers and Inspectors

“The building code itself is not in need of a major overhaul, but far more attention to strict adherence to the code and the elimination of shoddy design and construction is clearly needed for earthquake-safe buildings,” the commission reported.

Often, the report concluded, cost-cutting weakened structures and contributed to the damage. “It appears that the low bidder caused more damage than the size or magnitude of the earthquake,” it said.

The commission said that designers, builders and inspectors all shoulder some of the blame. “Engineers who design the least expensive structures are often rewarded with more work,” the panel noted.

“In highly repetitive construction, such as unreinforced masonry building retrofits, tilt-ups and parking structures, the designs are refined many times, with the most inexpensive details reused--even if these details happen to be inferior.

“The coordination of the final structure . . . can suffer in such cases, and the engineer of record may be difficult to identify.”

The report disparages current professional training, saying that architects and civil, mechanical and electrical engineers are not necessarily required to have formal education or work experience in seismic safety. “Many professionals receive their education and experience in other parts of the world and also have no formal education on earthquake safety,” the commission said. “As a result, shoddy, marginal and even incompetent designs are not uncommon.”

Many local building departments lack budgets and trained personnel to do an adequate job of enforcing codes, the report concluded. “In fact, a significant number . . . do not have any licensed building professionals on their staffs.”

The panel found a lack of adequate testing of many vital seismic reinforcement methods adopted by builders, citing as an example the thicker steel beams installed in high-rises in recent years. The report proposed establishment by the state of a Center for Earthquake Risk Reduction to conduct such testing.

Ron Nelson, president of the private Structural Engineers Assn. of California, responded to the report’s criticisms of building professionals.

“The way it reads in some places, it is as if dereliction is a dominant occurrence,” he said. “It is, in some instances, a factor. [The report] touches on reality, but in some cases could be misconstrued. . . .

“There are more things that could be done [to improve seismic safety], and it would take a cooperative effort from all participants, the engineers, the inspectors, the owners and the rest of the community. . . . Everyone has to be part of the team. You can’t just turn around and point a finger at the engineers and inspectors.”

Hospital Communications and Other Problems

Because communications lines had been ruptured in the quake, the report said, the Los Angeles Fire Department had to send out units and even firefighters on foot to determine whether hospitals were impaired. Even cellular phone systems were overloaded, preventing use by emergency personnel.

In the San Fernando Valley, the report said, “The Los Angeles County Medic Alert Center broke down; the Hospital Emergency Administrative Radio system was inoperable in the area of greatest earthquake impact; Reddi-Net, a computerized system owned by the Hospital Council of Southern California that links 86 hospitals, failed.”

Although improvements in hospital construction since the Hospital Seismic Safety Act of 1972 limited structural damage, there still was extensive non-structural damage that caused important hospitals to close, the report said.

“Earthquakes do not fit well into the existing disaster plans devised for the typical American hospital in that earthquakes are simultaneously an internal and external disaster,” the report explained. “For example, Holy Cross or Olive View hospitals [in the San Fernando Valley] experienced water leaks and power and communications problems at the same time that people in the surrounding area were injured and needed treatment.”

Disaster exercises conducted by hospitals sometimes are not realistic, the report said. “Elevators are used to transport simulated patients; power is assumed to be normal; no allowance is made for overturned non-structural elements being non-functional, and no provision is made for outside lifelines being unavailable.”

Two representatives of the county’s hospital communications systems said in interviews that the report’s statements about its failures were exaggerated.

David Langness, a spokesman for the Healthcare Assn. of Southern California, formerly called the Hospital Council, said only seven of 79 Reddi-Net terminals actually failed.

While “we don’t like the fact that seven of our units failed and we are designing a new system to have a zero percent failure in the next earthquake . . . I think a single-digit failure rate in a major event like Northridge isn’t too bad,” Langness said.

Darlene Isbell, a spokeswoman for the county Department of Health Services, said that while certain parts of the county’s medic alert system were out of commission for up to 24 hours, “we did send out an alternative system within hours and the control point did not fail.”

Tom Tobin, Seismic Safety Commission executive director, rejoined that transcripts of testimony from hospital representatives confirm the report’s account.

Building Failures

The worst building failures, the report said, occurred in tilt-up concrete buildings, welded-steel frame buildings, parking structures and mobile homes. Some buildings that had been retrofitted still had damage, and non-structural damage was also very costly.

Tilt-ups, with prefabricated concrete walls attached to foundations and then tilted up into place, “did not perform much better in the Northridge earthquake” than they had in the San Fernando quake, despite building code changes in 1973 and 1976, the commission said.

The changes included the strengthening of wall-to-roof connections, but there was no testing to verify that the code changes worked.

In addressing the most startling engineering failure of the Northridge quake--breaks in welded steel frames of dozens of mid- and high-rise buildings--the commission again made the point that new building techniques have not been adequately tested.

“The code changes in the 1960s that allowed these fully welded steel frames were based on small-scale tests of steel beams that were on the order of 10 times lighter and one-fourth the depth of beams now in wide use,” the report said. “Minor investments in full-scale tests back in the 1960s could have saved the industry from billions of dollars in Northridge earthquake losses alone.

“The damage generally indicates previously unknown limitations on [steel] behavior and raises serious questions about current practice for design and construction of such systems.”

Non-structural building damage that did not lead to collapse amounted to billions of dollars, the commission said. Heavy lighting fixtures fell and massive pieces of building veneers and ceilings were dislodged.

“One insurance company with a $60-million commercial earthquake policy loss found that the majority of the claim was due to only one kind of damage--non-structural sprinkler pipe failures,” the report noted. “The majority of the approximately $300 million in damage to Los Angeles Unified School District facilities was also non-structural.”

Incomplete or improperly done retrofitting sometimes led to building failures, the report said. “For example, the Bullock’s building in the Northridge shopping mall was partially retrofitted shortly after the San Fernando earthquake,” it stated, “but the added walls were not actually connected to columns as required by the retrofit plans, making the walls discontinuous, which probably exacerbated the collapse of three levels of concrete.” A Bullock’s spokeswoman declined comment Tuesday.

Elevator retrofits mandated in recent years sometimes turned out to be ineffective. The commission found that 688 elevators suffered derailed counterweights in the Northridge quake, as compared to 674 in the San Fernando quake. Despite the hour, 4:31 a.m., people had to be rescued from 39 elevators.

Free-standing masonry walls fared badly in the Northridge event, the report said. “Four-to-six-foot-tall concrete-block fences fell because they were not well engineered; many were obviously built without any inspection. Some had no foundations, some lacked reinforcing, and where reinforcing was used, it was often ineffective.”

The report warned that budget cutbacks on both the state and federal levels threaten earthquake safety efforts.

For instance, it said, decreases in funding at the federal Bureau of Reclamation leave a substantial number of federal dams, including Folsom, Friant and Cachuma, “needing repair and upgrading.”

It also warned against proposals by legislators to save money by exempting community colleges from provisions of the Field Act mandating seismic safety in the public schools. “Neither the community college chancellor’s office nor its local districts have properly qualified staffs to take on the responsibilities of building code enforcement,” it said.

In summary, the commission declared: “Unless seismic safety is afforded a higher priority, Californians will continue to experience avoidable economic and personal losses from earthquakes.”

The Northridge earthquake, the panel stated, “was a reminder. It showed us--again--how devastating even a moderate urban earthquake can be.”

* INSURANCE CRISIS: Activists say quake insurance may become thing of past. A3

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Lessons From Northridge

The State Seismic Safety Commission has voiced concern in a 195-page report that the state is slipping behind in its quake resistance efforts. The commission, reporting to the governor, says that much Northridge damage resulted from failure to adequately comply with state building codes. It describes Northridge as only a “moderate” temblor and says the next big quake could well be worse.

QUOTES FROM THE REPORT

Some of the conclusions reached by the state Seismic Safety Commission, in the report to the governor on the Northridge quake:

“A number of factors may serve to dampen any feelings of elation over the relatively few deaths that occurred. Through the shaking in this earthquake was intense, it was the product of a moderate-magnitude, short-duration event. It is reasonable to assume that either a larger magnitude quake or one of similar strength but longer duration will subject similar structures to a substantially more strenuous test.”

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“Architects and civil, mechanical and electrical engineers are not necessarily required to have formal education or work experience in the seismic safety of structures. In fact, it is still possible to graduate most California colleges and universities in these professions with no formal course work related to earthquakes.”

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“The numbers of dead and injured were not as high as in some other natural disasters, but the [Northridge] earthquake affected the lives of more people than any previous natural disaster in the United States.”

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“Many hospital radios and phones did not work, requiring the Los Angeles Fire Department to send runners and fire units to determine the status of hospitals.”

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“The $20 billion in losses that often has been quoted as the cost of the Northridge earthquake covers, primarily, the physical structure to structures and lifelines. It does not include many of the costs related to the loss of use, loss of business, loss of productivity and relocation of businesses.”

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DAMAGED BUILDINGS CITED IN THE REPORT

Cal State Northridge parking structure

Royce Hall at UCLA

Kaiser office building

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HOW THE NORTHRIDGE QUAKE COMPARES

The Northridge earthquake on Jan. 17, 1994 affected a smaller area with violent shaking intensities that some other historic quakes in California. But because of the dense urban population of the area, far more damage was sustained. In the maps below, areas of violent shaking are indicated in red.

1857 Ft. Tejon: 8.3 Magnitude

One dead, unknown injured

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1906 San Francisco: 8.3 Magnitude

700-800 dead, unknown injured

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1989 Loma Prieta: 7.1 Magnitude

63 dead / 3,757 injured

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1994 Northridge: 6.7 Magnitude

57 dead / 9,000 injured

Source: Report to the governor by the State Seismic Safety Commission