Cities Balk at Tougher New Building Standards : Safety: Engineers warn that housing is being built in Ventura County without earthquake safeguards recommended by a regional task force.

Eighteen months after the Northridge earthquake crumpled buildings across Southern California, none of the cities in Ventura County have imposed tough new building standards recommended by a regional task force and adopted by Los Angeles and the county government here.

Some cities have asked builders to voluntarily adopt the new standards requiring stronger materials and designs. Others claim their current codes work fine and point to limited damage from the Northridge quake as proof.

Still others--including the hardest-hit area, Simi Valley--are considering changes but want direction from the state.

“We don’t want to overreact,” said Gaddis Farmer, the city’s building official. “We want to do what’s best for the community and the building construction industry.”

Farmer said he would consider the county’s new measures when preparing recommendations to the City Council for code changes this fall.

In the meantime, however, engineers warn that new housing is being built without the safeguards recommended by a task force of builders, planners and engineers.

“We will have built thousands of buildings with these same codes that didn’t work,” said G. D. Mayer, an engineer with the county’s department of building and safety. Changes are needed, he said, and the longer communities avoid them, the more buildings may be vulnerable to the next quake.

The state’s Seismic Safety Commission released a report stating that failure to follow existing codes led to much of the damage incurred in the Jan. 17, 1994, quake. The report did not focus on changes in building codes.

But a Los Angeles task force assembled soon after the earthquake proposed a series of measures to keep walls from shearing and crumpling in the next disaster.

The city’s Department of Building and Safety and the Structural Engineers Assn. of Southern California brought together engineers, city building officials and contractors to analyze the damage and suggest ways it might have been prevented.

Investigators found patterns in the wreckage, said Ben Schmid, a task force member and consulting structural engineer based in Newport Beach. Stucco and dry wall used in shear walls--walls that resist the lateral push and pull of an earthquake--had failed, allowing structures to shift under the strain.

In contrast, many buildings with plywood shear walls survived largely intact, even those near the epicenter, Schmid said.

So the task force suggested requiring that stucco and dry wall used in shear walls in wood-frame structures withstand a greater amount of stress, and in multistory buildings be used only on the top floor.

“The buildings that we saw without damage had already been designed using those . . . more conservative approaches,” Schmid said. “Those buildings had zero damage.”

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Both the city and county of Los Angeles adopted standards based on the recommendations, and last October Ventura County followed suit. An emergency memorandum covering wood-frame buildings from the county forbids the use of stucco and dry wall as shear walls on the ground floor of multistory structures.

Plywood shear walls, the memorandum stated, must have a height-to-width ratio of 2 to 1. Buildings resting on columns, such as apartment buildings with parking spaces tucked underneath, would also need to meet tougher standards in the design of those columns.

In March, the county issued another memorandum dictating tougher stress standards for three-ply plywood and approving the use of a different type of washer, which survived the earthquake better.

Mayer said the new requirements are designed to discourage the use of stucco, drywall and three-ply plywood for shear walls, and encourage the use of sturdier four-ply plywood.

“We didn’t want to keep building with the same methods,” Mayer said. “We wanted to change.”

City officials didn’t quite share Mayer’s enthusiasm.

Barry Branagan, Thousand Oaks’ building director, said any changes in the building codes should be done on a statewide basis, not by cities or counties. “The idea here is to have a uniform application so that the contractors and builders can go from one jurisdiction to another and be confident that things will be the same,” he said. “If everyone’s got a different rule of thumb, it gets confusing.”

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Although he said the county’s changes should be considered, Branagan said the real key to seismic safety lay in proper building inspection and soil analysis of building sites. Thousand Oaks, he said, has done both for years. As a result, he said, the city suffered minor damage in the quake.

Building officials in Ventura and Moorpark have recommended--not mandated--that contractors follow the county guidelines. “We weren’t crazy about doing the emergency amendment like Ventura County did without hearing both sides of the issue,” said Bob Prodoehl, Ventura’s building officer and fire marshal.

The building industry, he said, needs to give input on the changes. “The code process has traditionally involved all parties,” he said.

Building engineers estimate the new requirements could add between 1% and 3% to the price of building.

Schmid argued it’s a small price to pay for making a building less susceptible to tremors. “It absolutely increases the resistance of the structure, and that’s what it’s all about as far as the owners are concerned,” he said.

Despite the resistance to code revisions, local building officials are considering another possible change--requiring engineers to visit building sites for structures they design and check the seismic safety measures. The move would guard against poor implementation of safety measures, blamed for much of the Northridge quake damage.

The county chapter of the International Conference of Building Officials will meet Wednesday to discuss the possible requirement.

Although Ventura County fared far better in the Northridge earthquake than its neighbor, local building officials and engineers say they know future quakes could strike closer to home. Fault zones crisscross the county, including zones along Oak Ridge and through the Santa Monica and Los Padres mountains.

The county’s vulnerability makes improvements in the building standards all the more urgent, said Tom Harris, a structural engineer in Thousand Oaks. Cities, he said, need to begin incorporating lessons learned from Northridge.

“How long are we going to wait and see?” he said.

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