Fixing Cracks in Steel Frame Buildings Poses Daunting Task : Engineering: Owners fret over costs of city ordinance passed after the temblor caused major damage in many columns and beams.

Last November, Rosalind Zuckerman had to move her West Los Angeles law firm after ultrasound testing detected hidden cracks from the Northridge earthquake in the steel girders that held the Marathon Bank building together.

Along with several other tenants--all ordered out on three days’ notice--Zuckerman resettled in another Olympic Boulevard mid-rise just a few blocks away.

Now it’s happening again.

Without consulting Zuckerman or other tenants, the management of the West Side Towers took out a city building permit to begin an estimated $3 million in repairs to the building’s steel girders.

“If this one is going to be yellow-tagged [and closed], I would be very upset,” Zuckerman said on learning the news.

Her anxiety will soon be felt by thousands of office workers--and their buildings’ owners--as the city’s steel frame repair law finally starts to deliver its punch.

The City Council adopted the ordinance Feb. 22 in response to the discovery that the Northridge quake had caused severe cracking in many steel columns and beams, shattering the engineering community’s confidence in steel frame construction.

Since May, city inspectors have hand-delivered hundreds of notices to offices in the San Fernando Valley and West Los Angeles. They instruct building owners to inspect--at their expense--for cracks that can be hidden behind walls that had little or no visible quake damage.

The ordinance covers the city areas where damage to steel frame buildings is thought to be concentrated, including the entire San Fernando Valley and the Westside roughly west of Beverly Glen Boulevard.

After receiving notice, owners have 180 days to report their own inspection results to the city and another 90 days to obtain repair permits if damage is found. The ordinance then allows them two years to complete necessary repairs.

Having no accurate list of buildings, the Department of Building and Safety this spring sent inspectors to every major street in the ordinance area looking for suspect buildings. More than 500 notices eventually went out, but about 150 have since been dropped after owners informed the city that the buildings were not of steel frame construction, Chief Inspector Russell Lane said.

The cost of repairs is expected to rise into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Even the inspections can cost close to $1 million for a large building.

“Right now the majority of the building owners are just beginning to face the reality of the cost,” said attorney Pamela Westhoff of O’Melveny & Myers, who represents owners and tenants of various office buildings. “They’re thinking, ‘How am I going to amass the funds if I can’t get them from the insurance company?’ ”

By last week, the first six inspection reports to reach City Hall indicated that costly repairs will be required. Three reports outlined quake-related steel frame repairs of $180,000 to $3 million each, said Yeuan-Wan Chou, major structures plan check supervisor.

Repair permits were also issued for another 11 steel-framed buildings before any city inspectors had ordered them, with repair estimates averaging just under $1 million per building.

In their scramble to prepare for the cost of repairs, some owners have warned their mortgage holders that they will go into default if they can’t renegotiate their loans, while others have hinted they may try to pass the bill on to tenants, Westhoff said.

It appears likely that disputes over who pays for steel frame repairs will end up in court. Santa Monica attorney Joel Castro said he expects to file a case alleging negligent work by a contractor in an office high-rise. Castro spearheaded several lawsuits over the collapse of the Northridge Meadows apartment building in which 16 people died in the quake.

The city’s enforcement campaign has been delayed almost a year by political squeamishness over the costs and unanswered engineering questions. That slow pace has allowed the engineering community time to consider how the inspections and repairs should be done.

A committee of engineers and state officials studying the problem expects to release guidelines in August with a range of options: from inspecting a large percentage of a building’s steel joints visually to investigating a smaller number with ultrasound devices, said Ronald O. Hamburger of EQE International, one of the committee’s engineers.

The pioneers in steel frame repair have forged some good news, showing it is practical to conduct massive and intrusive welding on high-rise buildings with only minor disturbance to tenants.

“They’re doing it at night, and, actually, they’re forcing me to go home at a reasonable hour,” said attorney Richard Block, whose office in the 18-story Pinkerton building in Encino becomes a reconstruction site as soon as he leaves.

Dozens of TriTech construction workers wrap every square foot of wall and carpet in plastic sheeting, roll out huge blowers to exhaust welding fumes and then erect tents of fireproof blankets around the exposed steel columns. During the night, welders work inside the tents, torching away damaged metal and replacing it with new welds. By the time Block returns each morning, every sign of their presence has been whisked away.

The opposite approach at the Tarzana Medical Office Building between Clark Street and Burbank Boulevard is to work from the outside by peeling off glass plates and rolling scaffolding down the side of the building, thus allowing workers to inspect and re-weld steel girders without intruding on tenants.

Still, the absence of heavy exterior damage is no guarantee against a building’s having problems serious enough to require evacuation.

For example, until a bank officer asked for ultrasound inspections last November before approving a mortgage for St. John’s Medical Plaza in Santa Monica, no one in the five-story building had any cause for alarm.

The city green-tagged the building immediately after the earthquake, meaning it had no structural damage, and the cosmetic damage was fixed in three days, said manager Randy Moore, president of Morlin Management Corp. But an inspection last winter revealed that 86 of 96 welded steel connections were cracked, probably as a result of the earthquake.

The owners, who were not insured for quake damage, obtained a $1.5-million Small Business Administration loan and bank financing to cover the rest of the $3-million-plus job, which began on a night-and-weekend schedule so that tenants could remain.

Then, in April, workers made a startling discovery. One of the 36-inch steel columns supporting a floor was cracked clear through above and below the concrete slab. The engineer concluded that the chunk could simply fall away in a future earthquake.

“There was a good possibility there could be serious damage or loss of life,” Moore said. His tenants were immediately evacuated, and they began moving back early this month only when the job was done.

The Building Owners and Managers Assn. of Los Angeles thinks that many building owners already in heavy debt will be unable to finance that kind of reconstruction. It is sending a letter to its 2,000 members proposing a special Wall Street bond issue to raise money for the steel frame repairs.

Financial constraints, which steer many building owners to make minimal repairs, appear to have taken the urgency out of the question that still perplexes engineers: how best to repair welded beam and column connections, a construction method that is now considered flawed because of its failure in the Northridge earthquake.

A variety of wedges, gussets, haunches and cover plates designed to be welded onto the connections have shown in tests to add considerable strength, said Thomas A. Sabol, president of the Los Angeles engineering firm of Englekirk and Sabol. But building owners have shown little interest because of the added cost.

In its August guidelines, SAC Joint Venture, the state committee studying steel frame repairs, will acknowledge that merely re-welding broken connections without adding strengthening devices leaves the buildings vulnerable to damage in future earthquakes, Hamburger said.

The report, however, will note the even more widespread hazards posed by other structures, such as concrete tilt-ups, which failed extensively in the Northridge quake, and the many unreinforced masonry buildings that have still not been strengthened.

“It probably does not make a lot of sense to spend a lot of society’s money to solve the steel frame problems when we are not addressing these other types of buildings,” Hamburger said.

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