Valleywide : City Reports Address Quake Readiness

The city of Los Angeles is already carrying out many of the recent recommendations of a state panel that were intended to make buildings and bridges more earthquake-resistant, according to two city reports released on Tuesday.

On July 19, one week after the state Seismic Safety Commission issued its report, the City Council asked the Building and Safety Department and Bureau of Engineering to report on how well the city is doing in terms of enforcing building codes and building safe facilities itself.

The state report contended that the Northridge earthquake would have caused far less damage if building codes had been rigorously enforced. The state report also criticized developers, engineers and architects who in some cases, it said, designed and built shoddy structures that suffered greater-than-necessary quake damage.

One of the state report’s specific recommendations was that public entities require employees to be professionally licensed before they are allowed to do structural plan checks of engineered buildings. The city building department gave qualified support to this proposal in its report, which it presented to the City Council’s Ad Hoc Earthquake Recovery Committee on Tuesday.

City building officials said they believed that unlicensed engineers should also be allowed to do plan checks, as long as they are supervised by a licensed engineer, as sometimes happens in the city. In most cases in Los Angeles, the building department report said, plans for engineered buildings are reviewed by licensed civil or structural engineers.

The state panel also recommended that the timetable for earthquake retrofitting of bridges statewide be speeded up. According to Clark Robins, the city engineer who wrote the Bureau of Engineering’s report, the bureau has already accelerated its bridge retrofit program in the city. The program to upgrade 118 bridges that started in 1991 is estimated to be completed in six years rather than the originally projected seven years, Robins said.

City Councilman Michael Feuer, who introduced the City Council motion asking for the city reports, expressed concern that the two city reports, which were due Aug. 18, were a month late. Robins said after the meeting that Feuer had a point, and that the delay was due to “sloppiness” on the department’s part.

Still, on the issue of seismic safety, Robins said his department is ship-shape.

“There’s nothing in the state report that we’re not already doing,” he said.

Feuer said he just received the reports and needs more time to review them before commenting.