Voluntary Seismic Reinforcement Urged

Efforts to prevent future earthquake damage suffered a setback Tuesday when Los Angeles building officials recommended voluntary compliance for now with new retrofitting standards for thousands of the city’s most vulnerable buildings.

A package of standards, based on experience gained after the Northridge earthquake, would require strengthening the frames and foundations of about 80,000 buildings, including industrial and commercial structures, apartments, hillside homes and older wood-frame houses.

But a City Council committee decided Tuesday that the standards should be voluntary, at least until the city can complete a two-year survey to identify all the structures that need upgrading. The recommendation still must go to the full council, which usually endorses committee actions.

Building officials are seeking an estimated $2.4 million in federal funding for the survey. Even when the survey is completed, building officials said, they will recommend making the standards mandatory only when the city can provide financial assistance to building owners.

“These are tough economic times, and you have to find financing,” said Karl Deppe, assistant chief of the Department of Building and Safety’s building bureau.

The decision was disappointing to engineers who specialize in earthquake safety, but enabled apartment owners to breathe a sigh of relief.

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The standards were proposed after building officials and seismic safety experts studied hundreds of homes and businesses damaged in the Northridge earthquake. The standards would cover about 1,200 older concrete buildings, 20,000 apartments, about 7,000 hillside dwellings and 50,000 older, single-family houses.

City officials acknowledged that requiring new seismic upgrading would generate opposition from many owners, but they said the standards eventually will be made mandatory.

“I will get the most political pressure from this, yet I’m the most motivated to do it,” said Councilman Hal Bernson, who heads the council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Earthquake Recovery. Bernson’s northeast San Fernando Valley district was hit hardest by the quake.

Deppe said his department is moving cautiously toward mandatory standards to help out property owners. Mandatory retrofitting would stand no chance of council approval without financial help to the owners, he said.

Apartment owners said they cannot afford the costs of upgrades.

“The longer you can put off death, the better,” said Dan Faller, president of the Apartment Assn. of Southern California, which represents about 12,000 apartment owners.

If the standards remain voluntary, only owners who can afford it will pay for the seismic retrofitting, he added.

Engineers who followed the ordinance were disappointed but philosophical over the decision to put off mandatory retrofitting.

“I’m always glad to see progress made, even if it’s a little bit of progress,” said structural engineer John Kariotis, chairman of the city’s task force on concrete office buildings. “You try to do what you think is the best, but you have to accept what you get because we’re competing with a lot of other things trying to reduce hazard.”

Thomas A. Sabol, president of Englekirk & Sabol, a Los Angeles structural engineering firm, said he has not lost hope that the measures will eventually be required.

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Most of the buildings targeted are at least 20 years old and upgrading would cost from $3,000 for a small single-family home to millions for a large commercial building.

Deppe said his department is most concerned about the 1,200 so-called non-ductile concrete buildings that are used for retail sales, offices and garages. The buildings have weak shear walls, which can collapse in a moderate earthquake, he said.

Had the Northridge quake occurred during business hours, 2,000 to 3,000 people could have died in collapsed department stores and medical buildings with the weak shear walls, according to a city report.

Deppe said that the survey would concentrate first on identifying those non-ductile buildings so that the city can impose mandatory standards for those buildings first.

The department is least likely to impose mandatory standards on the 50,000 single-family homes built before 1960 because the cost of such work would be beyond the means of most homeowners.

Times staff writer Doug Smith contributed to this story