Firm Sued Over Fractures in Steel Frames in Quake

The nation’s biggest seller of a widely used but fracture-prone weld metal has been hit with a new and sweeping defective product lawsuit that seeks more than $1 billion in damages.

Filed on behalf of the owners of hundreds of steel-frame buildings in Los Angeles County, the lawsuit accuses the Cleveland-based Lincoln Electric Co. of making and marketing a weld metal that poses “an unreasonable risk of danger” to building owners and the public.

Kenneth R. Chiate, a lawyer representing the building owners, said those suing Lincoln have or will incur costs exceeding $1 billion for inspection, retrofitting, repair, loss of rents and diminished property values.

The lawsuit, filed without public announcement last week in Los Angeles Superior Court, identifies as plaintiffs the owners of two complexes that were badly damaged by the January 1994 Northridge earthquake:

* The Automobile Club of Southern California, which decided to demolish its severely damaged, two-story building in Santa Clarita.

* The Pacific Design Center on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. The center, composed of separate six- and nine-story buildings, is a marketplace for interior decorating supplies and home furnishings.

The suit was filed as a class action, and Chiate, of the firm Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro, said he expects dozens if not hundreds of other building owners to join the case. The lawsuit notes that about 1,500 steel-frame buildings have been constructed in Los Angeles County as of January 1994.

A spokesman for Lincoln Electric said the company had been unaware of the lawsuit until contacted Wednesday by The Times. The case comes on the heels of a related lawsuit against Lincoln, filed by the owners of St. Johns Medical Plaza in Santa Monica.

At the center of the controversy is the weld metal known as “120” or “E70T-4.” Beginning in the 1970s, E70T-4 was used widely for construction of steel buildings throughout the West. The material gained popularity among contractors because it can be applied at far higher speed than other weld metals, resulting in lower labor costs.

However, E70T-4 has now come under scrutiny, in part because of widespread damage to welded connections of steel found after the Northridge earthquake. As detailed in a Times series last month, E70T-4 has about one-fourth the “toughness,” or resistance to fracture, of other available weld metals. In tests conducted at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and at the University of Texas, welds made with E70T-4 fractured under stresses far short of those expected in a major earthquake.

The Times series pointed out that other factors, including the geometric designs of the steel connections, welding workmanship and inspection, also are important to obtain adequate structural performance. Structural engineers, many of whom lacked knowledge of welding materials or processes, widely allowed contractors to use E70T-4 over the last two decades.

The building owners’ lawsuit filed last week, and amended Wednesday, alleges that “inadequate” weld metal was “a proximate cause of the structural cracking. . . . It is believed that 90-95% of the buildings” were welded with E70T-4, sold by Lincoln Electric. Lincoln, founded in 1895, introduced E70T-4 in the 1960s; competitors now sell their own versions of the product.

The lawsuit alleges that E70T-4 was “inherently unsafe” for major structural joints in earthquake sensitive areas. The weld metal is prone to cracking, according to the lawsuit, “and was not tough enough to resist even a moderate earthquake.”

The suit also alleges that E70T-4 meets the legal definition of a “defective product” because Lincoln Electric “knew or could have known that the [material] was not suitable. . . . Its design was defective in that it failed to perform as safely as consumers of the product would expect when used in the manner foreseen by Lincoln Electric.”

As of July 16, 1996, the city of Los Angeles has prohibited the use of E70T-4 for major connections of horizontal beams and vertical columns. The city has not moved to seek the retrofitting of the hundreds of buildings that have been constructed with E70T-4. Outside Los Angeles, hospitals and other buildings have continued to be welded with E70T-4 after the Northridge earthquake.

As for retrofitting, Richard Holguin, head of the city of Los Angeles engineering bureau, said the costs involved--up to $20,000 per connection--make this impractical, politically. “The votes [on the City Council] aren’t there,” Holguin said in an interview last month.

In a statement issued Jan. 6, Lincoln Electric’s president and chief executive officer, Anthony A. Massaro, defended the company’s conduct. He said that steel buildings performed adequately in the Northridge quake and that a conversion to tougher, more fracture-resistant weld metal “is not the solution.”

“More broadly,” Massaro said, “weld metal should not be the focus of the inquiry into cracked beam-to-column connections.”

Massaro was traveling abroad Wednesday and was unavailable for comment, according to his secretary. In its financial statements for 1995, Lincoln Electric reported net sales of weld metals and related equipment and products of $1.03 billion and total assets of $617.8 million.