Repairs to CSUN Library Wings Look Improbable

Probably delaying the recovery of the earthquake-ravaged Cal State Northridge campus by two more years, the two wings of the Oviatt Library will almost certainly have to be demolished and rebuilt rather than repaired as had been expected, campus officials said Wednesday.

The prospect arises after several months of planning for $3-million worth of repairs to the damaged east and west library wings, just a few months before work was to begin.

The repair job was scheduled to be finished in 1998, capping the university’s relatively speedy recovery from the devastating Northridge earthquake of January 1994.

Rebuilding the wings could take until 2000. The final word rests with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which covers 90% of the bill, but campus officials say the decision to rebuild is almost certain based on new engineering reports.

The cost of replacing the two, four-story, 50,000-square-foot buildings could reach $15 million, said Art Elbert, CSUN vice president for administration and finance.

“We want to get everybody back in as soon as we can, but we wouldn’t want to have another quake hit and have it all fall down,” Elbert said. “You’ve got to do it right.”

While the campus awaits a ruling by FEMA, building officials are already planning to level the structures this summer, when demolition crews will be removing the last remaining architectural casualties of the temblor--the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history at more than $40 billion, according to a recent study.

Also scheduled to be demolished this summer and rebuilt are a fine arts building, Dorm Towers and the South Library.

The once-optimistic outlook to simply patch up the damaged library wings began to dim late last year, officials said, even as plans were being made to reconfigure the wings’ interiors as they were repaired.

Not only was more damage discovered, but also even simple visual inspections indicated that the steel-framed buildings were continuing to deteriorate.

“It is in a state of collapse,” library facility manager Carlene Kouri said of the west wing. “We have a continual sloping of the floors. There is a gigantic difference between walking in there three years ago and walking in there now.”

Another study was ordered in December, Elbert said, and the results came back last week: The west wing is “literally sinking into the ground,” among other problems, and though the east wing is in better shape, it’s not by much.

If the east wing is indeed demolished, officials said they could still preserve most of the basement and first two floors, which house the library’s automated book retrieval system. The system, which was undamaged in the quake, contains nearly half of the library’s 1.1 million volumes.