City Moves to Improve Quake Safety Codes

The Los Angeles City Council directed the city attorney Tuesday to draft amendments to the building code that call for new standards to improve earthquake safety in apartment buildings.

The amendments, which apply to so-called “soft stories” in multistory apartment buildings, are aimed at preventing another tragedy like the collapse of the Northridge Meadows Apartments in the 1994 earthquake, in which 16 people died.

The proposed amendments would be mandatory for new buildings, but voluntary for existing structures. As expected, the council passed them without comment.

The proposed standards call for steel-frame retrofits of many ground-floor garages and plywood retrofits of many first and second stories in apartment buildings.

According to the city building department, as many as 20,000 apartment buildings and hotels in the city are thought to be more prone to collapse during earthquakes due to soft stories, which are the lower floors of multi-floor structures and are too weak to withstand a severe quake.