Stone Church Now Safer

Engineers and preservationists have had a long-standing fear that the cracked dome of Mission San Juan Capistrano’s Great Stone Church would come crashing down before they had a chance to fix it.

Their anxiety eased a little last week as a construction team began pouring concrete over a network of steel rods that will wrap around and tie both halves of the sanctuary dome.

“There was a sense of urgency about it, because once they crack and they fall, they’re gone. So it was a relief,” mission spokesman Jim Graves said.

The work on the steel rods, designed to keep in place the thousands of tons of sandstone during earthquakes, began 2 1/2 months ago. A team from Pointe Construction Inc. of Santa Ana is chiseling by hand a trench along the outer edge of the dome where the corrosion-resistant rods are placed.

Stabilization of the dome is the third phase of a $7-million mission preservation project that began in 1989. The goal is to preserve what remains of the stone church, which was severely damaged in an 1812 earthquake, only six years after it was completed.

John Loomis, project manager and architect at Thirtieth Street Architects in Newport Beach, said many people are not clear about the mission’s goal.

“They say, ‘Are you going to rebuild it?’ Well, that’s not what we’re doing,” he said. “We’re trying to respect the changes that occurred over time. It’s a relic. It’s not a church.”

When the construction crew completes the dome reinforcement by the end of the year, the 150-foot trench with steel rods will be sealed with concrete. A single 12-foot steel rod will connect the ring at the south end of the dome, which is too thin to handle the 3-foot-deep trench.

Engineers aren’t certain how the 3-inch-wide crack across the dome and west wall developed. The crack has left the unsupported southern part of the dome listing slightly.

Nels Roselund, chief structural engineer for the project since 1994, said the crack could date to the 1812 earthquake that toppled most of the cathedral, including a 125-foot bell tower, most of the nave and transept, along with several of the mission’s seven original domes.

But Loomis said the crack might have formed in the 1870s when the Army Corps of Engineers brought down a couple of transept domes that had been deemed unstable. The corps had to dynamite them twice to bring them down, he said.

Roselund said the sanctuary dome--even with the crack--could easily stand for thousands of years, not unlike ancient Greek and Roman monuments, if the area were not prone to earthquakes.

“As soon as you put earthquakes into the picture, stone masonry becomes fragile,” Roselund said.

What remains of the mission today has survived in part because a 1890s preservation team shored up much of the ruins, Roselund said. During the recent restoration, workers found a piece of railroad track and a good-luck horseshoe astride the dome crack like a sort of staple to hold both sides in place.

Others working on the project speak highly of the original builders, many of whom were Native American converts from the Acjachemen Nation.

Their contribution is something construction supervisor Bernard Bobitch has kept in mind during his 2 1/2 years on the project.

“It’s meaningful to me to work side by side with the ghosts who have built this,” he said. “And I feel it. You can’t help but get emotionally involved with the project.”

Since 1989, mission officials have spent about $2.2 million from private sources on the restoration. An additional $3 million in state and federal funding is expected over the next year.

Graves said he wasn’t sure of the start date for the next phase--stabilizing the priests’ vestry, which buttresses the sanctuary.

Jack Wronka, owner of Pointe Construction, is pleased to see work on the dome underway.

“It’s just one step closer to getting the scaffold on the interior of the sanctuary pulled down,” Wronka said. “So we can get people inside.”