Retrofit This Safety Law

Half the hospital buildings in Los Angeles County could collapse in a strong earthquake, according to a state survey released last spring. In Orange and Ventura counties, one in three hospital buildings are at risk of toppling, as are a third of the 2,670 hospital buildings statewide. Given this magnitude of risk, for legislators to even consider extending a deadline for California hospitals to meet earthquake safety standards seems boneheaded--until you consider the alternative: Hospitals that missed the deadline would be shut down, as surely as if an earthquake had devastated them.

Lawmakers established the current deadline just months after the 1994 Northridge quake damaged two dozen Southern California hospitals, three irreparably. According to legislation signed by then-Gov. Pete Wilson, hospitals deemed at risk of collapsing in a quake of magnitude 6 to 6.9 have until 2008 to retrofit, rebuild or close. By 2030, hospitals would have to upgrade again to both withstand such a quake and deliver services to quake victims.

The impulse was the right one. But no one at the time realized how many buildings would need retrofitting and at what cost. Hospital officials estimate the price of meeting the initial requirements at $12 billion, money they say they don’t have and can’t get in time to finish the work by 2008.

Such claims could be dismissed as rich hospitals looking for ways to shirk their responsibilities--except that hospitals in California, like everything else that has to do with health care in the state, are close to a meltdown. Two dozen hospitals, more than half of them in Southern California, closed between 1995 and 2000 because of financial pressures ranging from Medicare funding cuts to losses incurred caring for uninsured patients.

Would the state really shut down hospitals wholesale if they couldn’t make the 2008 deadline? The current law allows for one-year extensions, but the uncertainty of year-to-year deadlines would make it more difficult for hospitals to raise needed money in the bond market.

A bill by state Sen. Jackie Speier (D-Hillsborough) and now before the Assembly Appropriations Committee would, on a case-by-case basis, extend the deadline to as late as 2013 while setting yearly milestones that hospitals must meet. This bill offers the best hope not only of keeping needed hospitals open but of actually getting the seismic work done.