Engineers Give Quake Warning

Efforts to prepare for the next devastating earthquake in California are lagging, the founding head of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program warned at a conference of quake engineers.

Charles C. Thiel Jr., now a principal at Telesis Engineers in Berkeley, told the engineers, meeting in Long Beach, that it was “astounding” that in the last 20 years, despite billions of dollars in damage caused by the Northridge and Loma Prieta earthquakes, government research funding has decreased.

Thiel called for more research into ways to improve the quake performance of existing buildings. Officials and researchers are preoccupied with efforts to study and map fault lines and areas of heavy shaking rather than find ways to strengthen buildings to reduce hazards, he said.

“Ninety-nine percent of the buildings that will collapse in the next big earthquake exist today,” he said, “and yet the attention that is going into engineering often is only devoted to future buildings.”

The three-day meeting of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, which ends today, brought together many of California’s leading structural engineers. Much of the first day, Thursday, was devoted to reviewing the consequences of the Long Beach earthquake of March 10, 1933.

State officials moved quickly to pass new laws changing building codes, speakers at the conference said. By contrast, since the 1994 Northridge quake, they said, there have been comparatively few steps taken, despite new lessons learned from that quake’s damage.

The Long Beach quake, measuring magnitude 6.4, caused 120 deaths, the second-biggest toll of any temblor in state history. Severe damage to 70 schools led the Legislature, after a single day of debate, to pass the landmark Field Act to assure safer school construction.

The 1933 quake took place at 5:54 p.m. Had it happened during the school day, 2,000 to 10,000 schoolchildren would have died, Allan R. Porush, an engineer with URS Corp., told the meeting.

Porush and Roy G. Johnston, another engineer, paid tribute to the leaders of 1933 for acting decisively both to improve the schools and to adopt codes recognizing the risks posed by unreinforced masonry buildings.

By contrast, after Northridge, Los Angeles City Council members backed off requiring retrofitting of types of buildings shown to have fared badly, said Terry Dooley of Morley Construction. Dooley, who has worked on building the new Roman Catholic cathedral in Los Angeles, helped organize this week’s meeting.

Caltech seismologist Egill Hauksson, however, said the state has made a substantial bridge retrofitting effort since Northridge and that problems with steel-frame buildings have been the subject of major corrective studies funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The meeting also featured a discussion of scenarios for a possible 7.1-magnitude quake on the Palos Verdes fault in the South Bay area.

Although speakers cautioned that outcomes could vary widely, depending on the location of a quake’s epicenter, Doug Huls of the California Office of Emergency Services said a temblor of that size could cause 700 deaths, 7,000 injuries, render 100,000 people homeless and leave 44 million tons of debris to be removed.

By comparison, he noted, the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York by terrorists left 900,000 tons of debris.