Insurers’ Data May Be Key to Safer Construction

A model home survived an earthquake simulated by University of California San Diego engineers conducting a series of tests in July of 2000.

More interesting than the experiment itself, however, was that it was conducted at all.

The tests on the two-story, tile-roofed structure were the first on the kind of wood frame construction that houses 99% of the American population, university officials said.

The experiments highlight how incredibly little is known about how the homes we live in perform in earthquakes. And it’s significant that the tests were staged by a consortium of California universities, rather than by the insurance industry.

Insurance companies, in fact, are sitting on a wealth of data that could hold the key to what kinds of home construction make sense in earthquake territory. But they seem to be in no mood to share the information.

A leading disaster construction expert, Mary C. Comerio, has been waiting for more than a year for State Farm and other insurers to hand over data they promised to give her that would help her analyze the efficacy of various building techniques.

The data would allow Comerio, an architecture professor at UC Berkeley and author of “Disaster Hits Home: New Policy for Urban Housing Recovery,” to examine not only records about homes that were damaged in the 1994 Northridge quake but also–and more importantly–information about homes that weren’t damaged.

Comerio, who has studied residential devastation from Hurricanes Andrew and Hugo as well as the aftermath of earthquakes in California, Mexico and Japan, had hoped the undamaged homes could show what kinds of foundation anchors, sheathing methods, framing and other techniques best survive quakes.

However, she’s all but given up hope that insurers will deliver, at least any time soon.

“Everything is now so politicized, it’s been impossible to do anything, even straight old ordinary research,” she said.

Before we move on to the details of this particular spat, think for a moment of all the products you use every day that have been exhaustively examined for safety. Car makers used crash tests to make sure your vehicle was relatively safe. Scientists spend years checking out the health effects of the foods you eat. Even your cosmetics and shaving cream were tested before being placed on the market.

When it comes to your home, however, most of what we know about earthquake damage comes from anecdotal evidence.

Japan has conducted some tests on wood-frame construction, but Japanese home building methods differ significantly from our typical “two by four” construction, according to Robert Reitherman, executive director of the California Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering. The nonprofit corporation conducted this week’s test on a 16-foot by 20-foot “shake table” platform at the UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering.

The consortium includes engineers and scientists from Stanford University, University of Southern California, California Institute of Technology and the UCs at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles and San Diego.

Virtually all of the testing and modeling in the United States has been on concrete and steel construction–freeway pylons, bridges and office buildings. Housing had a low priority because most of it was wood-frame, which was considered flexible enough to withstand most quakes.

Northridge set that assumption on its ear. Residential losses were 10 times higher than the insurance industry had expected, said Mark Leonard, spokesman for the California Earthquake Authority, the state-run pool that now provides most quake insurance in the state.

Most of the people killed in the Northridge quake died in wood-frame buildings, and the bulk of the damage occurred to residential dwellings–specifically, to two- to four-story wood-frame homes and apartment buildings. Buildings with “tuck under” parking–typically apartment complexes with parking below the first residential level–seemed to suffer the worst damage.

But many two- to four-story structures were hardly affected, while some one-story homes were destroyed. Was it luck of the draw, or the way the quake moved through the ground, that made the difference? Or were building techniques at least partly the reason that some structures survived the impact better than others?

It didn’t necessarily help if a home met modern building codes. In fact, some studies suggest that older construction performed better than newer structures. That could be the result of faulty construction, or that well-intentioned code changes haven’t worked as well as expected, Comerio said.

Comerio believes some answers may lie in insurance company data bases. Working with the CEA, she secured promises from two of the state’s largest insurers, State Farm and Farmers, to share their records. Farmers has released its information. Not so State Farm. Allstate also expressed interest initially, but now says the files are confidential.

Other companies refused to share their records. 21st Century Insurance, which was nearly bankrupted by the Northridge quake, declined to participate; the company got rid of most of its homeowner records after it was forced to exit the homeowners’ insurance market, said spokesman Ric Hill. That’s a shame, because the company’s concentration of customers in the San Fernando Valley–the very thing that nearly drove the company under–could provide incredibly valuable information about how neighboring houses fared.

The scandal involving former Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush complicates matters further. Quackenbush resigned last month amid investigations into settlements he made with insurers that were accused of treating homeowners unfairly in handling Northridge claims. Insurers are outraged that supposedly confidential documents about their claims handling were released to the legislators and the press.

Insurers are notoriously protective of their records, whether or not such protectiveness ultimately serves their interests. Fear of releasing proprietary data, for example, is one of the reasons that insurance fraud flourishes; if they would compare notes more often, insurers could likely spot more scofflaws and fraudulent claims.

That’s how insurers act when their bottom lines are directly affected. Now think about earthquake insurance, which is now provided largely by the state-run pool. With fewer insurers on the line for earthquake risks, there may be even less incentive for companies to release the records Comerio needs.

The losers, ultimately, could be the Californians who die in the next big quake.