California lawmakers want lists of buildings vulnerable to quakes
SAN FRANCISCO — Structural engineers and seismic experts can drive along a street and quickly identify at least some buildings most vulnerable to collapse in a major earthquake. There are some telltale signs: parking spots under apartments, brick walls that have not been reinforced, first floors held up by flimsy poles.
But it’s harder for the average person to do this analysis, and some have long argued that the public should know the potential risks.
Now the California Legislature has sent to Gov. Jerry Brown a bill that would require cities and counties in the state’s most seismically vulnerable areas to create lists of buildings that could be at higher risk of major damage or collapse.
This could mark a major advance in efforts over the last decade to identify seismically vulnerable buildings in California. Los Angeles and other cities have generated lists of buildings that face the greatest risk of collapse. Some cities have ordered owners to retrofit those buildings to make them more secure.
But the regulations are far from even across the state, and there are many areas where little has been done to assess the risks.
Such an undertaking could be controversial. It would also raise a basic question: What should be done with the buildings that make the list? The Los Angeles Times earlier this year reported that many cities in the Inland Empire region of Southern California identified old brick buildings that faced a risk of collapse but ended up not doing anything to make them safer, or even let the public know.
There’s a big limitation to the bill — it does not provide funding. The law would take effect only if state officials can find a source of funding for the project. But backers of the bill say creating a list of possibly vulnerable buildings would represent a major step in alerting Californians whether the buildings in which they live and work should receive more study to determine whether they’re at risk in an earthquake.
“California contains thousands of buildings that are known to present an unacceptably high earthquake risk of death, injury and damage,” says the proposed legislation, AB 2681, which was written by Democratic Assemblyman Adrin Nazarian of North Hollywood. “Protecting our state’s economy, affordable-housing stock and social fabric from the long-lasting turmoil of earthquakes is of utmost importance.”
Following the powerful 1985 Mexico City earthquake, California passed a law in 1986 instructing cities to identify one of the most hazardous types of buildings — unreinforced brick buildings. But the state has not done so for other building types that have proved to be deadly in past earthquakes, such as woodframe apartment buildings with a flimsy ground story that often houses cars, known as “soft-story buildings,” as well as brittle concrete buildings built with inadequate steel reinforcement.
In recent years, a number of California cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Alameda, West Hollywood and Santa Monica have created their own lists of some of these potentially vulnerable buildings.