Deaths highlight danger of bricks-and-mortar work

LOS ANGELES -- The deaths of two women in the rubble of a quake-toppled 1892 clock tower have underscored the danger posed by the thousands of unreinforced brick buildings still standing throughout California, 70 years after the state banned such construction. Bricks-and-mortar buildings are usually the first to crumble during big earthquakes, as they did Monday when a magnitude-6.5 quake struck the state's central coast and reduced some 19th-century buildings in Paso Robles to rubble. The construction of unreinforced masonry buildings was outlawed in California after the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, which caused widespread damage to the port city.

Today, California still has about 30,000 such buildings, including 22,000 in the most seismically active areas of the state. Of those, one-third remain unstrengthened or only partially strengthened, according to the state Seismic Safety Commission.

Monday's earthquake made skyscrapers sway from Los Angeles to San Francisco, a distance of about 350 miles, but the damage was almost entirely confined to old brick buildings.

"The earthquake will pick out the weakest structures and very dramatically highlight their weaknesses," said Bill Iwan, director of the earthquake engineering research laboratory at the California Institute of Technology.

The bodies of two women were pulled from under the remains of a clock tower building that collapsed in Paso Robles. More than 80 buildings may have been damaged.

A 1986 California law required local governments in the most seismically active areas to tally unreinforced masonry buildings and adopt laws to reduce the dangers they pose in quakes.

But the law allowed local governments to decide how best to address the hazardous buildings.

"That's where the issue really arises," said Lucy Jones, a U.S. Geological Survey seismologist and member of the state Seismic Safety Commission.

Local laws invariably were tempered by the often staggering cost of retrofitting. Some jurisdictions required owners to strengthen their buildings or tear them down, while others simply mandated they post warning signs. Some gave owners years to strengthen their buildings. In Paso Robles, building owners had until 2018 to upgrade.

Jones called the choice a "gamble," where the political and economic costs of more stringent regulations were weighed against the likelihood of a large quake striking. And "Paso Robles lost that gamble," Jones said.

At the time the 1986 was passed, government officials estimated it was going to cost $4 billion to fully retrofit all 25,500 buildings then standing in the most seismically hazardous regions. Today, a single building can cost $300,000 to retrofit.

As of June, just 12 of Paso Robles' 58 unreinforced masonry buildings had been strengthened, with owners of 30 others having submitted plans to do so, according to a June report to the California Legislature.

That report found that significant progress has been made in the state but that many of the locally adopted programs were "ineffective."

The Seismic Safety Commission says the state should require the retrofitting of the remaining unreinforced masonry buildings.

"Local governments have failed to comply with the intent of the law," said Fred Turner, senior structural engineer for the panel.

On Tuesday, the difference was obvious to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who toured the town of nearly 27,000. He acknowledged that there's "always a big battle" between those who make laws and those who must pay to comply with them, but said the expense of retrofitting was worthwhile.

"I think it is a lesson for all the others, that they should retrofit their buildings," Schwarzenegger said.

------

On the Net: http://www.seismic.ca.gov

------

Associated Press writer Anna Oberthur in Sacramento contributed to this report.