Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 8, 1991 TAG: 9102080086
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
"We're still attempting to sell the same message we were selling 20 years ago: Have safer buildings and structures," said Robert McCarthy, a member of California's Seismic Safety Commission. The panel met Thursday near the epicenter of the Feb. 9, 1971, earthquake.
"There's a tremendous amount of work to be done to reinforce freeways and buildings to resist earthquakes, but other budget priorities are impeding progress," said James Lefter, a University of Illinois civil engineer.
The early-morning earthquake, centered in the mountains just north of Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley, measured 6.4 on the Richter scale. That's considered moderate by scientists, but terrifying to millions of Southern Californians who felt it.
Among those killed by the San Fernando disaster, also known as the Sylmar quake, were about four dozen who died in the collapses of the Veterans Administration Hospital and the brand new Olive View Medical Center in Sylmar.
Damage reached $511 million in 1971 dollars. There was damage to 180 schools, 30,000 homes and other buildings, 62 freeway bridges, five dams and two other hospitals. The Lower Van Norman Reservoir almost collapsed, prompting evacuation of 80,000 people threatened by inundation.
The quake resulted in creation of the Seismic Safety Commission, which met at a hilltop restaurant overlooking the now-abandoned reservoir.
"California learned an awful lot 20 years ago," said Tom Tobin, the commission's executive director. "We learned how frail we were and we made a lot of progress. But we still have some vulnerabilities we have not come to grips with."
The San Fernando quake inspired sweeping changes in California building codes and dam and hospital safety requirements. Earlier improvements had followed the 1933 Long Beach earthquake that killed 115 people.
"But we have not been terribly successful at reducing the hazard from the buildings that existed in 1971 before we changed our ways," Tobin said.
Thousands of unreinforced brick buildings remain a threat, as do thousands of concrete buildings and freeway bridges that lack adequate steel reinforcement, he said.
While most California cities are slowly reinforcing or demolishing unsafe brick buildings, inflexible concrete buildings remain "one of the greatest threats to life," he added.
"We have made progress, but it is slow," commissioners were told by earthquake engineer Paul Jennings, vice president and provost of the California Institute of Technology.
California's Department of Transportation started strengthening freeway overpasses and bridges because of the 1971 disaster. But the inadequacy of that effort was demonstrated when an elevated section of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland collapsed during the magnitude-7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake that rocked the San Francisco Bay region Oct. 17, 1989.
More than five dozen people died in that quake, 42 of them crushed on the freeway.
Lefter, who formerly worked for the Veterans Administration, said the agency has strengthened about 20 of its 30 weakest hospitals nationwide since 1971. Tobin said a few unreinforced brick hospitals still operate in California, and others remain vulnerable.
"Only a small percentage of our hospitals will remain functional after a [major] earthquake," Tobin said.
The rebuilt Olive View Medical Center will commemorate the quake's 20th anniversary Saturday by staging a mock-quake drill featuring "30 bloodied and hysterical victims faking everything from major trauma to heart attacks," a hospital news release said.
by CNB