Sloppy Construction Blamed for Damage : Quake: Tougher seismic standards and better education of builders are needed, engineering experts tell state board. Some retrofitting was done improperly.

Structural engineering leaders told the California Seismic Safety Commission on Thursday that sloppy construction techniques and poor engineering of seismic safety features were to blame for considerable damage in the Northridge earthquake.

Some buildings that were retrofitted before the Jan. 17 quake still failed because builders had forgotten to secure walls to foundations, according to Rawn Nelson, the president-elect of the Structural Engineers Assn. of California. In some cases, he said, the bolts were sitting alongside the plates they were supposed to secure.

As the commission began a three-day hearing near the Van Nuys Airport, an emissary from Gov. Pete Wilson gave the panel its marching orders: Report back to Wilson by Sept. 1 on the adequacy of current seismic construction standards in the state’s many quake-prone areas.

“It is vital that we learn all we can from this tragedy and, if possible, improve building seismic standards to protect life and property in future quakes,” Wilson declared.

Within hours, leading structural engineers had admonished the commission, chaired by Caltech engineering professor Wilfred D. Iwan, that it must look immediately at setting higher construction code standards.

Nelson said he and his colleagues had found damage in every kind of building, including the modern steel-reinforced structures that had been thought most resistant to earthquakes.

“It’s not always evident at first, but when you strip off the fireproofing, you find some of these steel buildings have heavy damage,” he said.

The current president of the Structural Engineers Assn., Arthur E. Ross, added that inflexible or non-ductile concrete buildings often shattered instead of absorbing the force of the earthquake, and he termed these buildings perhaps “a larger threat (to safety) than (is found) in unreinforced masonry buildings.”

The vertical force of the Northridge earthquake also called into question the effectiveness of base-isolation construction techniques meant to absorb horizontal shaking without damage to medium high-rises, the engineers said.

As for seismic retrofits that had been undertaken in many buildings, Nelson said, “There has been good performance in most cases with all these retrofits, if they were properly designed and constructed.

“That last issue is very important,” he said. “One of the items that we have commonly found is there has been some poor methods of construction as well as some engineering done that did not understand the basic principles of engineering.

“We have found anchor bolts not screwed to plates, but simply lying beside them,” he said. “That doesn’t do any good at all. And there has often been improper bracing.”

So, Nelson and Ross suggested, the Seismic Safety Commission must consider new means of educating builders in how to retrofit and new requirements for more rigid inspections.

Santa Monica Mayor Judy Abdo also expressed consternation that even some retrofitted buildings had not stood up well to the earthquake. “Retrofits did work in that buildings didn’t collapse and people didn’t die,” Abdo said. “But many buildings which had been retrofitted still sustained serious damage.”

L. Thomas Tobin, the staff director of the commission, said that “without question” the commission “will recommend both upgrades and reinforcement of present codes” to make buildings safer in quakes, although he and other speakers cautioned there is no such thing as making a structure 100% safe.

Among the witnesses were Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and the director of the state Office of Emergency Services, Richard Andrews.

Both indicated that the authorities had been hard-pressed to perform all essential services in the immediate wake of the earthquake. Noting that his own cellular phone did not work at first, Riordan said that emergency communications need to be improved. He said he had to find a police station so he could establish communications with emergency coordinators.

Andrews warned that if the quake had occurred later in the day, or been just a little more powerful, there would have been so many people trapped in damaged buildings and parking structures that it would have exceeded the capacity of available rescue teams to tend to them.

He said there had been a plan in such emergencies to fly in additional urban search and rescue task forces from the East Coast.

But on the morning of the quake, many Eastern airports were snowbound.