Nonprofit News Group Finds Seismic Safety Enforcement Lax in Many Schools

Only one school serving students in the Marina del Rey, Playa del Rey and Del Rey areas might not comply with modern earthquake safety standards, according to data from the Division of the State Architect.

A 19-month California Watch investigation released Thursday uncovered holes in the state's enforcement of seismic safety regulations for public schools. Some schools may have been inadequately retrofitted, while more recent construction projects may not have received final state certification.

In a 2002 seismic safety survey done by the DSA, a regulatory body that oversees the construction of public schools, more than 650 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District were designated as Category 2. These projects “require detailed seismic evaluation to determine if they can achieve life-safety performance," according to the website of the DSA. Local Category 2 projects include buildings at Marina del Rey Middle School in Del Rey.

The 2002 survey, ordered by Assembly Bill 300, looked at schools constructed prior to 1976, when the modern California Building Code went into effect. Those schools may not have been constructed with modern safety standards.

A specific list of Category 2 schools was sent to each district in 2008, with a request to inspect the schools, update the paperwork, or retrofit as necessary.

“After the list was released, we looked at all the buildings we had, and there were several things to do. First was an evaluation of the building structure and the building construction and determination of how close it is to a fault -- and then prioritization, as far as those buildings are concerned, taking into consideration age, occupancy and everything else,” said Neil Gamble, director of maintenance and operations for LAUSD.

According to Gamble, three schools in the district were located within 50 feet of fault lines. Two schools, Burbank Middle School and Osceola Elementary, have been retrofitted. The third, University High, is in construction now.

District officials denied to Patch that there are any safety issues, although the district still has not provided adequate documentation to the state that the rest of its schools are safe.

"We absolutely consider safety to be one of our highest priorities, the safety of staff and students,” Gamble said. “We don't open schools unless we are convinced that they are safe."

Eric Lamoureux, the acting deputy director for the Department of General Services, which oversees the DSA, agreed. “The districts have made the choice that they believe it is safe to occupy, and they haven't done that in a vacuum,” he told Patch.

As mandated by the Field Act, school officials must meet with architects and inspectors before and during construction of any school. Architectural plans must be inspected and approved, and the state requires on-site inspectors during the construction process.

The Field Act was ground-breaking legislation that regulated school structural standards for seismic safety. It was created a month after a 6.5-magnitude earthquake struck Long Beach on March 10, 1933, killing 120 people. The earthquake, which hit at 5:55 p.m., damaged or destroyed dozens of schools. The death toll would likely have been much higher had the quake occurred during the school day.

California Watch’s review of data from the DSA’s office shows 20,000 school projects statewide have never received final safety certifications required under the Field Act. In the crunch to get schools built within the past few decades, state architects have been lax on enforcement, California Watch reports.

A separate inventory completed nine years ago found 7,500 seismically risky school buildings in the state. California Watch reports that only two schools have been able to access a $200 million fund for upgrades. The funds were provided under Proposition 1D, a 2006 ballot measure that set aside money for schools from the kindergarten to university level for the repair and construction of facilities.

“We have one building that fits the criteria for that, and we are pursuing Prop 1D funds for that school,” Gamble said.

The AB 300 Category 2 designation is not the only way schools are running afoul of state regulation.

The LAUSD also has a number of school building projects listed as Letter 3 or Letter 4, state designations that indicate buildings have not received final certification by the DSA, according to the California Watch report. However, both the district and the DSA’s office told Patch that there were a number of reasons a project would fail to meet the documentation criteria, while maintaining structural integrity. In some cases, changes to the original plans were made during construction, which requires another layer of documentation, although on-site inspectors would have signed off at the time. In other cases, districts may have outstanding bills with the contractor or inspector and are unable to get the necessary documentation. There is also an added fee involved with reopening a project that has been given a Letter 4, with no benefit to the school.  

According to California Watch, one Northern California school in Letter 4 went without fire alarms for more than a decade. Other Letter 3 and Letter 4 schools are simply missing the necessary paperwork for architectural sign-off.

“We don't believe there are any significant safety issues with any of the Letter 3 projects,” Lamoureux said.

“Letter 4 projects, by definition, had a safety or structural deficiency issue noted during construction. On those projects, we don’t have any information that the issue was resolved, so we have no way of knowing right now whether the issue is still present or not,” Lamoureux said.  

“We've looked preliminarily at the files. We don’t believe, at least with the information we have, that they present an egregious situation,” he said. "If it was an egregious situation, we would consider taking that project forward to the Attorney General or local District Attorney.” The DSA  has no authority to take any action once construction has stopped.

Projects that closed with a Letter 4 designation cannot undergo further construction until documentation is provided that the required improvements have been made. Without expansion plans or state funds to support such work, schools have little incentive to change their Letter 4 status.

Marina del Rey Middle School was the only area school with projects on the AB300 Category 2 list. The school has a physical education building and a multi-purpose building listed among projects that may need to be retrofitted, but they are more than five miles from a known fault and are among the district's lowest priorities.

The school, which is inside a liquefaction zone, also was issued a Letter 3 designation in February 2010 after a campus-wide fire alarm modernization project was closed without state certification due to missing paperwork, according to data from the DSA.

Other area schools that can be found in an interactive database provided by California Watch include:

• Braddock Drive Elementary, which is inside a liquefaction zone and within a 1/4 mile of a United States Geological Survey fault.

• Short Avenue Elementary, which is inside a liquefaction zone.

• Goethe International Charter, which is inside a liquefaction zone.

• Westside Leadership Magnet, which is inside a liquefaction zone.

California Institute of Technology seismologist Dr. Kate Hutton explained that liquefaction happens during an earthquake in low-lying areas with sandy soil.

"Generally, the soil supports itself when there's no shaking," she said. But when an earthquake hits, water gets pushed up through the sand particles and it becomes a very wet mud posing two significant dangers.

"One, it amplifies the ground shaking. The shaking is harder on the soft ground," Hutton said. The second danger is when the mud that is formed oozes up through cracks in the ground, it can cause damage to the buildings over the cracks.

Hutton pointed out that during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, San Francisco's Marina District suffered major damage from liquefaction, whereas neighborhoods located closer to that quake's epicenter in the Santa Cruz Mountains suffered less damage.

For these reasons, schools built in liquefaction zones could be more prone to damage from an earthquake, even if they're further from actual faults, Hutton said.

Doc Nghiem, a structural engineer for LAUSD, said that schools within a liquefaction zone trigger further geotechnical studies, particularly when new construction or new modernization work is involved. The liquefaction zone criteria are not dependent upon location, but upon recent sediment types and water table.

"In the whole district we have found very few areas with liquefaction problems," Nghiem said.

The California Watch investigation raises concerns that recent budget cutbacks have limited the number of inspectors who provide oversight on construction sites. A Jan. 12 letter from the DSA’s regional manager for Los Angeles, Shaf Ullah, identified 112 projects in the LAUSD where the assigned inspector had been laid off and not replaced. In March, 14 projects were issued an order to comply by the state.

None of the 14 projects were located in the Marina del Rey area.

Patch will continue to follow this story as more specific data emerges about the state of our local schools.

This story was produced using data provided to Patch by California Watch, the state's largest investigative reporting team and part of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Read more about Patch's collaboration with California Watch.

Be sure follow Marina del Rey Patch, which also covers Del Rey and Playa del Rey, on Twitter and "Like" us on Facebook.