By Hector Gonzalez
Staff Writer

January 14, 2015 -- City officials are still working to identify buildings in Santa Monica that might collapse in a major quake—the first phase of a comprehensive seismic safety program that’s been delayed as officials double-check potentially vulnerable structures against existing building permits, an official said this week.

Santa Monica’s seismic safety program, announced last February, called for officials in the City’s Building and Safety Division to inspect hundreds of residential and commercial building built under outdated earthquake standards.

In announcing the program, officials said the goal was to create a comprehensive inventory of such structures throughout the city. Based on the inventory, City Council members were expected to adopt new building regulations by this past fall.

But the process of identifying every potentially vulnerable building is taking longer than originally anticipated, said Ron Takiguchi, building officer for the Building and Safety Division.

“There is no inventory yet,” Takiguchi said Tuesday. “The inventory follows identification, after we verify records.

“To give you an example, we may identify something that looks potentially seismically hazardous, but then we look at (city) records and find that’s not the case. So we want to be sure,” Takiguchi said.

During the identification process, Takiguchi said, much of the work has focused on “soft story” residential structures — apartment buildings, townhouses and other multi-unit, wooden-framed buildings of two or more stories built atop a weak spot such as a large open garage.

Such structures are particularly vulnerable to collapse in a major quake, according to the state’s Health and Safety Code. As an example, the code cites the failure of the soft story Northridge Meadows apartment complex that collapsed in the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, killing 16 residents.

Soft story structures were permitted in California prior to 1978. Across the state, tens of thousands of soft story residential buildings have never been seismically reinforced, according a report on the Association of Bay Area Government’s website.

In Santa Monica, a first round of seismic inspections completed at the end of last year identified about 2,000 soft story structures, Takiguchi said. But some potentially vulnerable properties in certain residential zones were not accessible during the first inspections, or they did not match city records or zoning maps, he said.

“In some cases, we actually went out to some of the areas and it wasn’t clear what streets to look at versus what’s on the map,” Takiguchi said.

“In other case garage doors were closed and we couldn’t verify at that time, so we want to have a second look at some of those buildings.”

Santa Monica Mayor Kevin McKeown said council members are aware of the complexities involved in identifying all the city’s potentially hazardous structures.

“We know there have been delays,” he said this week. “We haven’t forgotten about this.”

Although some work remains in identifying vulnerable buildings, officials are now nearly finished with that process, Takiguchi said this week.

“We’re close,” he said. “It’s going to be records verification at this point.”

Records verification can also be a complex process, he said.

“We take a building identified as a potentially hazardous building and we look at the building records—when the building was built, the materials that were used, any records of retrofitting that might have happened in the past, and any plans that are associated with that building’s retrofit,” said Takiguchi.

City building officials also are working with the Structural Engineering Association of California “to determine what technical standards will be applied these hazardous buildings.”

“The important point is, we want to be very comprehensive” before presenting any final reports to the City Council, said Takiguchi. “We want to make sure that we cover all that we can.”