L.A. approves nation's toughest earthquake safety rules

[Leroy N. Soetoro]

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-earthquake-retrofit-20151009-
story.html

The Los Angeles City Council on Friday adopted the nation's strongest
earthquake safety laws, requiring that the owners of an estimated 15,000
buildings most at risk of collapse during a major quake make the
structures stronger.

The 12-0 vote caps decades of debate over whether the city -- located in
the heart of California earthquake country -- should force building owners
to retrofit structures that could fail.

Studies estimate that a massive earthquake in the Los Angeles area could
kill 3,000 to 18,000 people and cause up to $250 billion in damage.

Written by Mayor Eric Garcetti, the ordinance targets two of the most
dangerous types of buildings: brittle concrete buildings and wood
apartment complexes with weak first stories, which have killed more than
65 people in Los Angeles’ last two major earthquakes.

The mandatory upgrades will be costly. Many wood apartment retrofits can
cost $60,000 to $130,000, and taller concrete buildings can cost millions
of dollars to strengthen.

City Hall has long ignored calls by structural engineers and the city's
own building officials to require privately owned buildings to be fixed.
But in the last two years, Garcetti and the City Council have had a
dramatic change of perspective.

Failing to act could not only cause a high death toll in the next
earthquake, they say, but could destroy large swaths of Los Angeles’
housing, render entire commercial districts uninhabitable and hobble the
city’s economy for a generation.

“For the city of Los Angeles, we finally took our head out of the sand,”
Garcetti said last year. “We can’t be that city that takes years, even
decades, to get back to where we are today.”

Owner groups now say they agree that fixing the buildings is essential.

“We want the buildings to be safe,” said Martha Cox-Nitikman, vice
president of the Building Owners and Managers Assn. of Greater Los
Angeles. “But we need to figure out how we get people there without
ruining businesses.”

Wood apartment buildings will be given seven years to complete
construction once an owner is ordered by the Department of Building and
Safety to retrofit the building. Owners of brittle concrete buildings will
have 25 years to do the work.

How the retrofits will be paid for is a work in progress.

The City Council has not decided how costs will be shared between tenants
and owners of residential buildings. The law currently allows owners to
increase rents up to $75 a month to pay for a required earthquake
retrofit, but both sides say they do not think Los Angeles renters can
afford such a hike.

The city’s housing department has suggested that renters and owners pay
for the retrofit on a 50-50 basis, allowing owners to charge a monthly
maximum surcharge of $38 to pay for the seismic retrofit. (Apartments in
Los Angeles built before Oct. 1, 1978, are generally under rent control,
which means the city restricts how much the rent can be increased
annually.)

To help pay for the costs, apartment groups are looking for additional
financial support, such as breaks on property and state income taxes and
business license and building permit fees for owners who retrofit.

Renters are also hoping that additional financial help will enable owners
to pay the lion’s share, if not all, of the cost of the retrofit.

“Our goal is to protect these buildings,” said Jim Clarke of the
Apartment Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, “and not lose affordable housing
in the city.”

“We do support making these units safe,” said Larry Gross, executive
director of the Coalition for Economic Survival, but he added that keeping
costs low for tenants is essential. “It can’t be on the backs of those
least able to pay.”

Owners of concrete buildings will face a significantly steeper price tag.
Building owners are hoping the city will give incentives, such as waiving
the city’s gross receipts tax, for businesses to move back into
retrofitted buildings.

The idea of requiring earthquake retrofits in Los Angeles did not come
easily, even though about 50 people died in concrete-building collapses in
the 1971 Sylmar earthquake and 16 people were crushed to death in the
Northridge Meadows apartment complex in the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

Just a decade ago, the City Council did not support even counting the
number of brittle concrete buildings in Los Angeles. Some business
interests remained skeptical that concrete buildings posed a real risk of
collapse.

But in 2011, the deadly nature of concrete buildings became clear again
when an earthquake struck New Zealand’s third-largest city, Christchurch,
in 2011. The collapse of two concrete office towers alone killed 133
people.

Following that earthquake, The Times embarked on an investigation to see
how many concrete buildings there were in Los Angeles, and establish where
they were, because there was no publicly available list of these
buildings.

As part of the investigation, a team of Times reporters mined thousands of
city and county records to identify concrete buildings. The Times found
more than 1,000 buildings in Los Angeles that appeared to be concrete.
Many were in the city’s busiest commercial districts: downtown, Wilshire
Boulevard, Westwood and Ventura Boulevard.

The Times found that only a small fraction of concrete buildings were
retrofitted, according to an analysis of building records of 68 of them.

After the story ran, Garcetti began an expansive campaign to address
earthquake safety, and appointed U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy
Jones as his earthquake science advisor. Jones, a telegenic scientist who
has been a reassuring voice on Southern California radio and television
stations after earthquakes, began canvassing the city, bluntly warning
residents and owners of how dangerous it would be to do nothing,
particularly for concrete buildings.

“They are the deadliest buildings when they fall,” Jones once said of
concrete buildings at one of her meetings. “Because concrete is heavy,
they kill people.”

Over the last year, Garcetti has been campaigning across the city for the
mandatory retrofit plan, traipsing, for example, from a town hall meeting
in the San Fernando Valley to a meeting with the Chamber of Commerce.

“The first question often in the mouth of stakeholders we meet is: Isn’t
this going to cost a lot? And that’s the wrong frame,” Garcetti told the
Chamber. “Not doing anything -- isn’t that going to cost more?”

“Remember San Francisco,” Garcetti added. Referring to the 1906
earthquake, he said it took that city “40 years to rebuild back to the
strength of 1906. Los Angeles simply cannot afford to go that way.”

Los Angeles was once a leader in seismic safety. In the 1980s, it was one
of the first cities in California to require retrofitting of brick
buildings, a vulnerability that proved devastating in the 1933 Long Beach
earthquake. Out of about 8,000 buildings, all but three have since been
retrofitted or demolished.

As a result, no one died from brick building damage in the 1994 Northridge
quake.

But an effort to require retrofitting of concrete and soft-story buildings
failed at City Hall in the wake of the Northridge quake.



--
Obama increased total debt from $10 trillion to $19 trillion in the six
years he has been in office, and sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
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Barack Obama, reelected by the dumbest voters in the history of the United
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Loretta Fuddy, killed after she "verified" Obama's phony birth
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Nancy Pelosi, Democrat criminal, accessory before and after the fact to
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Obama ignored the brutal killing of an American diplomat in Benghazi, then
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in order to cover up his own ineptitude.

Obama continues his muslim goal of disarming America while ObamaCare
increases insurance premiums 300% and leaves millions without health care.

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ne...@netfront.net ---

[PaxPerPoten]

This is a joke.. Back in the 1960's they decided not to allow any
building to be over 5 stories tall.. Guess how long that lasted.. Just
until the next big money mogul greased Governor Brown and Mayor Yorties
palm with Campaign money. The the big buildings came in and the codes
for earthquake proof construction went in to the wind for everything,
Money talks Bullshit walks... You do remember California is a Blue
Democrat state?
>
>
>


--
It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard
the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all
ages who mean to govern well, but *They mean to govern*. They promise to
be good masters, *but they mean to be masters*. Daniel Webster

[Rudy Canoza]

On 10/18/2015 11:01 PM, PaxPerPoten wrote:
> On 10/18/2015 3:43 PM, Leroy N. Soetoro wrote:
>> http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-earthquake-retrofit-20151009-
>> story.html

>>[...]

>> But an effort to require retrofitting of concrete and soft-story
>> buildings
>> failed at City Hall in the wake of the Northridge quake.
>
> This is a joke.. Back in the 1960's they decided not to allow any
> building to be over 5 stories tall..

Bullshit. You don't know what the fuck you're bullshitting about. I do
know. I lived there. There was a 13 story limit imposed in 1911, you
stupid fuck. Voters repealed it in 1956, and taller buildings
immediately were built. In the mid 1960s two buildings 40+ stories went
up, and by the early 1970s there were buildings over 50 stories.

You never know what the fuck you're blabbering about. And why would
you? You're so stupid you can't even spell your fucking name right.