Garcetti wants better earthquake safety for L.A.'s day care centers, private schools and steel towers
Mayor Eric Garcetti on Friday called for Los Angeles to significantly improve its planning for a major earthquake, saying the city should consider mandatory retrofits of steel-framed buildings and earthquake evaluations of private schools and day care centers.
Los Angeles already has some of California’s strongest quake retrofit laws, which cover brick buildings, concrete-frame structures and wood-frame apartments. Friday’s announcement marks the first time Garcetti has specifically raised the possibility about whether the city should require the retrofitting of vulnerable steel buildings built before the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
Government experts have said that, during a major earthquake, it is plausible that five steel-framed buildings across Southern California could collapse.
More than 400 people could die and more than 800 could be injured if those five buildings collapsed, a U.S. Geological Survey study has said. Santa Monica and West Hollywood recently passed laws requiring vulnerable steel buildings in their cities be retrofitted.
“There are buildings in Los Angeles that have slipped through the cracks. But we can’t let people in an earthquake be killed by those cracks,” Garcetti said in an interview. “Sometimes it takes political courage, but we have to make sure we don’t look back after an earthquake and have lives that were lost and say, ‘Well, we did as much as we could.’ ”
Added the mayor: “I just believe we can do more. We found where we can do more. And so it’s not a question of if — now we have to tackle how.”
Garcetti said the time has come to establish a plan to broaden not only the city’s efforts on earthquake safety, but on other menaces faced by America’s second-largest city, such as wildfires and worsening extreme heat.
“We can’t wait for catastrophes to hit before confronting them,” the mayor said in a statement.