Building Owners Fear Costs of Proposed Quake Zoning Change

In 1985, Bud Fischer gutted and renovated the downtown Granger Building, transforming the decaying relic at 5th Avenue and Broadway into five floors of office and retail space for $1.6 million.

Thursday, Fischer told an obscure government panel that he might be forced to walk away from his improvement project if the city presses forward with plans to reclassify itself as highly earthquake-prone.

The city is considering whether to adopt a “Seismic Zone 4” rating like San Francisco and Los Angeles, because recent research has shown the presence of an active earthquake fault running through the city.

Fischer and more than 125 other people who jammed a City Hall meeting room Thursday fear that a switch to Zone 4 would require owners of the city’s 1,000 brick buildings to retrofit the structures at enormous cost. The “unreinforced masonry buildings,” most of which are made of brick, are considered more susceptible to earthquake damage than modern structures because of the lack of steel bars within weight-bearing walls.

The new steel skeleton that would be needed to reinforce the 87-year-old Granger, for example, would cost $2.4 million, Fischer said. If a retrofit law were passed, “I would be happy to give the building to the city of San Diego or anyone else who would like it,” Fischer said.

Other owners would have to force elderly tenants out of buildings during renovations, and many would go bankrupt, said Harry Mathis, spokesman for the Classic Building Owners, an association formed to fight the reclassification.

“The fallout could be catastrophic,” Mathis said. “We’re talking about their livelihoods, their retirements.

“San Francisco and Los Angeles are in Zone 4 with good reason,” Mathis argued. “They have a history of violent earthquakes. We here in San Diego do not.”

Deputy City Atty. Rudolf Hradecky told the building owners that the reclassification applies only to new buildings, not existing structures. According to a report from the city’s Building Inspection Department, which recommended the classification change, protections required by the new designation would add a maximum of 1.3% to the cost of a new home and 3% to the cost of a new commercial structure.

But brick building owners said that the classification change will put pressure on the City Council to mandate a retrofit of all brick buildings out of fear of liability for damage during a major earthquake.

A city advisory committee is developing an ordinance governing such buildings, and the city’s earthquake designation will bear heavily on its contents, said architect Richard Bundy, who prepared renovations for the Granger.

But Edward Spicer, deputy director of plan review services for the building inspection department, warned that the new law governing brick buildings could mandate retrofitting--on a voluntary or mandatory basis--even if the city maintains its Seismic Zone 3 status.

“That’s the way we’re leaning right now,” Spicer said of the committee’s deliberations.

Thursday, the brick building owners won a reprieve of perhaps several months when the city’s Board of Appeals and Advisors refused to consider the seismic zone change without simultaneously reviewing the brick building ordinance.

Detailed examination last year of the Rose Canyon fault, which extends from La Jolla, along the city coastline and into downtown, showed conclusively that it is an “active” fault, according to the report.

Conclusive evidence of movement in the fault during the past 11,000 years has been gathered, and an earthquake measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale is possible on the fault, the report noted. Two other faults, one of them offshore, could also produce earthquakes registering above 5.8 on the Richter scale, the report noted.

But the Classic Building Owners said in a prepared statement that “the geologic evidence is not sufficient to justify the reclassification and notes that, historically, San Diego has been an island of relative seismic tranquility throughout recorded history, with no memory of any death, serious injury or significant building damage from earthquakes.”