Another Big Jolt From the Quake

You’re wrong if you think all of the big-ticket repair and retrofit bills from the Northridge earthquake have been tallied. Now comes a figure that is staggering for a single institution. UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young told the Board of Regents last week that $650 million is needed for quake repairs and retrofitting. Most of the money--about $500 million--would go to retrofit UCLA’s health sciences complex. Young also called for $500 million more to upgrade the health sciences structures, perhaps by erecting new buildings.

UCLA officials stress that these are rough estimates and that architectural and engineering studies are still in progress. Still, these are huge numbers. For comparison, look no farther than quake-ravaged Cal State Northridge, where direct damage has been estimated at about $350 million.

The degree to which UCLA might be helped by the federal government is unclear; whether the university’s wish list is pared down, and by how much, depends on what Washington can and will do.

The possibility of a single university asking for as much as $1.15 billion will no doubt strike some as egregiously indulgent and unrealistic. However, UCLA’s importance to the local medical system--not to mention to the region’s educational, cultural and intellectual life--cannot be overstated.

Los Angeles County and the region, for example, depends on the UCLA Medical Center. It is a state-of-the-art trauma center and also a tertiary referral center, accepting patients whose problems are too difficult for other hospitals to handle. It is the second-largest organ transplant facility in the nation and a top-level pediatric and neonatal intensive care facility. The magazine U.S. News and World Report ranked it as the best hospital in the West, and third-best in the nation.

If there were a list of hospitals that absolutely must be able to withstand a major earthquake, surely it would have to include UCLA Medical Center. The only question is the cost and how much can reasonably be done to afford such protection.