Quake Lessons One Year Later: No Gold Stars

Torrential though they may be, the rains of January, 1995, should not be allowed to wash away the memories of the earthquake of January, 1994. California had the opportunity to learn a great deal amid the aftershocks of the Northridge quake, but turning those opportunities into effective action has not become a happy anniversary story. When the temblors stopped, so, apparently, did any sense of urgency. There are bureaucratic lethargies that even earthquakes don’t shake.

To be sure, there has been a bit of institutional quivering over the past year. The structural engineering community is now asking itself tougher questions about what really works in earthquake-proof design. Increasingly, there’s a professional awareness that mathematical models should be subordinate to tangible tests. Engineers today are a little more rigorous and a lot more humble about testing their designs in the real world.

The California Department of Transportation, for one, has dramatically expanded the kinds of tests it does to assure the integrity of the state’s transportation infrastructure. “We’re not doing columns as much as other details” of structures, says Jim Roberts, director of the Caltrans Engineering Service Center. “We’re focusing more on joints and superstructures. . . . We’re also doing a lot more model building of the larger elements of structures, and then testing those.”

Roberts estimates that his group has performed four times as much tangible testing with its $5-million testing budget than in years past. Caltrans has also been far more active in building actual models and prototypes of testable structures. Indeed, Jack Moehle, who directs UC Berkeley’s Earthquake Engineering Research Center, and Nicholas F. Forell of San Francisco-based Forell & Ellseser, one of the country’s leading earthquake engineering firms, both give Caltrans a B+ for the way it has expanded its structural testing regimes since the Northridge quake.

On balance, however, California has been laggard in encouraging any meaningful earthquake engineering initiatives. The state hasn’t been active in either redefining seismic standards or pushing for more collaborative testing.

To be sure, says Berkeley’s Moehle, who oversees one of the region’s largest “shake tables” for testing seismic structures, “I’ve gotten more phone calls since Northridge, but we really haven’t been doing that much more testing for the private sector. . . . There have been a few encouraging signs, but I wouldn’t say there’s been a groundswell of support for solving this problem.”

The situation is “better, but it’s really not enough,” agrees Forell. “The commitment to seismic strengthening still isn’t there in the state.” Which is foolish: Dollar for dollar, investments in better seismic engineering design and testing are probably the most economical move the region could make. Certainly, earthquake engineering is a far smarter investment than the receding chimera of earthquake prediction.

While there is a university effort to form a cooperative research consortium to look at steel-frame structures, the sad truth is that Northridge has inspired very few initiatives to assure dramatically safer structures.

Where are the knowledge exchanges with Japan’s sizable seismic engineering community to share ideas about low-cost retrofitting and reinforcements? What do they know that we don’t? Where are the city, county and state efforts to get building contractors and developers to coordinate and pool their resources for testing? Where are all the insurance companies who have a direct financial stake in ensuring structural integrity?

“To my knowledge,” says Moehle, “the insurance industry has been almost absent from the research and the testing side of this.” That clearly has to change.

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Perhaps the most important innovation impact in the aftermath of the Northridge quake has been the rise of telecommuting. “There’s been a significant difference in 1994 than from any other year,” asserts Pacific Bell director of market applications Julie Dodd-Thomas. Indeed, in a survey the telephone giant conducted last fall, it found that fully nine out of 10 people who had begun telecommuting after the earthquake were still telecommuting regularly--a far higher percentage than after the Loma Prieta quake of 1989. Telecommuting, Pac Bell insists, has now become a high-profile business issue in California.

“If I look at our 62 top accounts,” Dodd Thomas adds, “telecommuting is the No. 1 issue. Every large employer is trailing it, implementing it or transitioning to it.”

Unfortunately, she concedes, Pac Bell doesn’t know how many people or companies are now telecommuting. The company has been sadly remiss in developing statistics to track the growth or pervasiveness of telecommuting.

However, Susan Herman, general manager of the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Telecommunications and overseer of a new five-county partnership to promote telecommuting, says telecommuting is already having a noticeable impact on life after Northridge. “I think you already see it in the L.A. region,” she says. “The kind of traffic congestion that you normally experience has been reduced. . . . Travel is minutes quicker. It’s like losing weight. . . . It takes time to be perceptible, but it’s definitely there.”

While Herman insists that “telecommuting is really blossoming,” she acknowledges that “we don’t have all the legislative incentives that would really make it fully bloom. I would want the state to be more aggressive. The AQMD (Air Quality Management District) is not aggressive enough in supporting telecommunications. The city needs to look at ways to provide incentives and rewards to employers to encourage telecommuting.”

The sad truth is that a year after the earthquake, neither Pac Bell, the city nor the state has proposed new tariffs or incentives to promote telecommuting either as a traffic management tool or as a disaster recovery contingency. This is leadership? This is an effective public service response to a crisis?

Of course, we’ll only know how successful our testing and telecommuting initiatives have been after the next big quake--but is it unfair or unreasonable to expect that a lot could have and should have happened in the last year?

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Michael Schrage is a writer, consultant and research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He writes this column independently for The Times. He can be reached at schrage@latimes.com by electronic mail via the Internet.