CSUN Lawsuit Over Collapsed Parking Structure Unlikely : Earthquake: Initial engineering report clears designer-builder of negligence in the garage’s failure.

University officials probably will not file a lawsuit over the spectacular collapse of the Cal State Northridge parking garage after reviewing the first phase of an engineering post-mortem on the building’s failure in last year’s Northridge earthquake.

“The report and the subsequent analysis appears to suggest that there will be no litigation,” said Bruce Richardson, deputy general counsel for the Cal State University system.

“There’s nothing in the report that leaps up and says (the builders or designers) were woefully negligent in what they did,” Richardson said.

The university on Friday released an initial report by Dames & Moore, consulting engineers, on the failure of the $11.3-million parking structure, reduced by the temblor to a twisted pile of steel and concrete at its eastern and western ends.

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The garage became an icon of the quake’s destructive power, triggering anxious speculation about the destruction of cars and lives had the quake not struck in the wee hours of a holiday.

The Dames & Moore report, marked “Covered by Attorney-Client Privilege,” is dated Dec. 12 but was withheld by school officials until Friday.

Although not final, “the decision at the moment is not to go forward with any kind of (legal) action,” Richardson said Friday in an interview with The Times. “That’s why we released the report.”

Andrew Curd, president of A. T. Curd Constructors, which built the garage in 1990-91, said Friday he has believed all along that no grounds for litigation exist.

“The design basically met or exceeded code,” Curd said. “I think . . . the ground motion just wildly exceeded the codes.”

The quake and its aftershocks left about half the five-level, four-acre structure collapsed or in a state of incipient collapse, according to the Dames & Moore report.

The main areas of collapse were at the east and west ends. According to the report, “Either columns failed and dropped their prestressed beams, and/or beams displaced and fell off” their supports.

“In either case, the result was that the attached slabs got pulled down with the dropped beams, and these, in turn, pulled adjacent beams, slabs and columns down with them.”

The 115-page report mainly considers whether to salvage and repair still-standing sections of the massive parking structure or demolish it and start over.

It concluded that the garage should be razed--and, in fact, demolition is expected to begin soon.

Dames & Moore is still preparing a detailed analysis of the causes of the collapse but has given a preview to university officials, said Allan R. Porush, a structural engineer and project manager for Dames & Moore.

While declining to give details, Porush said the second report is likely to fix blame more in “shades of gray . . . than black and white.”

But Porush said he “may make negative statements about the design-and-build process” used in constructing the CSUN garage--which critics say eliminates a vital check and balance.

In design-build projects, a single firm controls both functions--with the designer answering to the builder rather than to the building owner.

“I am an adamant nonbeliever in design-build,” Porush said. “You may get a cheaper product, but you do not get the same value.

“Parking structures generally in the Northridge earthquake . . . did very poorly . . . because of the design-build process,” Porush said.

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Litigation over the collapse could prove embarrassing to university officials, because in a dispute over adequacy of the design they sided with the builder over their own plan-check consultants. The plan-check firm, Esgil Corp., had been hired to assure that construction plans conformed to building codes.

As The Times reported last February, during construction in August, 1990, Esgil voiced strong misgivings about the structure’s ability to absorb the seismic forces the builder claimed.

In essence, the consultants said that in calculating compliance with the building code, Curd claimed a higher value for the structure’s ability to flex with seismic stress than the design warranted.

University officials sided with Curd after it provided letters from several engineering firms supporting its interpretation of the building code. Esgil then submitted a revised plan-check list that said its objections had been “resolved,” but a structural engineer for the firm refused to sign off on the plans.

Richardson said it was unclear how these circumstances might affect a lawsuit--in part because “it’s hard to say whether those issues (raised by Esgil) played a significant role in the failure.”