Records show 591 structures, including classrooms, libraries, and research labs need to be retrofitted or replaced before a major earthquake hits
By Stephen Stock, Michael Horn, Jeremy Carrol and Kevin Nious
When the next big earthquake hits, hundreds of student buildings on college campuses across the state could pose a serious hazard to everyone inside, according to seismic reports obtained by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit.
The findings are part of a continuous effort by school administrators at the University of California and California State University systems to identify unsafe buildings with seismic deficiencies. NBC Bay Area teamed up with our partners at NBC LA and NBC San Diego to request inspection records for every public university. Records show more than 590 structures, including classrooms, libraries, and research labs that need to be retrofitted or replaced before a major earthquake hits.
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Civil engineer David Mar owns Mar Structural Design in Berkeley. The state hired his firm and others to identify seismic hazards on college campuses and to enable buildings to better withstand an earthquake.
"These buildings are going through really significant and brutal tests when they go through a major earthquake, and they actually have to transform and dissipate energy and remain stable. It's a real hard ask," Mar told NBC Bay Area.
After the Loma Prieta (1989) and Northridge (1994) earthquakes, scientists gained a better understanding of how earthquakes move, allowing engineers to build more resisted buildings. Mar said those earthquakes also revealed which structures were built to fail.
"We're kind of understanding what the faults are capable of, how much energy they're releasing, better understanding the frequency, better understanding of soil [and] how intense the problem is," Mar said. "Especially when we're looking at archaic structures, we're testing them to these really high tests. I mean in a sense, we're taking a real earthquake, shaking a real building, and they have to break and transform and essentially go through that process and dissipate energy without collapsing."
The CSU system lists 65 buildings that need to be repaired or replaced. Eighteen of those buildings are at San Francisco State University and the school's satellite campus in Tiburon.
University spokesman Barry Shiller told NBC Bay Area the campus knows firsthand how destructive an earthquake can be after Loma Prieta forced school officials to red tag and implode the dorms at Verducci Hall.
"Most of [the buildings in Tiburon] were red tagged a couple of years ago and are now not in use. Some of them are going to be retrofitted, many of them probably will not. They will be demolished and eventually replaced," Shiller said.
Main campus buildings that warrant seismic upgrades include an administration building as well as several campus apartments.
"The seismic committee reviewed all of that work, deemed the buildings all inhabitable. But there is still more work to be done and will be done once funding is freed up," Shiller said.
At Cal State East Bay, the main campus library requires urgent attention for seismic upgrades, according to the CSU Seismic Review Board. Construction is currently underway on a replacement named the CORE Building, schedule to open in the fall of 2021.
The UC system is currently in the midst of a comprehensive review to inspect every structure on all nine campuses and address any seismic problems by 2030.
Thus far, engineers have found 526 buildings on five campuses that pose a serious threat to safety, according to records provided to NBC Bay Area.
Sixty-eight of those low rated buildings are owned by UC Berkeley. In September, school administrators sent an email to all students and faculty detailing the seismic inspection results.
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