California Not Keeping Up on Enforcing Seismic Standards for Schools

A 19-month California Watch investigation, which was released Thursday, uncovered holes in the state's enforcement of seismic safety regulations for public schools. All school buildings in Encinitas were found to meet seismic standards except for one at .

California began regulating school architecture for seismic safety in 1933 with the Field Act, but data taken from the Division of the State Architect’s office shows 20,000 school projects statewide never got final safety certifications. In the crunch to get schools built within the last few decades, state architects have been lax on enforcement, California Watch reported.

Even now, the state architect’s office has been reclassifying hundreds of projects as simply missing paperwork without visiting the schools to verify if fixes were made.

A separate inventory completed nine years ago found 7,500 seismically risky school buildings in the state. Yet, California Watch reports that only two schools have been able to access a $200 million fund for upgrades.

One building at Capri Elementary has landed on the state’s AB 300 list as a possible risk in the event of an earthquake. AB 300 requires the California Department of General Services to conduct an inventory of public school buildings that are of concrete tilt-up construction and those with nonwood frame walls that do not meet the minimum requirements of the 1976 Uniform Building Code.  

More details on Capri’s status will be available in the coming weeks as Encinitas Union School District Facilities Director Gerry Devitt looks into the case.  At the present time, EUSD is unsure which building has been identified as a risk.

According to Devitt, the school has undergone demolition work in the past, resulting in upgrades to several buildings. If the problem listed under AB 300 still exists, however, Devitt said the district will follow through in fixing it.

"We'd like to get off that list," he said.

No problems were reported in the Cardiff or San Dieguito Union High School districts, and the city itself is not near any major fault lines.

In Carlsbad, Valley Middle School also ended up on the state’s AB 300 list because it has , which doesn’t meet the minimum requirements of the building code.

 Superintendent John Roach is aware that the locker room at the school is a concrete tilt-up and therefore on the AB300 list.

“It’s not a building I’d send kids into during an earthquake, but this doesn’t mean it will fall over or the state wouldn’t allow us to use it daily. The state is not requiring us to change it,” Roach said.

While these are buildings are a potential risk, there is no quantifiable data that they would actually fail in an earthquake.

Gretchen Zeagler, a public information officer
 with the DSA, agrees.

“A concrete tilt-up building is not unsafe, but we request (not mandate) that schools get these type of buildings seismically evaluated. Either CUSD hasn’t sent in the evaluation or they haven’t done one; therefore, they are still on the list,” she said.

Another Carlsbad school, La Costa Meadows Elementary, was identified as a Letter 4 school—meaning that it has a health or safety issue and does not meet the latest earthquake standards—before it was revised to a safer Letter 3.

According to data from the DSA, the school made alterations to all of the fire alarms. In March 2010 the file was “closed without certification.”

This story was produced using data provided to Patch by California Watch, the state's largest investigative reporting team and part of the Center for Investigative Reporting.