California’s wise retreat from seismic overreaction
Healthcare Design Magazine - June 2008, Posted On: 6/1/2008
by CHRIS POLAND, SE
On November 14, the California Building Standards Commission (CBSC) approved plans to amend the requirements for hospital seismic safety measures in order to delay billions in premature spending. The new requirements will allow significant savings in the state’s healthcare costs over the next 15 years.
At issue is the implementation of Senate Bill 1953 (SB 1953), legislation originally passed in 1994. Drafted by Senator Alfred E. Alquist in response to the magnitude 6.7 earthquake that hit Northridge in 1994 and halted emergency services at 23 hospitals in the Los Angeles area, SB 1953 was intended to ensure that by 2030, all of California’s hospitals would not close or suspend critical care services following a major natural disaster.
As part of SB 1953, legislators set three intermediate deadlines, the third of which was the subject of the Commission’s vote last year. It required all general acute-care inpatient buildings at risk of collapsing during a 500-year earthquake—classified as Structural Performance Category-1 (SPC-1) buildings—be rebuilt, retrofitted, or closed by January 2008. All others could wait to upgrade to the fully operational level until 2030.
Following the 1994 decision, 40% of California’s hospital buildings were categorized and reported as SPC-1 rated. Though the percentage seemed unusually high, policy makers trusted the available evaluation methodology. The criteria used to deem a building as high-risk was that its construction pre-dated 1973, prior to the Alfred E. Alquist Hospital Facilities Seismic Safety Act, and that it had the same characteristics as buildings that had collapsed in previous earthquakes. While this rapid assessment procedure may have been the most accurate for the time, it created an overly broad definition of what constituted a high-risk building, thereby wrongly categorizing hundreds of buildings that were actually usable until the 2030 deadline.