Mighty shake, but little damage in epicenter city
By GILLIAN FLACCUS, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
(07-29) 17:25 PDT CHINO HILLS, CA (AP) –
Modern building codes helped protect homes and businesses in the low-rise suburb near the epicenter of Tuesday’s Southern California earthquake, engineers and officials said Tuesday.
About half of the structures in Chino Hills — an hour’s drive from the skyscrapers of Los Angeles — were built after 1991 under construction rules intended to minimize damage from earthquakes.
The moderate-strength, 5.4-magnitude temblor knocked merchandise from store shelves and rattled nerves, but apparently caused no significant damage to homes or commercial buildings in the city of nearly 80,000.
“We have a lot of new construction. We’ve doubled our population since 1991,” said Denise Cattern, a city spokeswoman. “We have all the latest building standards and that probably made a difference.”
The quake was centered three miles west-southwest of Chino Hills at a depth of about 8 miles.
Engineers said shaking from an earthquake of Tuesday’s magnitude would normally not cause serious damage in California because of building rules and enforcement. That is not always the case in developing countries, where a temblor that size could cause weaker construction to collapse.
With the exception of old, unreinforced brick structures, “our buildings are largely built to withstand that type of shaking,” said Thomas Heaton, director of the earthquake engineering and research laboratory at California Institute of Technology.
Chris Poland, chairman of Degenkolb Engineers, a West Coast structural engineering firm and former president of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, said the widespread use of plywood to reinforce sheet-rock and stucco walls has created more durable housing throughout the region.
“In the (19)60s and ’70s, the buildings were designed 25 to 30 percent as strong as they are today,” Poland said. “That’s a big difference.”