Are Belmont Shore-Naples Schools Seismically Safe?

How safe is your school in an earthquake, and are watchdogs watching that? Patch.com has partnered with California Watch, the state’s largest investigative reporting team, to find out.

A 19-month California Watch investigation, which was released Thursday, uncovered of seismic safety for public schools.

Long Beach Unified has 90 schools--about 80% built before 1970--and 33 show up on California Watch's interactive map as needing safety upgrades or documentation that the repairs were made. There's no question about some of the district's schools, though only Wilson in the Belmont Shore area, are in need of seismic safety improvements. But DeMille Middle School is listed and it doesn't even exist. It was leveled as being cheaper to rebuild than to retrofit the old building.

  The district, California's third largest with 86,000 students, notes that of seven cases the state presented just in 2009 as needing a construction project's final safety certification, six of them were in other cities or not LBUSD property. On what the state calls its most current inventory, KLON is listed when it's actually on the Cal State Long Beach campus--and the all-jazz radio station was renamed KJZZ years ago.

Fremont, Lowell,  Naples elementary schools and Rogers Middle School have no problems, whatsoever, with uncertified construction projects. Most of them are identified as within a quarter mile of a fault or in a liquefaction zone--much of the coastal area is as well. (Lowell was a two-story building whose bell tower caved into the library during the 1933 Long Beach quake, and it was rebuilt one story. Wilson High's bell tower also collapsed. And one student, visiting from San Pedro for a track meet, was killed when the P.E. building collapsed. Had the quake not happened at 5:54 p.m., thousands of students would have been killed in the demolished portions of schools.)

Woodrow Wilson High has two projects that older buildings with the potential to be hazardous risks and in need of evaluation.  They are substantial retrofit projects--the auditorium is 29,200 feet and the gymnasium/indoor swimming pool structure called a natatorium is 69,500 square feet. The auditorium on the California Watch map is called "potentially hazardous in an earthquake and in need of a detailed structural evaluation." The gym/natatorium "generally would perform well in an earthquake" but also need a "detailed" structural evaluation. 

"We are aware and know Wilson is on the list, we've done more thorough seismic studies than the state has on it," district spokesman Chris Eftychiou said Thursday. "And Wilson is part of our list of priority projects under Measure K," which Long Beach residents overwhelmingly approved in 2008 to raise $1.2 billion toward retrofitting and replacing old and unsafe buildings.

Many of the projects the state lists date back to the late 1990s, when the district had a huge surge of students, 2,000 additional pupils yearly at one point. So the district scrambled to erect portable classrooms to house all the students. Over another decade, the district population waned and lost 14,000 students--about the size of nearby Los Alamitos' entire student population.

"When it comes to the portables," Eftychiou said, "a lot of the missing certificates...are from that time. They are one-story, modern and built to withstand being transported on a trailer at 60 m.p.h."

California began regulating school architecture for quake safety in 1933 with the Field Act--a direct result of which killed 115 people. The 6.4-quake wreaked such damage due to poor construction and forever changed building in California. 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.

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

It was not for lack of applying for that money, many districts say. Long Beach Unified applied for the funds and was rejected on grounds that none of its buildings was deemed "vulnerable enough" to moved to the front of the line for the money, Eftychiou said. All of the Belmont Shore-Naples area's five schools were built before 1941, and most were constructed in 1926.

Where does your school stand in all this? Patch has been digging through a maze of documents and interviewing officials for answers. The state grades all individual school construction projects using a four-letter rating system for compliance with quake regulations. Letter 4 is the lowest rating; letter 1 is the best.

But judging a school’s structural safety based on those ratings can be tricky. In recent years, according to California Watch, state officials upgraded hundreds of Letter 4 buildings to Letter 3 without visiting schools to verify fixes were made.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean the buildings would fall apart in a quake. Because local school district officials and builders can be criminally prosecuted if students or staff are injured by earthquake damage at an uncertified campus, they hire their own inspectors and don’t open any structure that isn’t deemed up to snuff, said Eric Lamoureux, a spokesman for the Division of the State’s Architect.

Lamoureux also downplayed concerns about Letter 4 buildings reclassified to Letter 3, saying most simply involved missing paperwork. “We don’t believe there are any significant with any of the Letter 3 projects,” he told Patch on Wednesday.

For its part, Long Beach Unified wrote a comprehensive response about Patch's questions on seismic safety at its schools:

"While the state prepared the AB 300 list, the state did not set up a corresponding repair and upgrade program.  In fact, the AB 300 report specifically estimates a cost of $4 billion to bring these older Field Act compliant schools up to today’s seismic Building Code standards.  The only system that has been adopted is set forth as Title 2 Section 1859.82, which provides a program that provides only $195 million to a very limited list of potentially qualified schools.  In an effort to seek further revision to the regulations, LBUSD applied to the DSA to qualify for State funding for all of the 24 buildings on the AB300 list and specifically noted the significance of the AB 300 issues to the state.  The state has reviewed each of the 24 schools and deemed that the schools are not considered to be the 'most vulnerable' to serious damage in a major earthquake as outlined in this program.  Therefore, LBUSD’s 24 school buildings are ineligible to participate in this program.

 "To address this need, LBUSD sought and received voter approval for Measure K, a $1.2 billion general obligation bond passed by 72% of voters in November 2008.  Among the first projects being considered to receive seismic upgrades are Newcomb K-8 Academy, Hill, Hamilton and Bancroft Middle Schools.  Depending on the scope of work and the availability of future funding, LBUSD has plans to retrofit buildings on five high school campuses, including Wilson High School.  The costs associated with upgrading all buildings on the AB300 list in our school district would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars."

LBUSD's spokesman, Eftychiou, said that while the district now has funding, which can only be spent on "brick and mortar," not on classroom supplies or teacher salaries, the district does have a finite amount of staff to oversee such a significant scope of construction."

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.

Read more about Patch's collaboration with California Watch regarding their joint investigation: