They are the first thing we in the media look for during an earthquake. The bricks. There always is some place where bricks have collapsed onto a road/walkway/parking lot. Last week’s 5.4 magnitude quake provided the pictures in the city of Pomona. Fortunately nobody was underneath those bricks when they fell.
The rubble came from a building made of unreinforced masonry. “URM’s” as they are called by engineers are buildings made of brick and mortar and nothing else. So many of those buildings came down in the Long Beach earthquake in 1933 (6.3 magnitude 115 dead) that the state banned their construction in 1935. In 1986 a state law was passed requiring seismic retrofitting of existing structures. But the California law left implementation, and standards, up to local jurisdictions.
In a rare move of municipal leadership the city of Los Angeles was the first to require the seismic shoring up of its URM buildings. It wasn’t easy and it was costly. But the buildings most likely to fall down in an earthquake have been eliminated. That’s one reason why you didn’t see any bricks falling in Los Angeles Tuesday.
Pomona is a different story. As was San Luis Obispo County a few years back when the San Simeon quake resulted in the deaths of two women who ran from an URM building in Paso Robles. Normally smaller localities can accomplish more than the large ones… but not in this case.
Most older buildings in the state have been upgraded. It is up to the legislature to see what it can do to get the remainder of California cities to do the heavy lifting that comes with making sure their buildings won’t come down in “the Big One.”
As seismic engineers like to remind us… “earthquakes don’t kill people.. buildings kill people.”
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