Disaster Preparedness for Existing School Structures
When a 6.4 magnitude earthquake in 1933 destroyed at least 70 schools and damaged 420 more in Long Beach, Calif., the state enacted the Field Act to establish design and construction standards for new schools.
The act did not cover the existing schools, however, where according to the U.S. Geological Survey, the greatest earthquake risk lies due to their being built prior to modern building codes — in much of the country, that includes facilities built as recently as the early 1990s.
In 1966, 30 years later after the Field Act was enacted, the state attorney general issued an opinion stating if schools were found to be unsafe and the board did not make the necessary corrections to make them safe, the individual school board members were personally liable.
USGS officials said concerned school board members, realizing the gravity of the situation, soon followed with legislation.
In 1967, the governor signed the Greene Act, which relieved the individual school board members of personal liability only if schools were properly examined and an intent was established to complete all steps necessary for replacement or repair.
Almost 50 years later, the act has not been reinforced as it should, according to reports.
On Shaky Ground
A 19-month investigation by California Watch, a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting, concluded the Division of the State Architect "shirked responsibility" to fully enforce the law, approving at least 20,000 school building projects without final safety certification required by the act.
An analysis by California Watch determined that roughly six out of every 10 public schools in the state have at least one uncertified building project, ranging from minor fire alarm upgrades to major construction of new classrooms.
The report "reveals how the Division of the State Architect has routinely failed to fully enforce the Field Act, California’s landmark earthquake safety law for public schools, allowing children and teachers to occupy buildings with structural flaws and potential safety hazards," according to the group.
"The state architect’s office has allowed building inspectors hired by school districts to work on complex and expensive jobs despite complaints of incompetence," officials said. "Some inspectors have failed to show up at construction sites at key moments."
Based on its investigation, the center alleged that state regulators seemed more concerned with caseload management than enforcing the Field Act.
The report cites an April 1993 memo in which state architect Harry Hallenbeck ordered what he titled "Close-O-Rama" — authorization to approve projects even if they lacked sworn affidavits from architects and engineers, or were missing documents proving that fire alarms had been installed.
The group alleges that the state architect’s office continues to currently reclassify hundreds of projects as simply missing paperwork without actually visiting the schools to verify that fixes were made.
The last of the center’s three-part series said a separate seismic inventory created about 10 years ago shows more than 7,500 older school buildings as potentially dangerous, but due to restrictive rules only two schools in the state have been able to access a $200 million fund set aside specifically for urgent seismic repairs.
“As the Schwarzenegger administration decided how to dole out a limited amount of money, it worried about a rush on the funding, according to internal e-mails and memos obtained by California Watch,” the report states. “The concern prompted the administration to set a high bar for schools to qualify.”
The vast majority of the buildings remain unfixed, and the money goes unused, according to the center.
The report also found that the state architect’s office relaxed its oversight and became closely aligned with the industry it regulates.
The team cited examples of government officials who became "dues-paying members of a lobbying group for school construction firms; mingled at conferences, golf tournaments and dinners; and briefed the lobbying group’s clients at monthly meetings."
The report states that while a 1972 law requires the state to publish detailed maps of active earthquake fault zones, the California Geological Survey has “amended those maps over the years, frequently shrinking the size of the hazard zones,” based on pressure from property owners, real estate agents and local government officials who feared property values would decline inside seismic hot spots, according to interviews and documents obtained by the center.
California Watch found examples of schools removed from hazard zones, including ones in the seismically active areas of Los Angeles and Alameda counties.
The survey excluded older, potentially active faults and narrowed the zones considered hazardous. Removing schools from the hazard zones was not the agency’s central intent — but several ended up outside the lines when the new maps were published, California Watch stated.
"As the maps shifted, some schools were located in hazard zones one day and out the next,” said Mark Katches, editorial director of California Watch. “This seismic safety project points out glaring weaknesses in the state’s system of oversight at a time the tragedy in Japan is still front and center."
In addition to the 20,000 projects lacking Field Act certification, the state discovered 59,000 more that have yet to be fully reviewed by the state architect’s office to identify their Field Act status, according to the center.
The California Watch series includes a searchable and interactive map to locate individual schools and potential hazards, rich video content, an iPhone app, a coloring book on earthquake preparedness for kids and resources for taking action, along with a guide to resources for readers to get involved in earthquake safety in their community.
Robert Rosenthal, executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent organization of California Watch, said they have been working on this project almost from the day the division was started.
"This series reveals issues that can be addressed and understood before a potential disaster,” he said. “We hope it leads to reforms that will serve the public interest."
“We’ve seen inconsistencies in some of the submitted documentation,” said Howard Smith, who became acting head of the state architect’s office in August. “But we haven’t actually seen a case where a significant, imminent hazard or risk was posed by one of these projects.”
According to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s risk management publication series, Incremental Seismic Rehabilitation of School Buildings (K-12),some seismically active parts of the country, such as schools in the Midwest, have only recently adopted appropriate seismic design standards while in other parts, like the Northwest, estimates of seismic risk have been revised upward.
Like the Field Act, since the standards do not apply retroactively to existing school buildings, there is no automatic requirement to improve older buildings that are more susceptible to damage due to age. Any injuries caused by earthquake damage to these buildings is the responsibility of the owner or operator, according to the agency.
School construction projects traditionally have been carried out by facility managers, who look at the parameters of educational program development, area demographics and the physical condition and projected useful life of the existing school facilities, the publication states.
Additional factors include social issues like vandalism, physical security, and equity, or federal mandates like asbestos, lead abatement or energy conservation.
Agency officials said facility managers rarely consider the risks to school buildings from natural disasters such as earthquakes or windstorms.
School administrations have recently started to bring on risk managers, who contribute to facility planning by analyzing risks.
Currently, identified risks in schools are divided into risks to students, such as school bus accidents, sport activity or playground accidents, and food service hazards, and risks to staff, such as work-related disability and general health, according to the agency.
“Rarely do risk managers consider the risks to school facilities in general, and the risks to facilities and their occupants from natural disasters in particular,” the publication states. “Rather, they tend to assume that facility risks are addressed by building codes and similar regulations.”
Facility planning is also dealt with through financial managers, who manage maintenance budgets, capital improvement budgets and insurance budgets for the demands presented by facility and risk managers.
“The costs and benefits of various options of facility risk management are rarely explicitly addressed,” the publication states. “Addressing the problem of earthquake risk reduction requires the establishment of active communication among the three management functions and the coordination of activities into an integrated planning and management effort.”
The agency provides information on addressing various building types that can be adopted for use in schools due to their similar characteristics, according to the agency. Most school districts do not need to consider mid-rise and high-rise buildings, for example.
Weathering the Storm
While no legislation exists on the federal level, according to the agency, state education codes across the country mandate various emergency preparedness and auditing measures to protect schools from earthquakes, storms and other natural disasters.
A number of tornadoes, some deadly, hit the Southern and Midwest regions of the country in the past few months, destroying and damaging homes and schools.
Elementary school principal Mahlon Carothers of Mapleton, Iowa, said their school suffered $1 million in damage from the recent storm.
Preliminary damage at Mapleton Elementary School was to the playgrounds, lights, and ceilings rained in at the school, he said. The school also lost its sports storage place and bleacher, along with damages to the floor.
A few classrooms also require reconstruction, as well as rebuilding fences and scoreboards.
At the time the storm hit, a play was being held at the school. Actors and the audience were guided to the basement.
The total population of the adjacent elementary and high school is about 940, he said.
Another building, Anton, a kindergarten through eighth grade school, didn’t receive any damage.
Carothers said the town was well-prepared and the sheriff’s department and spotters had a good handle on the situation.
The town had a 15 to 20 minute warning — enough time for officials to blow sirens to alert residents to take cover.
The high school was built seven years ago and the elementary school in the 1930s, with an addition in the late 1950s. Rebuilding work on the two brick campuses will be paid for through insurance.
The spotters are trained through classes to identify where they think the storm might hit, watch it as it develops and stay up to date with the weather service’s information.
"Training is important, most of our staff is a few trained police officers," he said. "Our fire department is all volunteer, we’re a rural small community.”
Carothers said there was a strong response from local citizens and schools from hundreds of miles away after the storm.
Though the school won’t be fixed up for months, the principal said in two days volunteers had the streets cleaned.
"All of that, that’s what makes Iowa, Iowa," he said. "People all join in and help, they don’t wait for someone else to do it — they just come in and fix it."
The state also pitched in, providing big trucks to help in the effort, he said.
"All that training before and training to respond right away and be proactive basically is why we probably didn’t lose any lives," he said.
In response to the storms, the National Science Foundation Rapid Response Grant for Exploratory Research commissioned a group of researchers to study the structures of the areas hit by the April 27 Alabama storms to better understand the forces generated by large tornadoes and make recommendations for design code improvements and general safety guidelines.
David Prevatt, assistant professor in the Civil and Coastal Engineering department at the University of Florida, is serving as the principal investigator researching the post-storm areas.
Prevatt said many of the residential buildings he studied in the area are older, more vulnerable structures not brought up to code, and are primarily composed of wood structures, in addition to some built masonry blocks and concrete blocks.
Prevatt said various the materials, like wood, concrete or masonry, can all be equally built to withstand wind, hurricane or earthquake forces.
“It is very important for us to understand that simply the material by itself does not make a building stronger — it’s how you put it together, how you tie the basic elements of the material together,” he said. “The main input to making a building robust is going to be how each element in that structure is connected to each other.”
Likening building materials to links in a chain, Prevatt said the members themselves have to be strong but the connections between them must be equally as strong.
Building systems built whole might offer a better solution, he said.
Bill Coulbourne, who also served on the research team and is the director of Wind and Flood Hazard Mitigation at the Applied Technology Council, said there are two primary points schools should consider for rebuilding.
“One would be figuring out some space in the middle of the school somewhere, to be treated as a safe space or safe room,” he said. “Certainly for tornadoes, it should be secure enough and large enough to hold the population of the school.”
Coulbourne said that while most administrators think hallways are the safest places, damage observed after the tornadoes shows failures in parts of the structure that would have collapsed into the hallways.
“Thank goodness, a lot of times people aren’t in school so no one’s been hurt or killed,” he said.
Instead, Coulbourne recommended schools build shelter spaces specifically designed for safety.
As a consultant with his own firm, Coulbourne works on disaster response teams for state and local governments for any critical facilities where large amounts of people congregate to try to resist damage in future disasters. He also worked to put together guidelines for shelter spaces for the federal emergency management association, which can be referenced in FEMA document 361.
Coulbourne said masonry and concrete blocks were frequently used in lots of school buildings in many schools across the country was masonry. Depending on the region, in the late 1970s and early 1980s a lot of the masonry construction was not reinforced with steel to secure it, he said.
“The roof systems are not very well tied down so in major tornadoes or major wind events you tend to get an uplift because the wind is actually sucking up the roof,” he said. “The roof comes off, then the walls collapse.”
Coulbourne recommended schools that are going to rebuild to look for ways to reinforce masonry walls, put mortar in the cells and tie down the roof.
In terms of recent building trends, while nothing in a green building by itself would help resist damage from a natural disaster, any building that can continue to stand is more sustainable, he said.
While newer building codes in place since 2000 or 2003 have required more disaster resistance and property protection techniques based on previous damage, the center of the country is still building at lower wind speed rates, he said.
“They still have the concept that they’re not going to be hit by anything major,” he said. “And yet, when a tornado hits, it usually causes devastating type of stuff.”
Using the federal agency guidelines to build spaces would help schools make sure they can resist the high speeds of an EF4 or EF5 storm, he said.
“One of the things most helpful to a community is being able to have schools in service so parents can concentrate on clean up and jobs,” he said. “If kids can’t go back to school (parents have) got multiple issues to deal with — having places like schools continue to be able to put in service is most important.”
John van de Lindt, professor and Garry Neil Drummond Endowed Chair in Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alabama, worked with Prevatt and Coulbourne on the team to study homes and schools in the Tuscaloosa area.
The team studied a range of wood structures with varying ages.
Van de Lindt said the metal pieces that connect roofs to walls and walls to ground in more recent structures were historically not used.
“Depending on the wind speed, depending on where it was on the tornado path, we didn’t see those providing that much help when it was EF4 or EF5,” he said. “When those become of benefit were the EF0, EF1 and EF2.”
Seeing the roof of a gymnasium ripped off was not surprising given the wind pressure of the tornado, he said.
“I’m a very, very strong supporter of safe rooms or at the very least a basement with concrete walls or something over the top,” he said. “For these very large tornadoes that we’re seeing form in the southeast, or supercells, as a society we really need to figure out a way to make sure someone has somewhere safe to go.”
Van de Lindt said for engineers, it means really encouraging people to build shelters and explaining the risks.
“Historically people have said, well the probability is so low — that may be the case for the entire country. I teach reliability and probability so I definitely have a feel for probability,” he said. “When (a tornado) hits 10 to 20 miles away it feels close.”
While clean-up is in the works, it is still very early in the rebuilding process, according to Wes Brooker, market development manager at American Buildings Company.
The Eufaula, Ala.,-based company has set up a hotline where any business owner whose property was destroyed by the tornado can call in to connect with builders and contractors it is working with throughout the storm-ridden and flooded areas.
While some local builders have received about 15 to 20 orders to replace metal roof panels, current efforts are mostly focused on clean-up efforts, he said.
Brooker noted Tuscaloosa has instated a temporary moratorium on replacing buildings to prevent temporary buildings.
“They want the right buildings on the right structure,” he said. “Temporary structures are hard to get in and out.”
Brooker said the situation reminded him very much of the Katrina hurricane aftermath. While it took more than a year to start rebuilding after Katrina, Brooker said he expects the post-storm rebuilding to happen faster.
Brooker said while in high impact tornadoes there isn’t much one can do to keep buildings standing other than have concrete bunkers, metal buildings traditionally tend to do well. In the Northridge earthquake in 1994, the company’s metal buildings sustained minimal damage, and in the Haiti earthquake in 2010, their metal building was unscathed.
The building strength is due to the fact that the company designs and manufactures the entire building system to work together, while traditional conventional construction has many different parties working on different parts.
“As a result, not everything works together,” he said. “I do know that our structures tend to hold up extremely well, every bit of that structure, everything is designed to meet local codes.”