TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

Nearly 180 public university buildings in California used by tens of thousands of people have been judged dangerous to occupy during a major earthquake — including libraries, classroom buildings, student apartments, gyms, a hospital and even a child care center, a California Watch investigation has found.

While some significant earthquake risks have emerged only recently, university officials have known about seismic problems with the majority of their dangerous buildings for five years or more. In some cases, they've known for decades.

California Watch reviewed thousands of pages of documents and audits and interviewed seismic safety experts about both of the state's public university systems.

Among the findings:

• Dozens of new buildings have been built ahead of seismic safety projects that have languished. Projects with outside support, such as those receiving partial funding from donors, tend to get preference for state funding.

• CSU policies don't mandate fixing the most dangerous buildings first. A building at CSU Fullerton got funding for retrofitting in 1999, even though it was ranked 20th on the system's list of hazardous structures. Eight of the buildings that were ahead of it remain to be fixed.

• Rigid rules prohibit UC and CSU officials from using certain types of construction money on seismic repairs. Instead, both systems make due with limited pots of money for safety upgrades.

Four Cal State Bakersfield buildings are considered seismically hazardous: Dore Theater, Faculty Towers, the old gym (physical education building) and Runners Cafe. School officials said repairs are in campus plans, but those buildings meet state building requirements and do not pose an immediate risk.

No public university in California has more seismically unsafe structures than UC Berkeley.

The campus, part of which sits on the active Hayward fault, has 71 occupied buildings that engineers say would sustain significant structural damage and endanger people's lives in a major quake.

Despite an aggressive effort to repair some buildings, UC Berkeley officials sent construction crews to remodel other unsafe buildings without making needed seismic repairs. And they moved offices for retired professors and research labs from a building that was considered low-risk to a structure deemed a higher risk.

The state's public universities have made progress toward protecting safety on campus. The vast majority of buildings are expected to pose only a small risk of causing injuries or deaths in a major quake.

Since 1979, the UC system has spent more than $1 billion shoring up seismically unsafe buildings, according to a university estimate.

The CSU system has spent more than $480 million on seismic projects since 1987, a California Watch analysis of university documents found.

But it has fallen far behind on some buildings, records show. Eighteen years after CSU began cataloguing its seismically dangerous structures, three liberal arts buildings at CSU Long Beach remain unfixed and occupied, posing a risk to the 1,500 students and faculty who pass through their doors on a typical school day.

CSU Long Beach has retrofitted four other buildings that posed high seismic risks. But instead of making repairs to its three liberal arts buildings, the university used state money to build other projects, including $120 million for two new science buildings and $32 million for a library addition.

Universities leave most risky buildings occupied, even though the structures could cause injuries or deaths in the event of a major earthquake. Vacating buildings would mean a decrease in the number of students who can enroll, said Thomas Kennedy, chief of architecture and engineering for the CSU system.  

“You're balancing off a series of competing needs,” Kennedy said. “Is there a risk in driving a car? You bet. But I drive every day. Is there a risk going into some buildings? Yes, there is. If we do that (close the buildings), that means we teach fewer students. Do we want to cut 50,000 students? Or do we want to go forward?”

NO PLANS TO MOVE FASTER ON SEISMIC REPAIRS

Officials say they would like to correct existing structures faster, but they can only afford to do a few projects at a time. The state budget crisis means no new projects proposed since 2009 have received funding.

In the meantime, students and staff are using 28 CSU buildings even though they could collapse in a major earthquake.

An additional 38 occupied CSU structures are less likely to collapse, but would pose serious risk to life because of falling hazards, records show. These include Cal State Fullerton's Titan Gym and several apartment buildings in San Francisco State's University Park North. The apartments were partially retrofitted last year but still have structural problems, records show.

CSU Long Beach has some of the longest-standing seismic dangers of any CSU campus, with four buildings on the hazard list since at least 1994. CSU East Bay, Humboldt State University, Cal Poly Pomona and San Francisco State University have also known about some highly vulnerable buildings for at least a decade.

In the UC system, about 10 structures that could collapse in a big earthquake remain in use. More than 100 other buildings are occupied even though they would pose hazards.

Of the occupied buildings that pose hazards, nine are libraries. One is a UC Berkeley child-care center. Another is the UC Davis Medical Center.

Also at UC Davis, engineers with Rutherford & Chekene in 1998 found flaws in the main reading room of the Peter J. Shields Library, which was built in 1939. Even at night, students gather to study at the library's wooden tables, under the glow of large, hanging lamps.

The engineers predicted that the same 50-foot-high ceiling that makes the reading room bright and cavernous could seriously hurt someone. In a major quake, the ceiling plaster could crack severely, causing pieces to fall, the report said.

It may take years for the university to fix the problem. Construction officials are evaluating how much it will cost — the first step before designing a plan and requesting money for the project.

UNIVERSITIES MUST SEEK SEISMIC SAFETY FUNDS

The UC system adopted a policy in 1975 requiring chancellors to develop plans for fixing buildings that could fail in a major quake. The CSU system created a similar policy in 1993.

But you won't find seismic projects filling up the construction priority list.

That's partly because universities don't actually make seismic safety their number-one concern. They have other construction priorities. They want to build modern labs and accommodate growing enrollment.

“In a perfect world, we'd love to do everything,” said Kennedy, the chief of architecture and engineering for the CSU system.

Even though the CSU system has a method for prioritizing seismically deficient buildings, the most dangerous ones in the system don't always get fixed first.

A 1997 internal audit found the university had repaired some lower-priority structures before the most hazardous buildings.

California Watch found that the pattern has continued. Universities got funding for at least 10 lower-priority seismic projects ahead of other buildings that engineers identified as urgently in need of repairs.  

One that skipped ahead in line was CSU Fullerton's humanities and social sciences building, which ranked 20th on a list of 25 dangerous structures in 1999.

Yet that year, the building got state funding for repairs ahead of the 19 other, riskier structures, such as Humboldt State University's theatre arts building, which was rated seventh on the list.

UC BERKELEY FAILED TO ADDRESS SEISMIC DANGERS

Since 1980, UC Berkeley has spent 58 percent of its state construction funding to strengthen or replace seismically hazardous buildings, according to a California Watch analysis. That's more than $300 million in state money spent on seismic upgrades, not counting other sources of funding.

The campus has now strengthened more than 50 buildings, making UC Berkeley safer in the event of a major quake.

However, over the past several years, the university has also remodeled or upgraded buildings with known seismic dangers without fixing the structural deficiencies.

Edward Denton, the university's vice chancellor of facilities services, said the university generally won't move people to a building that's in worse condition than the building they're in.

But that's exactly what happened in 2005, when the university relocated labs and offices for retired professors from a building that had a low seismic risk to one that was rated a higher risk, according to UC Berkeley documents.

The project took labs and professors out of Davis Hall North, which was being replaced by a new, state-of-the-art headquarters for the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society. They moved into the seismically hazardous Davis Hall South in 2005. UC Berkeley officials could not say how many people were relocated.

Denton defended the move, saying the university made Davis Hall South safer with a partial retrofit in 2004. But he acknowledged that even after that construction project, the building is still rated “poor.”  

California Watch is a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting with offices in the Bay Area and Sacramento. To read a longer version of this story and read other California Watch investigations, click here.