Some Poor Seismic Ratings for UCI

While the newer UC Irvine campus would emerge from a major earthquake in far better shape than UCLA, nearly a fifth of its building space was rated “poor” or “very poor” in terms of seismic safety by a 1978 state-commissioned survey.

Buildings with those ratings, according to the study performed by H.J. Degenkolb & Associates, would pose “appreciable” and “high” life hazards in the event of a large earthquake.

No Specific Listings

The study did not include a list of the buildings and how they were classified, but did list--in total square footage--how much of the campus was good, fair, poor or very poor. “We specifically did not list the buildings,” said Loring Wyllie, the structural engineer who performed the survey. “We looked at hundreds of buildings so quickly--listing the buildings would get people excited needlessly.”

Wyllie said the structural strengths and weaknesses of each building were not examined in any great detail. Instead, engineers used a “crude technique” of predicting each building’s “seismic performance” by looking at how buildings with similar architectural and structural characteristics had fared in major earthquakes.

But the 1978 survey, and a second Degenkolb study in 1981 that incorporated factors such as building uses and reconstruction costs, are the basis for a University of California priority list of hundreds of buildings that it wants to bring up to current seismic codes. The highest-ranked Irvine building, the Crawford Hall gymnasium, is 23rd on the list, said David Newman, the director of physical planning and campus architect.

The building’s relatively high ranking, however, does not necessarily mean it is structurally unsafe, Newman said.

“All of our buildings are built to current code,” he said. Crawford Hall, built in 1965, needs additional lateral bracing and improved exterior panel attachments to bring it into code compliance, he said.

Requests Submitted

A new events center under construction should be completed by late 1986, Newman said, and it will handle many activities that now take place in Crawford. Funding requests for seismic renovation of Crawford have also been submitted. But at No. 23, the gymnasium may have to wait for structural surgery: So far, reconstruction funds have not stretched past the top four buildings on the statewide system’s master list.