Schools’ High Density Areas Hardest Hit

More than half the Los Angeles schools that flunked their safety tests and will remain closed today suffered significant earthquake damage to cafeterias or other places where large numbers of students tend to gather, inspection reports disclosed Monday.

Of the 76 schools deemed uninhabitable, at least 56 were found to have unusable cafeterias because of structural damage or other problems, such as natural gas leaks, according to reports compiled by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Officials said much of the damage occurred in kitchens rather than in student eating areas.

At 23 campuses, auditoriums were found unusable, and at eight schools the main offices were rendered useless by last week’s 6.6-magnitude earthquake.

Eight schools in the hardest-hit sections of the San Fernando Valley will remain closed indefinitely, officials said.

Despite the damage suffered by schools throughout the city, state and district officials said that the buildings fared well overall during the temblor and that much of the damage was cosmetic. Even the cafeterias and buildings considered unusable did not collapse and may have been relatively safe had they been occupied during the quake, said Bonnie James, the district’s director of building design and construction.

“ ‘Unusable’ does not mean ‘unsafe,’ ” said James, who stressed that district officials have not completed their analysis of damaged structures. “We have cracked walls, (fallen) plaster, fallen ceiling tiles. We have buckled floors, broken windows, damaged ceilings (and damaged) air-conditioning vents.

“(But) all of our buildings are standing. To our knowledge--and we have not had any structural engineers say differently--we have had no buildings fail to the point where students would not have been (safe).”

James said officials know of no classrooms or buildings where heavy sections of ceiling fell, although in some cases light fixtures dropped and gas lines broke.

Inspection reports showed that at many schools, portable classrooms shifted off their foundations during the quake. In several instances, damage was reported to the supports of arcades that provide cover for outdoor eating areas and shade over walkways. Gas and heating problems were found more than half the schools that remain closed.

Architect Gary McGavin, a member of the California Seismic Safety Commission, visited more than a dozen of the damaged school sites in the Valley and concluded that in some locations, poorly maintained arcades could have injured or killed students. McGavin said heavy ovens and other unsecured equipment tended to bounce around cafeteria kitchens, ripping gas and utility lines.

Even as teams of building engineers, architects and inspectors continued to go from site to site, state officials raised questions about whether all the schools could be repaired and returned to use. “By far the majority (of the known damage) is non-structural,” said Joe McRonald, who is coordinating a damage evaluation for the state architect’s office. “Most likely (the buildings) can be cleaned up and reused.”

But a few schools suffered “very serious damage,” he said. Officials said eight schools near the Northridge epicenter would remain closed indefinitely.

Inspection reports obtained Monday identified 102 unusable classrooms at El Camino Real High School in Woodland Hills, where the auditorium and cafeteria were declared unfit for use.

At Kennedy High School in Granada Hills, 100 classrooms were found unusable. The auditorium, cafeteria and main office all were uninhabitable.

Nearby Van Gogh Street Elementary School, also in Granada Hills, fared no better. “Entire site structurally unsafe,” a report noted.

Two other Granada Hills campuses suffered substantial damage: Robert Frost Middle School and Danube Avenue Elementary School. Ernest Lawrence Middle School in Chatsworth lost the use of its auditorium, cafeteria and 34 classrooms. Castlebay Lane Elementary School in Northridge lost the use of its cafeteria.

Northridge Middle School lost the use of 50 classrooms.

Other schools that are closed today may reopen later this week or soon afterward, officials said. Overall, more than half of the district’s 640 campuses were virtually unscathed by the quake, and some were only partially unusable. District officials scrambled throughout the past week to allow students to return to many campuses this morning.

Understanding the full scope of the temblor’s impact on schools may take time, McRonald said. He stressed that it is too early to say whether the destruction will force changes in California building codes for schools--more stringent than the structural standards for virtually any other type of building.

At this time, he said, “everyone feels comfortable with the standards.”

Duwayne Brooks, director of school facilities planning for the state Department of Education, agreed. “There were (no buildings) that absolutely collapsed and every district has said the same thing,” she said. “The Field Act works.”

The Field Act, enacted in 1933, was one of the first responses to the devastating 1933 Long Beach quake, in which a number of school buildings were seriously damaged. Named after Southern California Assemblyman C. Don Field, the measure initially applied only to new school construction. It was not until the 1960s that state law required older schools to be brought up to modern seismic standards.

“The Field Act virtually stopped the construction of unreinforced masonry schools and that in and of itself was a tremendous improvement,” said L. Thomas Tobin, executive director of the state Seismic Safety Commission.

Over the years, often as a result of damage left by a major quake, school standards have been upgraded.

“The vast majority of California schools are our safest buildings,” Tobin said. “There are some that are not so safe.”

After the 1989 Loma Prieta quake, a number of school districts re-examined buildings, especially those built close to major faults, and some districts shut down selected facilities.

But a measure to require the state architect’s office to do a systematic review of buildings constructed before the 1970s died in the Legislature. So it has been left to each district to look at its own buildings and take whatever corrective action is necessary.

The nature of last week’s quake, particularly the unexpectedly strong vertical thrusts, caused some engineers to question the adequacy of the Field Act.

“Most of the Field Act was designed to deal with the majority of quakes, which are horizontal,” said the state Department of Education’s Henry Heydt. “One of the questions is whether (the vertical movement standards) need to be upgraded.”

Sen. Leroy Greene (D-Carmichael), a civil engineer, is promising hearings to review school building standards.

Greene said it is not possible to build an earthquake-proof building. “There is no perfection in design in terms of resisting earthquakes,” he said.

And even if weaknesses in building codes are uncovered, Greene said a major obstacle to upgrading schools still remains: lack of money.

Providing new schools to house an additional 150,000 to 190,000 students a year in the state and replacing older buildings will cost $2.5 billion a year, Greene said. The lawmaker is carrying bills to ask voters to approve $2 billion in school construction bonds this year.

But to upgrade schools to the highest earthquake-resistance standards will take even more, Greene said. “You can’t just fix things that are broken,” he said. “That just gets you back to where you are. If the same thing happened again, you’d get the same result. What we want is to improve our knowledge and improve our preparation for an earthquake.”

Times staff writers Jeffrey L. Rabin, Ted Rohrlich and Richard Simon contributed to this story.