City Hall will get seismic upgrade

FEMA will cover half of $6- to $7-million cost of bringing building up to code; project will not disrupt city business.Officials are planning a $6- to $7-million earthquake retrofit of City Hall.

Half the money will come from a grant provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, City Administrator Penny Culbreth-Graft said, while the city will pick up the other half of the bill. The 1970s-era building needs an upgrade to help it to survive a major earthquake along the Newport-Inglewood fault line, a recent independent analysis discovered.

Culbreth-Graft said the work would be a major project, but she doesn’t expect it to cause major disruptions of city business. All departments would continue to operate, she said.

City leaders said that the building was built to the standards of its time and has survived several smaller quakes, but it could be a danger to city employees if a major quake hits Southern California.

A seismic upgrade would boost the chances of city employees escaping the facility after a big quake, the report found, but the building itself would likely still be unsalvageable. Retrofitting the building to a higher standard would be prohibitively expensive.

“The associated costs would be tantamount to constructing a similar new building,” the report said.

City Hall’s biggest structural problem are its columns; the building’s frame doesn’t meet recent earthquake standards that require columns to move with a quake. If the columns are too tight, they can become brittle and crumble during a catastrophic event, destroying a major support system. The columns above the third floor are particularly weak, the report said, leaving the planning department most vulnerable.

The consultants are recommending a number of fixes to bring City Hall to current earthquake standards, including reinforcing weak elements of the building with steel beams.

Culbreth-Graft said her staff will begin looking for ways to fund the project and match the $3-million grant from FEMA.

“That will be something in the next couple of months we will be addressing with the City Council,” she said.