Earthquakes don’t heed the legislative boundaries that define a city’s limits. That’s why, many property owners not bound by any safety ordinance are taking action and having their buildings retrofitted anyway – not because of the law, but because it’s the right thing to do. In Glendale and many other cities, there is a [...]
News accounts of the Northridge earthquake of 1994 presented shocking images of the widespread destruction, the loss of life, and the injuries suffered from the 6.7 magnitude blind-reverse-thrust quake, which produced the largest ground motions ever recorded in an urban environment in the U.S. Fifty-seven people were killed; more than 40,000 structures damaged. The quake [...]
Building practices in Chile and Nepal underscore the importance of retrofits to withstand seismic activity Every month of every year, an average of as many as 10 major quakes between a magnitude 6.0 and 6.9 strike somewhere on our planet, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The level of destruction resulting from this seismic activity [...]
Anyone who lives in California knows that our state’s calamitous reputation for earthquakes is fueled by the intricate web of volatile fault lines that crisscross our landscape. The closer you are to the convergence of two tectonic plates, the more likely you are to be impacted by seismic activity. Here in Southern California, the junction [...]
Earthquakes are not selective about where and when they strike, and they are equally as indiscriminate on the types of buildings they can rattle to the ground. While it is true that some structures may be more prone to damage than others, the reality is that virtually all buildings have the capacity to fail [...]
Prompting ‘New Frontier’ for Earthquake Safety The Los Angeles Times recently proclaimed the start of a “New Frontier” for earthquake safety: a phenomenon kicked off by the city of Santa Monica, which this month is expected to adopt the most comprehensive seismic retrofit ordinance in the nation. Santa Monica’s law is much more comprehensive [...]
Insurance of Older Buildings Made Easier with Earthquake Retrofits Last fall marked a brief period of heightened anxiety for us here in Southern California, when scientists announced that a swarm of seismic activity at the Salton Sea dramatically increased the risk of a major quake along the San Andreas fault. Newspaper headlines and radio [...]
Last month marked the five-year anniversary of the devastating Tohoku earthquake that struck off the coast of Japan, causing more than 18,000 deaths, $300 billion in damage and a devastating tsunami that set off the worst atomic crisis since Chernobyl in 1986. Coastal communities were flattened – more than 400,000 buildings collapsed and another [...]
