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Article below is from signonsandiego.com
Evaluation system developed by FEMA
By Keith Darcé
STAFF WRITER
August 23, 2008
The good news for Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla is that its deadline for retrofitting or replacing one building to meet California's earthquake rules has been pushed back from 2013 to 2030.
The bad news is that five of its other buildings, including one of the main patient towers, have failed to earn the same reprieve.
For the past eight months, state regulators have been using a complex computer program to determine whether hospitals previously tagged as being vulnerable to collapse in a strong temblor are actually safe enough to leave alone for 17 more years.
Health providers have until July 1 to request the reassessments. Nine hospitals in San Diego County have filed for the review.
Besides the Scripps Memorial structure, only one other in the region has been cleared by the program – a building that houses the main intensive-care unit at Scripps Mercy Hospital in Hillcrest.
Statewide, hospital operators have sought re-examinations for 281 buildings, or about 25 percent of the 1,100 structures designated for retrofit or replacement by 2013.
All of the buildings were constructed before 1973, when the state rolled out stricter building standards.
The efforts to fortify or replace California's oldest hospitals are being driven by concerns that hundreds of patients and staffers could die if a medical center collapses in an earthquake. It's also important that the buildings remain standing so medical workers can use them to help care for quake victims.
The new evaluation system, known as HAZUS, was developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the 1990s to predict damage caused by earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters.
California's Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development is using a version of the program that was customized to evaluate medical structures.
Unlike the state office's earlier earthquake modeling system, which largely evaluated the structural integrity of a building, HAZUS factors in the proximity of active faults and the stability of underlying ground.
Reclassification doesn't take a hospital off the hook completely. Some interior work, such as reinforcing utility-pipe mountings that could give way during a strong temblor, still must be completed by 2013.
When state regulators adopted HAZUS in November, they predicted the program would rate at least 600 hospital buildings as safe enough to leave standing until 2030.
Postponing major construction on those buildings would save $4.6 billion, according to hospital industry officials who lobbied the state to adopt the new evaluation system.
So far, HAZUS hasn't produced any surprises.
“As we're going through it, the number of buildings that are turning out to be eligible for an upgrade is around what we anticipated – 60 percent,” said John Gillengerten, deputy director of the facilities development division for the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development.
Buildings that have received a deadline extension tend to be one-or two-story, wood-framed structures that are at least 40 miles from active faults, Gillengerten said.
Officials for Scripps Health, the hospital network that operates Scripps Memorial and Scripps Mercy, knew their reassessment application for most of the La Jolla hospital's buildings was a long shot, given the campus's proximity to the Rose Canyon fault.
They will move forward with retrofitting the structures that HAZUS didn't reclassify, Scripps Health spokesman Don Stanziano said. “It doesn't change our plans much,” he added.
Keith Darce: (619) 293-1020; keith.darce@uniontrib.com
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photo by EDUARDO CONTRERAS / Union-Tribune
A masonry saw is used by ETC's team to cut a sample from a building at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla to be submitted for seismic testing.
Photo by EDUARDO CONTRERAS / Union-Tribune
This "core sample" of concrete was taken from an elevator shaft in one of the buildings at the La Jolla hospital.
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