Eugene weekly., August 08, 2013, Page 13, Image 13

including upgrades like bracing entrances and anchoring
brick mortar to prevent it from falling down on people as
they exit the building. The priority one upgrades are all
complete, and Brantley says the district has no plans to
further retrofi t its buildings, unless it makes sense to do so
during remodeling for other purposes.
Brantley says after DOGAMI released the high risk
ratings for six 4J schools, he had structural engineer Scott
Metzler evaluate the buildings in greater depth, and according
to his work, they all fell into the moderate category of risk,
although Edison Elementary is on the high end of moderate
risk. The school, built in 1926, is one of the district’s oldest
buildings, and a rating of moderate risk in the evaluation
system used by the needs assessment indicates that the
building has between a 1 and 10 percent chance of collapse.
“They’re better than DOGAMI thought,” Metzler says.
“It’s almost impossible to bring older buildings to current
codes. The goal is to keep the building standing up until the
students get out.” He adds, “If we had a Cascadia Subduction
Zone earthquake, I really can’t say what the outcome would
be. All I can say is we did the best we could, given the
constraints of cost and the current understanding of how
earthquakes perform. Something is better than nothing.”
While the older schools have received seismic updates,
they are not to Cascadia-level mega-earthquake standards.
Because these retrofi ts started in the mid ’90s, they are not
necessarily in compliance with the most recent building
codes. “We don’t go back after the code changes because
that’s really expensive and disruptive,” Brantley says. “We
feel like we’ve done the priority one work, and we’ve done
as much as we’re going to do of that.”
Many of 4J’s schools are aging and were built before
1971, when Oregon established its fi rst statewide building
code. While the most recently built schools are up to
modern seismic standards, including Cal Young Middle
School, Madison Middle School, Bertha Holt Elementary
and César E. Chávez Elementary, the older schools are
more diffi cult to fi x. “We did what was recommended by
structural engineers at the time, but you can’t bring these
old buildings up to new standards,” Brantley says. “It
wouldn’t be practical to do that.”
He says, “We were looking at bracing things and getting
people out of the door safely in the event of a moderate
earthquake. We can’t get there in the event of a 9.0.”
In 2005, the same legislation that required DOGAMI
to perform the needs assessment also required that
Oregon set up the Seismic Rehabilitation Grant Program,
a “competitive grant program that provides funding for
the seismic rehabilitation of critical public buildings,
particularly public schools and emergency services
facilities,” according to the program’s website. So far, the
program has funded earthquake retrofi tting for 16 Oregon
school buildings, with eight more buildings in progress.
Kiri Carini, grant coordinator for the program, says that the
retrofi ts bring old buildings up to current American Society
of Civil Engineers life safety standards, which factor in the
risk of a Cascadia-level earthquake.
Legislation that passed during the most recent session
allocated $15 million for seismic upgrades to public schools.
Carini says that any public K-12 school, community college
or university can apply for grant money.
The Springfi eld School District recently received a
$255,549 grant from the grant program to retrofi t Walterville
Elementary School, which was built in 1952 and had a
rating of “very high risk” in the DOGAMI study. Devon
Ashbridge, communications specialist for the Springfi eld
School District, says the district received the grant after
applying twice, and part of the application process involved
a $4,500 structural evaluation by an engineering fi rm in
order to craft a successful retrofi tting plan.
Without the grant, Ashbridge says, “We would not have
been able to undertake this project. The grant allows us to
do something that is outside the scope of what we would
ordinarily be able to do, and that’s true of most schools in
the state. For our district, that’s meant a huge decrease in the
funding we have available for maintenance of our buildings,
and we have a very restricted amount of money available
for funds. That’s why we actively pursue grants like this —
because we believe this work to be very important.”
Schools in the 4J School District have not received
any seismic rehabilitation grants because the district is not
applying for them. Brantley says he attended a seminar
training session in Salem and decided that the cost of
evaluating school buildings as part of the application
process was too great.
“Even the simplest evaluations can cost $5,000, and it can
get up to $30,000 for a fairly complex building,” Brantley
says. “South Eugene High School is on pilings built over
swampland, and that $30,000 may not have gotten us there.
And you might get funded, and you might not get funded.
What happens if we get an asbestos surprise? There are no
increases to your grant. We’ve got bond funds; we’re just
going to continue doing our own bond program.”
Carini says that evaluation costs can vary depending
on the complexity of the building, but the grant program
asks only for a preliminary assessment, a likely cost being
between $5,000 and $10,000. “We have applications
come in where schools have invested in a more robust
engineering assessment, but that’s their choice,” she says.
Considering that the grant money provides hundreds of
thousands of dollars for seismic retrofi tting and turns “high
risk” schools into “low risk” schools, investing money in
an engineering evaluation seems a comparatively small
price to pay. Kim Lippert, a public information offi cer for
the Oregon Offi ce of Emergency Management, says that
while no amount of retrofi tting can completely guarantee
a building’s resilience in the event of a high magnitude
earthquake, the retrofi ts make unsafe schools much safer.
For engineers like Wang, it’s all about protecting Oregon’s
infrastructure and, more importantly, its people. “The goal is
to get something done slowly but surely so it’s not that painful
when we divert a small percentage of our funds to improve
things,” Wang says of the statewide mission to prepare
Oregon schools for a major earthquake. “After it happens, we
will defi nitely wish that we did more. I’ve seen it all around
the world. No one ever expects it; it’s always a surprise. But
those who prepare well recover more quickly.” ■
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