Los Angeles Times - 05.03.2020

LATIMES.COM WST THURSDAY, MARCH 5, 2020A

has been working on the re-
port for five years. “We have
a seismic source here, run-
ning through downtown.”
Particularly troubling is
that for many decades the
San Diego area was built to
lower seismic standards
than the ones applied to L.A.
or San Francisco, based on
the belief that San Diego had
a lower seismic risk.
It was only after the dis-
covery of the Rose Canyon
fault’s activity that the min-
imum building codes for this
region were raised to Seis-
mic Zone 4, the highest level
and the same as that of Los
Angeles and San Francisco,
said Heidi Tremayne, execu-
tive director of the Earth-
quake Engineering Re-
search Institute, a nonprofit
based in Oakland.
“Many older, more seis-
mically vulnerable buildings
constructed before modern
seismic design provisions
were in place, including sev-
eral key City of San Diego fa-
cilities, may be severely
damaged with multiple old-
er buildings potentially suf-
fering partial to total col-
lapse,” the report said. It did
not specify which buildings.
There could be many
deaths, as the San Diego re-
gion has relatively weak lo-
cal laws requiring retrofits of
vulnerable buildings com-
pared with cities like Los An-
geles and Santa Monica. The
San Diego region is esti-
mated to have thousands of
apartment buildings with
flimsy ground floors, hun-
dreds of potentially brittle
concrete buildings that can
be particularly deadly if they
collapse, and scores of pos-
sibly vulnerable steel-frame
office and hotel buildings.
None of the buildings de-
scribed above are required
to be retrofitted in the city.
And for another particularly
deadly class of buildings, old
brick buildings, San Diego
required only limited partial
retrofits, the report says.
The authors expressed
great concern that the col-
lapse or damage of these old
brick buildings — which
have been ordered retrofit-
ted or demolished in other
cities like L.A. — would dra-
matically worsen emergency

response. Several hundred

of them are believed to re-

main in places like down-

town San Diego, National

City, Chula Vista, El Cajon,

Solana Beach, Encinitas,

Oceanside and unincorpo-

rated areas of the county.

Many of San Diego’s civic

institutions may end up be-

ing crippled, including po-

lice and fire stations and city

offices, as first responders

are called to perhaps hun-

dreds of fires. The research-

ers estimate that nearly half

of county schools and hospi-

tals could be running at par-

tial capacity for days.

Military facilities around

San Diego Bay would suffer

from severe ground shaking

and liquefaction. And more

than 100,000 residential

structures could be dam-

aged — many of them apart-

ments — worsening the af-

fordable housing crisis.

And with land on the

western side of the fault

lurching to the northwest

relative to the eastern side,

many pipelines, cables,

bridges and railroads could

be severed or otherwise dis-

rupted. Water, wastewater

and gas lines serving areas

west of the fault, from La

Jolla through Coronado,

could be cut off for months

after the quake. Coronado

firefighters could find them-

selves without functioning

water pumps to fight fires.

San Diego International

Airport could find itself

hamstrung as land under-

neath it acts like quicksand

when shaken, damaging the

runway, taxiways and build-

ings. A western section of the

fault passes directly under

the runway, and a quake

would render it temporarily

inoperative.

Gas line breaks and a loss

of water pressure would

make firefighting even more

difficult.

And although the Co-

ronado Bridge has been

retrofitted to withstand col-

lapse, experts said they ex-

pect land on one side of the

fault to lurch two to three

feet from the other side.

Damage could render the

bridge unusable for weeks,

months or possibly years.

For decades, there had

been no scientific work done

demonstrating the Rose

Canyon fault was active.

Then, in 1985, the first hint

appeared during an excava-

tion at Broadway and 14th

Street, where a section of the

active fault was discovered,

said Tom Rockwell, profes-

sor of geology at San Diego

State.

The big discovery came

in 1990, when trenches were

dug across the fault in Rose

Canyon. It showed the land

on the western side of the

fault had lurched to the

northwest 30 feet over vari-

ous earthquakes in the last

8,000 years, convincing evi-

dence that the fault was

alive, Rockwell said.

Today, it’s believed the

Rose Canyon fault ruptures

in a big earthquake of some-

thing approaching a magni-

tude 7 about every 700 years

— give or take 400 years or

so. The last such major

quake is believed to have

happened between 1700 and

1750, Rockwell said, before

the Spanish founded their

first California mission in

San Diego in 1769.

Between those big

quakes, quakes in the range

of magnitude 6 can strike.

Such a quake ruptured on

the fault right through Old

Town in 1862, causing what

the Los Angeles Star de-

clared the “Day of Terror” in

San Diego, Rockwell said.

Today, it’s known that

the Rose Canyon fault is ac-

tually the southern contin-

uation of the Newport-Ingle-

wood fault, which caused

Southern California’s dead-

liest earthquake on record,

the magnitude 6.4 Long

Beach earthquake of 1933

that killed 120 people.

Without a major change

in San Diego’s psyche about

earthquakes, the city could

end up facing the fate of the

city of Christchurch, New

Zealand.

Many people in

Christchurch also thought

of themselves as relatively

safe from earthquakes, so

when a magnitude 6.3 quake

ruptured under the city in

2011, the damage was cata-

strophic: The central busi-

ness district downtown was

left in ruins and 185 people

died, mostly from the col-

lapse of unretrofitted brick

buildings and two brittle

concrete buildings.

“Having spent a decade

working down there and

knowing how people felt

about the risk before and

now, this is still such a shock

to them,” said Laurie John-

son, president of the re-

search institute and an ur-

ban planner.

San Diego can avoid this

future if there’s a concerted

regional effort to retrofit vul-

nerable buildings and infra-

structure before such a

quake hits. The authors rec-

ommend a committee of gov-

ernment officials, earth-

quake experts, utilities and

others to identify county

seismic hazards and suggest

actions.

“Without that advanced

mitigation work, we are wor-

ried it could jeopardize the

economic vibrancy of the re-

gion,” Tremayne said.

Strengthening the region

against quakes is part of

the bargain of living in San

Diego.

“We owe a lot of the

beauty of San Diego to the

Rose Canyon fault,” from

the fault pushing up Mt. Sol-

edad by La Jolla to the cre-

ation of the bays of San Di-

ego, Rockwell said, enabling

it to be the principal home

port of the Navy’s Pacific

Fleet.

“If we did not have the

Rose Canyon fault, then we

would look like Oceanside.

It’d be a long, linear coast-

line with not much going

on,” Rockwell said. “Because

the fault line comes on shore

in San Diego, it produces the

topography that makes San

Diego unique.”

At a panel discussion af-

ter the release of the report,

Ali Fattah, senior research

engineer for the city of San

Diego, said there would be

challenges in strengthening

vulnerable buildings.

“It’s easy to get rules out

there,” Fattah said, but the

city doesn’t have the re-

sources right now to create

an inventory of vulnerable

buildings. He also suspects

residents will be opposed to

the city imposing strength-

ening requirements on old

buildings.

San Diego faces major quake threat

SAN DIEGOcould see 120,000 buildings damaged and over $40 billion in losses from a quake, a study says.

George RoseGetty Images

[San Diego,from A1]

WASHINGTON — The
Supreme Court heard its
first abortion case with
President Trump’s two new
conservative appointees on
Wednesday, but the conser-
vative justices sounded as
though they might move
cautiously rather than issue
a broad ruling on the issue.
The justices focused
their questions on how spe-
cifically a Louisiana law re-
quiring doctors who per-
form abortions to have hos-
pital admitting privileges
would affect women and
clinics that perform the pro-
cedure.
Four years ago, the court
by a 5-3 vote struck down a
nearly identical law in Texas.
“This case is about this
court’s respect for prece-
dent,” Julie Rikelman, a law-
yer for the Center for Repro-
ductive Rights, told the jus-
tices. If the state’s law took
effect, “it would leave Louisi-
ana with just one clinic and
one doctor providing abor-
tions,” she said. And it
“would do nothing for wom-
en’s health.”
But Chief Justice John G.
Roberts Jr. and Justice
Brett M. Kavanaugh, who
likely hold the deciding
votes, suggested that prece-
dent alone would not deter-
mine the outcome.
Roberts said the facts of
each case may differ, and
therefore “the results would
be different in different
states.”
Even though the high
court had struck down the
similar Texas law as uncon-
stitutional, the U.S. 5th Cir-
cuit Court of Appeals in New
Orleans upheld the Louisi-
ana law on the grounds
that the admitting-privi-
leges rule would have less ef-
fect in Louisiana.
Kavanaugh agreed with
Roberts, saying the issue
was not simply whether ad-
mitting privileges by them-
selves are improper, but
whether they impose an un-
due burden.
If, for example, all doc-
tors in a state obtained ad-
mitting privileges, would a
requirement on abortion

providers still be unconsti-

tutional, he asked. “Could

you say that the law still im-

poses an undue burden,

even if there is no effect?”

Rikelman conceded that

would be a harder case to

win. She stressed, however,

the admitting-privileges

rule “has no medical ben-

efits whatsoever.”

It extends to doctors who

do no surgery but simply dis-

pense pills that induce an

abortion, she said. And its

impact in Louisiana “would

be severe. It would leave only

one physician to serve 10,

people per year in the entire

state.”

Roberts also pressed

Elizabeth Murrill, Louisi-

ana’s solicitor general, on

the rule’s supposed benefits.

In 2016, the court decided

that the admitting-privi-

leges rule in Texas provided

no or minimal benefit to

women. Roberts suggested

that health benefits of ad-

mitting privileges would be

the same for Louisiana.

“The impact might be dif-

ferent in different places,”

Roberts said, “but as far as

the benefits of the law, that’s

going to be the same in each

state, isn’t it?”

Murrill disagreed and

tried to argue the benefits of

the law, but she ran into

skeptical questions from the

court’s liberals, led by Jus-

tices Sonia Sotomayor and

Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

They pointed to the diffi-

culties abortions providers

have encountered in obtain-

ing privileges in many cases.

They noted, for example,

that some doctors had ob-

tained privileges at a hospi-

tal in New Orleans or a medi-

cal center in Baton Rouge,

but could not do the same in

the Shreveport area, where

the Hope Medical Group is

the only provider of abor-

tions.

In his comments, Rob-

erts suggested the court

must weigh the benefits and

burdens of the Louisiana law

and decide then whether it

would put an undue burden

on abortion rights.

This could lead to a rela-

tively narrow ruling in the

case of June Medical Serv-

ices vs. Russo.

High court weighs

new abortion case

By David G. Savage

Welcome to Freedom