In California, hundreds of Inland Empire buildings face collapse in major earthquake

As California’s fast-growing Inland Empire churns out new housing tracts, the city of Redlands is a throwback to an older, more regal era.

The college town is graced by historic mansions, old orange groves and a vintage downtown that stands in deep contrast to the region’s big-box shopping centers and drive-thru restaurants. The town center is defined by century-old buildings filled with children’s boutiques, bakeries and cafes.

But danger lurks for these brick buildings: As many as 74 in the city are not retrofitted to withstand major earthquakes, putting the public at risk should the bricks start to topple onto sidewalks, cars and pedestrians.

As many as 640 buildings in more than a dozen Inland Empire cities have been marked as dangerous after decades of warnings, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of building and safety records. These cities are far behind coastal regions of California, which have retrofitted thousands of buildings after devastating earthquakes exposed how deadly they can be.

The risks are all the more concerning because the Inland Empire is particularly vulnerable to a major earthquake.

Three of the state’s most dangerous faults – the San Andreas, the San Jacinto and the Cucamonga – intersect in this region east of downtown Los Angeles. The San Andreas alone, an ominous battle line visible from the foothills, is capable of unleashing a devastating magnitude 8 quake.

Any shaking would be amplified by the precarious soil the region is built on – a basin of loose sediment that would rock like a bowl of Jell-O.

The Inland Empire is uniquely unprepared for a major earthquake in large part because its economy has struggled in ways more affluent coastal California has not. City officials and residents say myriad issues weigh on them and seismic safety rarely tops the list.

Antonio Canul, a longtime restaurant owner in San Bernardino, shrugged off the risks and said there was no point in saving the city from an earthquake when it was already in such economic shambles. In the 34 years that he’s lived in the city, Canul said, he’s had more pressing matters to worry about.

“I’m just here to do business, feed people and make a living,” said Canul, who cooks, cleans and serves each day, starting at 6 a.m. in an old brick building downtown. “If you’re gonna die, you’re gonna die. Maybe it’s cancer, maybe it’s an earthquake.”

Then there are the other obstacles: Poor data upkeep. Building chiefs who stick around for only a few years. Little, if any, public pressure. In dozens of interviews and records requests, the Times analysis found a trail of starts and stops by officials in each city to identify and update its lists of old brick buildings. One list dated back 27 years; others were marked by hand or undecipherable.

While Los Angeles, San Francisco and others have charged ahead on retrofitting many types of vulnerable buildings, many here still have not addressed what structural engineers say are the most basic, most dangerous, most unsupported type of building.

California learned the dangers of brick construction when a major earthquake struck Long Beach in 1933, crumbling schools, churches and shops. The quake killed 120 people. These so-called unreinforced masonry buildings, or URMs, are vulnerable because the mortar essentially crumbles apart during shaking, bringing down the roof and walls.

Cities across California now ban this type of construction. URMs that had already been built were mostly left to fate. But as its history of destruction continued – Sylmar in 1971, Loma Prieta in 1989 – a number of cities found the political will to compile lists of addresses and force owners to either demolish or add reinforcement to their brick buildings.

When a magnitude 6.5 earthquake in 2003 struck downtown Paso Robles, the only two people who died were found crushed under an avalanche of bricks outside a historic building. The roof had slid onto the sidewalk, taking the clock tower with it. (The city, which had a retrofit law on the books, had given the owner until 2018 to complete a retrofit.

“They are really dangerous. … Even with moderate earthquakes, we see – all the time – collapse of these structures,” said Benson Shing, a University of San Diego structural engineering professor who has researched the subject extensively. “There’s no spine. You can see the blocks just one on top of another. So when you shake the structure, it will just rock and collapse.”

In Los Angeles, after three decades of chasing down the owners of 8,080 URMs, officials say there are now only three left in the city that still need to be retrofitted or demolished. When the Northridge earthquake struck in 1994, the retrofits saved lives. No one died in a brick building.

“We have to deal with it one way or the other, sooner or later,” said Ramon Hernandez, who became Colton’s building official 18 months ago and has been retracing the steps of his many predecessors. Hernandez drove around the city in December and updated a building list from 1991 in response to a Times inquiry. He said he’s reached out to owners and is trying to find a solution.

Others have thrown up their hands, pointing to the same challenges their cities faced decades ago that are still holding them back.

Forcing owners to retrofit or demolish these buildings just doesn’t make sense in a predominantly working-class region like the Inland Empire, some city officials said. Many treasure their historical character, and a city could be put at an economic disadvantage if neighboring cities don’t enforce the same strict rules.

“The jurisdiction that does not require retrofit can out-compete their neighbor that does require retrofit when attracting new business,” said Mike Gardner, a councilman in Riverside, where the historic Mission Inn and some of its surrounding brick buildings have been retrofitted. The city has as many as 160 URMs left, the most of any city examined by The Times. “There is also a risk that buildings that have not been retrofitted may be abandoned by their owners in economically depressed areas,” Gardner said.

Others shrug at the number of unsafe buildings. They say that many are occupied only for a few hours each day and question whether retrofitting such old buildings – which might save lives but not necessarily the building after an earthquake strikes – is worth the effort. It makes more sense to wait for buildings to be purchased and let the new owners decide whether it’s more cost-effective to tear the buildings down and build anew.

The city of Ontario, on last count, has 42 brick buildings that have not been retrofitted. “That’s not a high number,” building official Kevin Shear said.

Seismologist Lucy Jones, whose work guided L.A. in 2015 to pass the most ambitious seismic safety laws in California history and is now helping dozens of smaller cities do the same, said she understands – but also questions – the economic arguments.

“If you’re going to use an economic argument, you have to ask: What’s the value of human life?” she said. “URMs are the reason you have earthquakes in Iran that kill 60 percent of the population. Most of us don’t have them anymore. And the idea that we do know exactly which buildings are the most dangerous and where the dangers will be … what’s the implication of a decision to not retrofit?”

In San Bernardino, which is directly on top of the San Andreas, officials acknowledged the implications and said it’s time to do something about the risks. Despite the challenges posed by a five-year bankruptcy, a weary working community and spotty records on the oldest properties in town, building officials have tried to push ahead.

“It’s a daunting task. A lot of people don’t understand what a complicated issue it is. People just think, ‘We’ve known that these are high-risk buildings for 25 years, why haven’t cities done anything?’” said Mark Persico, who took over the city’s building and safety staff in 2014. “One of the issues that we’ve had – because there’s been a high turnover in staff as a part of the bankruptcy – is really coming up with a complete list of properties. Because the city has started and stopped this process, I think like many cities have, since the early 1990s.”

By April, Persico and his team had whittled the list down to 89 buildings still in need of retrofit. Many are boarded up and vacant in the city’s downtown.

Tucked in an otherwise desolate stretch of aging brick buildings, Canul’s corner restaurant, along historic Route 66, is one colorful hallmark to what a bustling downtown could be. Steps were taken in the 1990s to retrofit this building, when the city tried a mandatory retrofit law. Facing resistance and limited success, the city repealed the ordinance in 1999 and it is unclear today whether the restaurant retrofit was completed, according to city records and preliminary surveys by Persico and his team.

The current building owner could not be reached for comment.

Inside one recent Wednesday, the lunch rush was lively. More than a dozen tables, along with the bar, were crowded with parents, children, police officers and government workers. An outdoor patio offered more seating along a painted brick wall.

Canul, dismissing the seismic risks, said the city needed to focus on more important problems than telling owners what to do.

“Fix the economy first,” he said. “Create more businesses around here. Create an environment for more people to come. If they do, small businesses like this are going to have money to rebuild these old buildings.”

Persico has held community meetings to bridge this disagreement, broaching the idea of reviving a mandatory retrofit ordinance. Forcing building owners – most of them mom-and-pop business owners – to spend tens of thousands of dollars to retrofit was, and still is, unrealistic, Persico said. Unlike in Los Angeles, real estate values are so low that even taking out a commercial loan for a retrofit would be difficult.

The cost of retrofitting a brick building – which can involve using steel braces, rods and beams to hold up the bricks in a way that keeps them from coming apart during shaking – could cost an owner $30,000 to more than $100,000.

Within the next year, Persico hopes to secure some form of grant to help owners pay for part of the architectural or engineering cost of retrofitting.

A few neighboring cities – both wealthy and working-class – have overcome the economic resistance. After a magnitude 5.2 earthquake that damaged numerous brick buildings, Claremont in 1991 mandated that all 33 of its URMs be retrofitted or demolished. Rancho Cucamonga passed a law that year forcing owners of URMs to retrofit or demolish within three years of notification.

By 2006, the city was down to 22 brick buildings that were not retrofitted. Today, one – fenced off and red-tagged – remains.

In Chino, building officials in 1988 identified about 30 unsafe buildings and chipped away at the issue. Using redevelopment money, the city purchased a number of brick buildings in downtown, demolished them and turned the empty lots into a community park and a senior living complex.

The lack of institutional memory in many of these cities is a major problem. Building officials tend to come and go, handing off old notes and addresses from one to another like a baton with no finish line. Yucaipa’s building official is also the top building official for another city, and the interim chief for a third.

In Redlands, Corrie Kates has been coming in twice a week as the city’s latest building official. A third-party contractor, he replaces the former full-time building chief, who left last year.

Some of the brick buildings downtown have been retrofitted, Kates said, and any owner who wants to make significant renovations would be required to include a seismic update. But the reason so many buildings are not retrofitted is simple.

“The owners don’t have the money to retrofit them, and there’s no funding out there to help,” he said. “If there were public funds available, then cities would go make an effort to promote people to retrofit.”

Kates said it was useful for the city to have this list of 74 addresses, last updated 13 years ago, that are considered hazardous.

If the alarm bells start ringing and the ground starts shaking, he said, fire and rescue officials will know where to check first.