GILROY
– If an earthquake shook this city the way one shook Paso Robles
on Dec. 22, unreinforced brickwork in any of 27 active downtown
businesses could crumble, injuring or killing people the way a
historic clock tower killed two women in Paso Robles.
GILROY – If an earthquake shook this city the way one shook Paso Robles on Dec. 22, unreinforced brickwork in any of 27 active downtown businesses could crumble, injuring or killing people the way a historic clock tower killed two women in Paso Robles.
It’s not illegal to run a business in a building with unreinforced masonry in Gilroy, and there’s no immediate call to action among city building officials – especially since a quake in Iran on Friday made it clear how quake-proof California construction already is. Iran’s seismic rumbling, which registered 6.6 on the Richter scale, killed tens of thousands of people. California’s, which rated 6.5, killed two.
“Certainly there was a tragedy in Paso Robles, but the magnitude of the tragedy was far less than the one in Iran,” city Fire Marshal Jackie Bretschneider said Monday. “(The difference) is purely construction standards. … I think people sort of forget about that.”
“Granted, there are buildings (here) that pose dangers, but those dangers are a whole lot less dangerous than in the rest of the world,” city Building Department head Jim Fruit said.
Unreinforced brick supports make for a “higher statistical probability of people getting injured” in an earthquake, Fruit said. The danger is that sections of the brickwork are more likely to crumble and fall on people, but there are too many variables to predict whether unreinforced brick buildings are any more likely to collapse totally. Deteriorating materials in non-brick older buildings can make them just as likely to collapse as brick ones, according to Fruit.
“In Los Gatos (in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake), we had a wood building collapse next to a brick building that didn’t,” Fruit said.
The high cost of reinforcing an old brick store – plus the lost revenue from closing the shop during construction – makes it unaffordable for many business owners struggling to repay loans or eke out a profit.
Mike Brownfield owns the 7459-7463 Monterey St. commercial building that houses his own Vacuum Center, the Head Trip Hair Salon and the office of Robbins & Strunk, Attorneys at Law. The Central Coast earthquake last week, like the 1989 quake, reminded him of how much he wants to reinforce his stucco-covered brick structure, but he can’t afford to close his store for upwards of a year to do it himself.
“Where would I go?” Brownfield asked. “I have bills to pay.”
Brownfield said he wants to look into programs that could help him retrofit his building, built in 1900, but the city has no such programs. Federal Housing and Community Development block grants could have been used for zero-interest loans for earthquake reinforcement, but city officials chose instead to spend those monies on housing programs and replacing sidewalks and medians in part of downtown, according to city Administrative Services Director Michael Dorn.
Brick construction was common in California in the first half of the 20th century and was still used until 1973, when the state required all new commercial structures to have more earthquake-proof structural supports, such as steel or wood beams or concrete-block walls. Houses were not included.
The Gilroy City Council has never required owners to retrofit their buildings to the 1973 standards, but a 1986 state law required all owners of unreinforced brick commercial buildings to report them to local building officials by Jan. 1, 1990.
The Loma Prieta earthquake hit three months before this deadline, on Oct. 17, 1989, killing at least 62 people in the Bay Area and doing $7 billion to $10 billion in damage. Gilroy’s Old City Hall, at 7400 Monterey St., and the Hall’s store (now Ruby’s Fashions and Shoes) across the street at 7401 sustained significant damage.
Meanwhile, Gilroy’s list of commercial buildings with unreinforced masonry came in at 41 addresses, all of them downtown. Of these, four were retrofitted to meet the 1973 standards between 1990 and 1995, according to the city Building Department:
• Old City Hall
• Porcella’s Music, 7357 Monterey St.
• 55 Fifth St., most recently home to the Station 55 restaurant
• 7598 Monterey St., now demolished.
Other buildings may have been retrofitted since 1995 but didn’t make it to the city’s list, which has not been updated since that year due to departmental reorganization, according to Fruit.
Inside Porcella’s Music, 11-year-old vertical steel beams are readily visible against the restored brick wall they support. Owner Dave Porcella, whose grandfather opened the store about a century ago, happily pointed out the back and front walls and ceiling of the store that were replaced during a $180,000 renovation binge that closed his store for nine months more than a decade ago. It was all made possible by a 4-percent loan from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the federal Small Business Administration.
On the day of the Loma Prieta quake, Porcella was giving a piano lesson against the back wall of his store – once made of brick but now of steel-reinforced cinderblocks. The wall shifted to the point where it was leaning noticeably inward.
“It almost collapsed,” Porcella said of the wall. “It almost went on top of me.”
Not all business owners got the same loan package as Porcella. Brownfield said he applied for a $150,000 FEMA loan and was offered $15,000 – too little for him to work with.
“They said (the damage) wasn’t bad enough,” Brownfield said.
The city only requires unreinforced brick building owners to retrofit if they apply for a permit to intensify the building’s use – i.e., change to a business plan that would bring in more people, such as switching a retail store into a night club or movie theater.
