Are Local Schools Safe in Earthquakes?

As a 19-month California Watch investigation uncovered holes in the state's enforcement of seismic safety regulations for public schools, Patch has learned that one Walnut Creek school campus will undergo retrofitting this summer to better protect it against earthquake hazards.

The Walnut Creek School District received a "Letter 4" designation from the Division of the State Architect’s Office regarding the former Parkmead Intermediate School campus, which the district has leased to the private K-8 Dorris-Eaton School for the past 20 some years, according to Stuart House, the district's director of construction and maintenance. 

Letter 4 is the term used to describe those projects that the state cannot certify as meeting seismic safety requirements.

House said the state architect's office asked the district to have an engineer inspect the Newell Avenue campus, which is adjacent to Parkmead Elementary School.

Following the engineer's recommendations, the district will retrofit areas between the windows and walls in three classroom buildings. 

Meanwhile, no schools in the Mt. Diablo Unified School District, including those in Walnut Creek, were listed as being among the most potentially dangerous.

California began regulating school architecture for seismic safety in 1933 with the Field Act, but data taken from the state architect's office shows 20,000 school projects statewide never received final safety certifications. In the crunch to get schools built within the last few decades, state architects have been lax on enforcement, California Watch reported. 

A separate inventory completed nine years ago found 7,500 seismically risky school buildings in the state. 

While no MDUSD schools have the Letter 4 designation from the state architect’s office, there are about 75 projects that do not have final certifications on file, ranging from a 1980 project to last year’s construction at Olympic High School in Concord.

Most of those projects have a lesser designation — a Letter 3 — that Eric Lamoureux of the state architects office says is not deemed a critical safety concern.

Other MDUSD projects that do not have proper certification are several at , including the installation of a fire alarm system and computer network, relocation of a portable classroom, and elevator and foyer construction.

Final safety records of the construction of the  football field, some elevator construction at  and various fire alarm and intercom systems throughout the distinct are also incomplete.

Lamoureux said that district officials have deemed most of these projects safe, but a lack of proper accounting may hinder additional work on those projects, if needed. 

MDUSD facilities officials have not yet responded to several queries from Patch about these these projects.

The California Watch project website offers numerous links so you can look at the data and peruse interactive maps that show details such as school proximity to fault lines and liquification zones.

For answers to your questions, quake preparedness tips and more, click here.

For a timeline of the California Watch project, click here. You can also see an interactive map of the history of California earthquakes since 1861,  including their magnitudes, locations and damage caused.

This story was produced using data provided to Patch by California Watch, the state's largest investigative reporting team and part of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Read more about Patch's partnership with California Watch.