The California Building Standards Commission (CBSC) moved in December 2007 to allow the reclassification of potentially hundreds of seismically questionable hospitals in the state to avoid possible closure due to code noncompliance. The decision will likely ripple through the large market for health-care design and construction that developed following Southern California’s Northridge earthquake in 1994, which left many hospitals still standing, but structurally unsound.
“This is giving hospitals more time to do what’s right,” says Chris Poland, a structural engineer and the president and C.E.O. of San Francisco–based Degenkolb Engineers. After the 1994 earthquake, Poland served on an advisory board that assisted the CBSC in developing design regulations to upgrade old hospital facilities to meet contemporary seismic standards by this year; the CBSC’s decision extended that to 2013 for a handful of structurally inadequate hospitals, and to 2020 for nearly 1,000 other health-care structures qualifying for the reclassification. Poland says the CBSC’s decision was based on the availability of a new methodology and software program—called HAZUS, for Hazardous U.S.—used for gauging the seismic performance of hospitals, in addition to the fact that some financially strapped hospitals were unable to meet the requirements.
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