Buildings will be killers in big quake

About 4,000 people come to the library each day.
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- The mountain basin that cradles this town is due for a whopping earthquake, the kind that's reliably on time and can topple buildings in a heartbeat.
With their borrowed time, Utah lawmakers are shoring up the marble Capitol building against the inevitable. But they can't soon afford to brace another known deathtrap: the University of Utah's main library.
In a quake of magnitude 5.0 or greater, the building is expected to "pancake" on itself.
"That's why at night I study at the law library," said Dwayne Madry, 23, an undergraduate history and chemistry student.
Officials say two out of every three buildings here are considered unsafe -- even from moderate shaking.
Geologists for years have warned that the basin is due for a powerful jolt, one that returns with fair regularity about every 1,300 years.
The Wasatch fault last slipped about 1,284 years ago -- and the intervals between each of the four most recent prehistoric quakes ranged from 1,270 to 1,442 years. For experts who determined those dates, it's as close to clockwork as geology gets.
And while Salt Lake City has long been known to be vulnerable to an ancient rhythm of immense earthquakes, geologists have only recently begun to understand how savage they can be.
Thousands could die
A magnitude 7.5 quake could kill 7,600 people in the Salt Lake basin, injure 44,000 others and cause $12 billion in building damage, a pair of Stanford University engineers calculated in 1994.
One leading advocate for building safety says this city's aging stock of unreinforced brick and masonry buildings looks a lot like San Francisco's before the 1906 earthquake devastated much of that city.
"I'll be very candid with you," said Lawrence Reaveley, chairman of the University of Utah engineering department. A cascade of peeling, buckling and collapsing buildings will, he said, "just flat-out kill you."
Around downtown, about 20 new or strengthened buildings stand among older buildings that are likely to fail in an earthquake. That could provide a vivid, side-by-side contrast between buildings left standing and others that could crumble, says city building inspector Larry Wiley.
Across the city and valley, about 56,000 houses are built of unreinforced masonry. With any kind of ground shaking, engineers say, their brick walls will instantly crack and could topple, bringing down roofs.
The warnings are underscored by recent debate over the University of Utah's Marriott Library.
A major menace
It's considered so menacing the Federal Emergency Management Agency stepped up April 5 to help pay for earthquake bracing that the Utah Legislature had refused to fund only weeks before. But FEMA offered only $2.9 million and the Legislature still has to come up with the rest of the $45 million.
FEMA's contribution "adds credibility to the importance of this project," says Arthur Brown, a partner for Reaveley Engineers & amp; Associates. "It would be hard for the Utah Legislature to totally ignore it."
Legislators said they didn't want to go deeper into debt to pay for the library at the same time they were borrowing heavily to overhaul the Utah Capitol. The Capitol is being emptied this month for four years of work that will include lifting the 67,500-ton statehouse on a set of shock absorbers. The entire project will cost $200 million.
Earthquake-resistant buildings are supposed to stand up and stay mostly intact. But engineers don't guarantee they'll remain open for occupancy or be useable after a quake.
"If we can get you out of the building without killing you, we're happy," says Reaveley.
Students know the dangers. Madry was studying in the part of the building that was remodeled in 1996 and is considered more seismically sound. He works mostly in the newer side of the building when he needs to because "that's what my wife tells me to do."
The five-story Marriott Library will "pancake" on itself in a 5.0-magnitude quake because of a design problem, said Joseph R. Harmon, the campus structural engineer.
Just an inch of building sway could cause welds holding the top floor to snap from steel columns, dropping the concrete slab onto lower floors and bringing them down one-by-one, he said.
The library routinely draws about 4,000 people each day. Those inside would have little chance of escaping during an earthquake.
Librarian Peter Kraus said his concern is with the collection: The library contains everything from ancient Egyptian papyri to some of the original papers of western explorer John Wesley Powell.
"Day in and day out I don't think of my own safety a lot," Kraus said. "I think of the institutional knowledge. The material in this building is irreplaceable."
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