Higher Ed | Spotlight

When the next big quake hits California, how safe will our public universities be? I wanted to find out.

I limited the scope to public institutions, but I have a request out to private institutions to determine where they are with seismic safety. I decided not to include community colleges, which together with K-12 schools are regulated by the Field Act.

First, I requested data from the University of California and California State University systems to determine which buildings they deemed hazardous. After getting some basic information, I submitted public records requests to campuses for more information about each building, including seismic hazard, a description, its occupancy status and when the campus estimated it would fix the problems.

While a number of campuses provided responsive records in a matter of weeks, several universities took several months. Some required hounding before turning over documents. As of the story’s publication, one campus still had not handed over engineering reports that I asked for in September 2009, saying the reports continue to be reviewed.

I pored over hundreds of pages of documents over about five months, building several databases to track patterns and dollar amounts where no such databases existed.

For example, I noticed that some campuses had used state construction money to erect new buildings, even though they had hazardous buildings that they had known about for years. I analyzed past construction spending and requests to flesh out this part of the story.

While examining spending data, I found some universities had remodeled seismically hazardous buildings without fixing the structural deficiencies. I requested information for the biggest of these projects to find out why this was happening.

I also conducted interviews with dozens of building officials and other campus representatives, as well as seismic safety experts.