contractor for a wood frame structural engineer who can serve as a reference to verify the contractor's competency to design and install a retrofit. Unfortunately, structural engineers who have experience in residential retrofit work are rare; the work is dirty, the money is low and the liability is high. Nonetheless, if the contractor cannot produce such a reference, you should find someone else to retrofit your home.

City Retrofit Programs Need Retrofitting

The following are real-life examples encountered by Bay Area Retrofit.

• The Kline family lives in Oakland and recently hired a contractor to bolt their house to the foundation. The work was inspected by the building department, so they thought their house was properly retrofitted. They were wrong; the house would still collapse in an earthquake because the contractor did not brace the cripple walls with plywood. 
   
• Mr. and Mrs. Brogan of Kensington bought a house that was already retrofitted. Unfortunately, the contractor installed hardware that is designed to resist hurricanes, not earthquakes. They paid $5,000 to have the work redone.
   
• Mr. and Mrs. Johanson paid $4,200 for a complete retrofit on their home after the 1989 earthquake. The contractor bolted the house properly but did not attach the plywood cripple wall bracing to the foundation or to the floor framing. The retrofit was useless and had to be torn out at great expense.
   

All this work was done by licensed contractors and inspected by city building inspectors.  What went wrong?

The answer is that none of our building departments have workable guidelines for residential retrofit work, training for inspectors and contractors, or even building officials who understand how to retrofit a house. When Howard Cook of Bay Area Retrofit worked with several Bay Area building officials to develop a retrofit course for homeowners, he was surprised at how little the building officials knew about the subject. Few of them had designed a retrofit and none of them had installed one. That is why these guidelines, known as Plan Set A, available in Berkeley and San Leandro, are completely impractical and do little to protect homeowners. 

Approximately one-third of the retrofits done by Bay Area Retrofit are repairs of retrofits that were botched by well-meaning but improperly trained contractors. An article in the Contra Costa Times claimed that approximately 80% of the retrofits they looked at would not perform in an earthquake.  After inspecting more than 3000 houses, it is Bay Area Retrofit's experience  that the number of existing retrofits that need to be torn out or repaired is closer to 95%. What this means on a broader scale is that there are thousands of Bay Area homes that have     do-nothing retrofits, and most homeowners will never know it until the earthquake hits . 

It is not that the building departments are not inspecting the work of contractors. Mr. Sam Reis, owner of Quake Smart Seismic Retrofitting, had this to say: "Retrofit contractors refer to building inspectors as 'bolt counters' because they make sure we do what is on the plans we provide but they don't make sure the house is properly retrofitted. If we put hardware in the wrong place it doesn't matter to the building inspectors as long as we tell them where we put it. To be sure a house is retrofitted properly, someone at the building department would have to check the engineering behind the design and none of the building departments do that."

Oakland's Senior Building Inspector agrees:  "In regard to retrofit work, we do not check the design but we do carefully check the quality of the workmanship. After all, that is what we are here for."  He added, "It is up to the homeowners to make sure that their retrofits have been properly designed by a competent professional. We do not currently have the manpower to do that for them. My only advice is that the credentials of anyone designing a retrofit should be checked very carefully." 

Contractors are not purposely trying to cheat anyone. To properly retrofit a house, a contractor must have a good grasp of the design principles involved, or he must follow rules dictated by a seismic retrofit building code. Unfortunately, retrofit contractors are not required to have a special license to insure they have an even rudimentary understanding of retrofit principles. When the building department doesn't have a code specific to retrofit, and the contractor does not know what to do, then the contractor does what he thinks might work and as long as he indicates on the permit what he plans to do, the work is approved and the homeowner never knows the difference.

To demonstrate the danger of this situation, Howard Cook of Bay Area Retrofit recently applied to one of the largest building departments in the East Bay for two seismic retrofit permits.  On one set of plans Howard purposely left out the bolts, on the other one he purposely left out the plywood shear wall bracing.  He got the permits, did the work indicated and the retrofits passed inspection even though both of these retrofits were useless.  Howard then went back and did the jobs right. The sad thing is, the homeowners never see the permits so they have no idea what was actually done to their homes.

Most cities could adopt a retrofit building code without increasing their budgets by adding a small surcharge to building permits for work intended to protect homes from earthquakes. Structural engineers from the American Plywood Association, the American Wood Council, the Structural Engineers of California, and experienced retrofit contractors have volunteered to donate their time to develop a retrofit building code but Bay Area cities do not take advantage of their offer. As a current member of the Berkeley Disaster Commission recently said "We are a Hurricane Katrina just waiting to happen, and the cities are doing nothing about it."

If your house has already been retrofitted, you might want a properly trained retrofit professional to inspect it to be sure your retrofit was done right.  Better yet, read "The Homeowner's Guide to Seismic Retrofitting" available in the PDF Download Forum on the Bay Area Retrofit Bulletin Board (near the bottom of the list) or email Jeff or Howard at Bay Area Retrofit and ask them to email you a copy. It provides all the necessary background information needed for you to evaluate your retrofit yourself. No one will care more about your house than you do.

Let's not wait for "The Big One" to hit before we do something to protect our communities. All Bay Area communities desperately need a retrofit building code and special licensing for contractors NOW. Call your local building department and leave a message with the Building Official and/or City Manager. Tell them of your concerns.