The state Legislature passed the Alfred E. Alquist Hospital Facilities Seismic Safety Act in 1973, requiring all acute care hospitals at risk of collapse be retrofitted to withstand an earthquake. After the Northridge earthquake in 1994, the Legislature passed two bills that strengthened the requirements and set deadlines to meet those requirements. Hospital buildings at risk of collapse during an earthquake, as determined by the hospitals themselves, must be seismically retrofitted to remain standing during an earthquake by 2013 and to remain operational immediately following an earthquake by 2030.
There are several obstacles to meeting these deadlines, including the high costs of new hospital construction, lack of funding or financial incentives for the hospitals to complete the work, and lack of adequate tracking of hospitals’ progress toward completing these projects.
Tracking the Progress
The OSHPD Facilities Development Department (FDD) has $20 billion in projects under plan review or in construction. The department plans to deploy a suite of Web-based workflow automation software from Accela. This, it is hoped, will better track hospitals’ seismic retrofitting projects, improve coordination within the FDD and provide the public with online updates on the project.The software will allow FDD staff to track a project at each step of the process from initial permitting to the completion of construction.
The department’s existing tracking system isn’t robust enough to handle the substantial workload FDD has had, according to David Byrnes, the public information officer of OSHPD. “New programs, as well as changes to existing ones, made by changes in the Hospital Seismic Safety Act would require a substantial investment for reprogramming and modifying an archaic program that was on the verge of becoming unstable,” said Byrnes via e-mail.
Additionally the department wanted to change the way it tracked projects and allowed for the electronic submission of applications to provide better service to contractors. The system also will include components for the FDD to track its response to a disaster and help provide emergency services personnel with the availability of hospital services following a disaster. It’s slated to be up and running by the summer of 2010.
“It is still difficult to track the progress that hospitals have made toward seismic safety compliance,” Byrnes said. “SB 499, passed by the Legislature last year and signed into law by the governor, will require hospitals to submit substantial data regarding the status of their seismic safety compliance status to OSHPD by Nov. 1, 2010, and to update this information yearly after that.”
Retrofitting Half of California’s Hospital Space
Hospitals that don’t meet the bills’ deadlines must close or stop providing acute care services. According to a 2007 study by the Rand Corp., 54 percent of the state’s acute care hospital space must be retrofit. The same study found that approximately half of those buildings won’t be retrofitted by the 2013 deadline. The study also concluded that the 2030 deadline will likely not be met either.The resulting hospital closures could cause gaps in acute care services and diminish capacity to care for the injured following an earthquake, the Rand study found. However, the OSHPD doesn’t have projections as to the impact hospital closures will have on the delivery of services after an earthquake. “OSHPD does not have projections on the impact because no information has been provided regarding the services that occur in the ‘collapse hazard’ buildings,” Byrnes said. “This information will be required to be reported to OSHPD on or before Nov. 1, 2010.”
[Photo courtesy of Jocelyn Augustino/FEMA.]
