Are WA schools ready for earthquakes? We don’t know

But first the state will have to find these dangerous buildings. The schools database could not be incorporated into a prior such inventory due to lack of construction type information, which is still missing for hundreds of older buildings statewide, and shows inconsistent information for Seattle Public Schools compared to the district’s list of unreinforced masonry buildings.

Randy Newman, school facilities director at the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction, said “maybe” data will be shared once more information is collected. 

Tracking seismic upgrades

After the 2001 Nisqually earthquake struck the Puget Sound region, the Edmonds School District set out to better protect vulnerable schools. Over the next nine years, the district completed seismic retrofits at 18 schools. But according to the state data, the district has no retrofits.

Crystal Springs Elementary in Bothell received a seismic upgrade after a 2010 evaluation called for anchoring the walls to the roof, adding nails to plywood walls and bracing storage racks and file cabinets, according to documents from the Northshore School District. The school, built in 1956, is now undergoing an expansion, but has no evaluations or retrofits in the state data.

The Department of Natural Resources called for a survey of school districts to collect information on past seismic upgrades for the database, starting with large, well-funded districts. But five years later, the survey was never done.

Some districts provide seismic data to the state through a voluntary grant program tied to building condition assessments that are required to apply for construction funds. But the retrofit field is not required, and not all districts complete the assessments. 

“A lot of them don’t really want to do that if they’re not getting funding,” Black said.

The Edmonds, Bellevue, Northshore and Bellingham school districts are among 163 districts and state-tribal education compact schools with no seismic evaluations or retrofits in the state data, although all four districts provided retrofit records for this story. 

Omitting retrofits from the state data can lead to higher risk ratings for schools, as the state estimates that many high-risk buildings would be deemed low– risk with a retrofit.

Jeff Rogers, Director of Environmental Health and Safety for Tacoma Public Schools, said districts will often appoint someone to update their records following construction projects, “But a lot of times it doesn’t happen because a project manager has never been told, ‘Hey, when you’re done with your upgrading, you need to provide this information to [the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction].’”

Missing information is also due to variable interpretations about what qualifies as a retrofit.

Tina Christiansen, a spokesperson for Seattle Public Schools, said upgrades may not be marked as retrofits when they are part of full renovations or affect only portions of a building. “There is not a partial retrofit or upgrade option,” said Christiansen, adding that the district couldn’t verify how the upgrades were categorized in the state database.

The School Seismic Safety Project, which evaluated one in eight school buildings, did not make these distinctions. “Within the reports, the terms ‘seismic upgrades,’ ‘retrofits’ and ‘structural upgrades’ are used interchangeably and generally mean the same thing,” said Loyd Travis West, a geophysicist at the Department of Natural Resources. But more than 50 seismic and structural upgrades recorded in project reports are not listed as retrofits in the state data.

Seattle Public Schools updated its list of seismic improvements to distinguish between building renovations and replacements in response to questions for this story, but continues to list additional retrofits that were not found in the state data. 

Seismic upgrades totaling $16 million in the Bellingham School District are also missing from the data, despite the district’s assertion that the projects were added. 

Taine Wilton, director of capital projects for the Edmonds School District, noted that building condition assessments, which the district completes, “are not about checking if the buildings meet code requirements or testing how they would withstand extreme forces including wind, rain, seismic, or fire.” 

Seismic safety experts say that comprehensive evaluations of buildings and ground conditions are the best way to identify vulnerable schools, compared with satellite imagery or construction drawings alone, as schools often have multiple wings constructed in different years.

“The safety of buildings is highly dependent on structural materials, so I think that on-site work is very valuable,” said Ash.

Steely echoed the call for evaluations, saying, “The more fully we know which structures are built to withstand ground shaking, and the site conditions at that school that either increase or decrease the shaking, the better we as a state can plan for upgrades and mitigation measures.”

The  Washington State Standard originally published this story on Sept. 30, 2024.