Despite Showing Up on Seismic Hazard List, San Bruno Schools Deemed Safe

Two San Bruno schools have shown up on a statewide list of buildings that might possibly be unsafe in the event of an earthquake and need further study.

The statewide list was made known as part of a 19-month California Watch investigation, which was released Thursday, that uncovered holes in the state's enforcement of seismic safety regulations for public schools. 

California began regulating school architecture for seismic safety in 1933 with the Field Act, but data taken from the Division of the State Architect’s Office shows 20,000 school projects statewide never got final safety certifications. In the crunch to get schools built within the last few decades, state architects have been lax on enforcement, California Watch reported. 

A separate inventory completed nine years ago found 7,500 seismically risky school buildings in the state, including  and  elementary schools. Yet, California Watch reports that only two schools have been able to access a $200 million fund for upgrades. 

Despite the San Bruno schools showing up on the list, the construction manager for said there is no need to worry here because all the schools in the district have been properly inspected since the seismic safety inventory was compiled in 2002.

The school district currently is embarking on a project that would place solar panels on all schools throughout the district, and the project passed all structural evaluations for the schools’ roofs—the main indicator that the schools are seismically safe, said Todd Lee of Greystone West, the company that manages all construction projects throughout the district.

Two projects at the former Edgemont Elementary School built in 1956 and a group of projects listed as “various”—which could be portables—also showed up on the list (see California Watch's interactive map of schools on the state's seismic safety inventory). But Lee said his company is having a difficult time finding the plans for those projects and that the buildings may not even exist anymore.

“At first blush, if you’re going to have buildings that are going to have issues, you’d think it would be the gym,” Lee said in response to the schools showing up on the seismic safety list. “But those don’t show up on the list. The buildings are pretty stout.”

The list was a result of Assembly Bill 300, which was passed in 1999 requiring the state to compile a seismic safety inventory of California’s K-12 school buildings. If the state deems schools might possibly be unsafe in the event of an earthquake, it will send an AB 300 letter to the school district.

While ending up on the AB 300 list of potentially seismically risky schools can indicate dangerous safety issues, it can also signify a simple lapse in certification paperwork, even if safety upgrades have already been made.

Lee said the latter is most likely the case here.

Most, if not all, of the schools currently operating in San Bruno were built during the 1950s, when school buildings throughout the Peninsula were built with rigid frame structural systems, a type of architecture where the framework of buildings was designed with steel.

It is typical for school buildings to get modernized every 30 years. While schools in San Bruno haven’t been modernized that recently, Lee said, the buildings would still be considered structurally strong.

“If you walk the San Bruno schools, you don’t see evidence of seismic problems,” Lee said. “You go through San Bruno and what you see is…(air conditioning and heater) work that needs to be done, you see windows shot—but not cracking or offsetting or anything normally attributed to any failure to the structural system.”

In addition to revealing schools on the seismic safety inventory, the California Watch project showed that San Bruno has four schools located within a quarter of a mile of the San Andreas fault—, , , which is in the San Mateo Union High School District, and , which is in the South San Francisco Unified School District. One school, John Muir, is located in the fault zone. 

The other schools in the San Bruno Park School District, and Lomita Park Elementary were not on the list.

This story was produced using data provided to Patch by California Watch, the state's largest investigative reporting team and part of the Center for Investigative Reporting.