Are Local Schools Earthquake Safe?

If the big one hits the Bay Area, are schools in Livermore safe?

That's one question that will likely be on the minds of parents in town now that a watchdog group called California Watch has published a list of potentially unsafe school buildings and projects.

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. Yet, California Watch reports that only two schools have been able to access a $200 million fund for upgrades.

In Livermore, two schools were listed by California Watch with "Letter 4" designations, the most serious designation by the state architect's office.

Four schools are listed on a 2002 inventory list of school buildings with potentially dangerous seismic hazards, and the California Watch project found that both the state and school districts routinely never followed up to find out if fixes were made.

 Livermore Patch is working to get additional information from the  about whether any retrofitting has been done on the schools listed in the report.

About half of the schools in the district are listed as either being within a quarter-mile of an earthquake fault or located in a liquefaction zone. 

A liquefaction zone is where sandy soil can be jolted into acting like a liquid by a strong earthquake. In extreme cases, buildings in those zones can sink into the ground or be carried off.

The California Watch project website offers numerous links so you can look at the data and view interactive maps that show details such as school proximity to fault lines and liquefication zones.

For answers to your questions, quake preparedness tips and more, click here.

For a timeline of the California Watch project, click here. You also can see an interactive map of the history of California earthquakes since 1861,  including their magnitudes, locations and the damage caused.

Livermore Patch will be following up on this story at a local and state level.

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. Read more about Patch's partnership with California Watch.