Seismic shift

https://easyreadernews.com/letters-opinion/

Dear ER:

The Beach Cities Health District seems to have gone seismic consultant shopping to find one who would “tell them” to demolish the former South Bay Hospital building. No luck though. The first consultant, Youssef Associates, provided the Community Working Group with a presentation stating that “best practice” would allow up to 25 years more use prior to retrofit or demolition.

They also noted that there were no requirements to upgrade the building to current code and that any work BCHD did, including demolition, was “voluntary.”

So BCHD went shopping for another consultant and somehow found ImageCat Inc. They provided BCHD with a maybe some owners would deem operation past 10 more years as unacceptable. Their exact language was “risk … from 10 to 50 years becomes significantly higher, with probabilities of collapse that would likely be deemed unacceptable.”

Likely? Why the weasel word? Likely by whom? ImageCat apparently didn’t have any hard data because there’s no requirement to demolish the building, nor to red tag it as unsafe. When an engineer says that a problem is likely, but not imminent, it’s just a cover your ass.

So no matter which BCHD consultant you choose to believe, BCHD’s demolition of the South Bay Hospital building is voluntary, not covered by any ordinance or code, and can wait for up to 25 years, according seismic “best practice.”

Taxpayers should not be paying $15M for guesses by BCHD executives with no seismic expertise or training.

Mark Nelson

Redondo Beach