California hospitals seek relief from seismic safety rules
Recession-battered California hospitals are asking state lawmakers to provide relief from seismic safety rules that could prompt closure of facilities that don't meet impending deadlines.
Most hospitals have until 2013 to comply with a state law requiring them to strengthen buildings in danger of collapsing during an earthquake and until 2030 to replace those at-risk buildings with new ones.
While hospitals in the Sacramento area appear at little risk of closure, the massive investment needed to comply is placing financial strain on their parent companies, officials said.
"There isn't enough money in this world to do all these projects in this time frame," said Scott Seamons, regional vice president for the Hospital Council of Northern and Central California.
Sutter Health, for one, has been working diligently to meet the deadlines, "but there's so much work to be done in such a short period of time," said Carl Scheuerman, director of regulatory affairs for the health system.
Five of the eight buildings that make up Sutter Memorial Hospital don't meet state seismic standards, but the company has announced its intent to close the east Sacramento campus and consolidate operations at Sutter General, where a massive expansion project is under way.
The state has the authority to close facilities deemed unsafe.
The California Hospital Association, which represents 430 hospitals statewide, is asking the Legislature to throw out the 2013 mandate and push up the 2030 deadline to replace at-risk buildings to 2020.
"Rather than pouring money into this twice, what we're saying is that this will allow hospitals to just use one set of capital investment. It's more cost-effective," said Jan Emerson, the association's spokeswoman.
The request is expected to be written into Senate Bill 289, which seeks to get a clearer scope of the community impact that could be brought about by closing hospitals that don't meet the seismic deadlines.
About a third of 2,700 buildings operated by the state's hospitals are classified by the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development as seismically at-risk, but many of those buildings are being re-evaluated. As many as half of the buildings on the list could be removed, hospitals hope, because of more accurate disaster modeling programs now available.
A recent study by the Rand Corp., a nonprofit research institution, says it will cost at least $110 billion – perhaps twice that when financing costs are factored in – to comply with the state's 1994 seismic retrofitting law.
When the law passed, officials thought it would cost $14 billion to undertake a massive rebuilding project aimed at making hospitals across California safe, particularly antiquated facilities near the end of their life spans.
Passage of the law followed the Northridge quake, which shut some hospitals, not because buildings collapsed but because of broken plumbing, inoperable mechanical systems and ruptured gas lines.
"A lot of assumptions were made, and a lot of them were wrong," said Emerson, the hospital association spokeswoman.
"One assumption was that you could relatively cheaply retrofit all these buildings," she said. "It turned out that was a flawed assumption because many buildings had asbestos. In the end, it was actually more expensive to retrofit the buildings than to just start over."
Nearly two-thirds of the state's hospitals, citing the economy and their inability to obtain financing, won't be able to meet the 2013 deadline, according to a survey conducted by the hospital association.
Many hospitals, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California – regions most at risk of devastating earthquakes – are attempting to comply with state seismic safety rules, Emerson said, but need more time.