Los Angeles City elected officials have ignored these 2018 quake threat findings, including Los Angeles City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti. Both men are very keen to permit twin skyscrapers on top of the Hollywood Earthquake rupture fault, a powerful sleeper fault capable of a huge quake that rips open the surface of the earth, not just a deep shaking below.
The developers pushing for skyscrapers on top of the Hollywood Earthquake Fault are the incompetent bunch called Millennium Partners, who built San Francisco’s greatest new (and most embarrassing) tourist attraction: The Millennium Tower in SF, the only skyscraper in the world that is sinking and tilting.
More than 50 lawsuits are underway in San Francisco by condo owners living in tilting rooms, and Millennium Partners’ name is now so tainted that they have scrambled to rebrand themselves as “MP.” It turns out that Millennium Partners anchored the San Francisco Millennium Tower in sand, not rock.
So here in Los Angeles, Millennium Partners are trying to bury their now-worthless “Millennium” name by rebranding themselves as “MP” and renaming the Hollywood Millennium twin skyscrapers the “Hollywood Center.” So far, local media have played along, mum on the fact that the San Francisco skyscraper builders are trying to bury their bad name.
A far better name for their terrible twin skyscraper plan is Hollywood Epi-Center since the quake threat will be very real.
Read on folks, to understand what Los Angeles elected leaders, public works officials, and city engineers are trying hard to ignore: the quake threat from skyscrapers collapsing and endangering thousands of people. Our thanks to The New York Times for writing what no major Los Angeles newspapers have reported this year. Read on:
NEW YORK TIMES
LOS ANGELES — In their quest to make tall buildings safe during earthquakes, engineers have for decades relied on calculations that represent the tremors and convulsions that a building can endure. Some of the world’s top earthquake experts now say the projections significantly underestimate the severity of shaking that buildings in several West Coast cities are likely to undergo during earthquakes.
The research, presented Wednesday at a gathering of earthquake experts in Los Angeles, has significant consequences in the ways tall buildings are designed. Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, San Jose and Seattle are among the cities that have buildings that could suffer more damage than anticipated or in the worst case, have a greater potential for collapse, engineers said.
“There are going to be large changes coming,” Norman Abrahamson, a seismologist at the University of California, Berkeley, told hundreds of engineers gathered for the conference. “We now know how far-off our ground motion models have been.”
In some areas of Los Angeles County like Century City, Culver City, Long Beach or Santa Monica, the new projections nearly double the previous estimates for the type of ground shaking that is most threatening to a tall building.
“It’s going to amplify the shaking in terms of intensity but also the duration,” he said. “Those two things combined can have quite a damaging effect that right now we are probably not capturing.”
The crucial changes in the new models are that they rely on local conditions, not global averages, and they model the ground more deeply.
See map below, showing the California State Geologist’s official mapping of the location of the Hollywood Earthquake Fault, and the proposed location of the two skyscrapers. No city in California allows such positioning adjacent to or upon a fault due to the obvious quake threat. Los Angeles City Hall is dying to be the first.
