They are getting rid of all the evidence

The directors of this west coast museum say they are making it earthquake proof.

I think they are getting rid of all the evidence they thought was hidden decades ago.

Ever since the blind item I wrote a few years ago, there have been more inquiries and investigations.

The Getty Center

The Northridge earthquake exposed flaws in the Getty’s construction—and changed how LA builds

Twenty-six years ago this morning, Tom Sabol was jolted awake by the thrashing of an earthquake. He lived some 20 miles from the epicenter in suburban Northridge. But he still remembers power lines sparking and fizzling in his West LA neighborhood.

At the time, Sabol, who has a doctorate in structural and earthquake engineering, was working on the Getty Center, the largest construction project underway in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s. But amid the tumult, he wasn’t thinking about the Getty. He was so confident in the steel building skeletons he had helped engineer that it didn’t cross his mind that they might yield to the shaking.

“We thought the Getty had been designed for a level of earthquake demand greater than the minimum requirements in the building code—by a substantial amount,” says Sabol, a principal with engineering firm Englekirk Institutional.

That confidence was shattered about a week later when the Getty’s contractor discovered cracks in the welding in at least one of the steel-frame buildings being constructed. According to a February 1994 article in the Los Angeles Times, six of 80 joints were damaged, and one cracked in two. One steel column cracked.

The Northridge earthquake showed the vulnerability in the welded and bolted connections of what are called moment frames. Until then, they had been considered seismic-proof. And this wasn’t just at the Getty. Engineers considered moment frames to be “among the most ductile systems contained in the building code.” They had been widely used in steel buildings since the 1960s. – Source