In mid-September 2021, Jim Buck mailed information about the Department of Natural Resources’ School Seismic Safety Project (SSSP) 2019 – 2021 Legislative Report which was released on June 30, 2021. This is the study that concluded that 93% of the Washington school buildings examined rated a one-star grade on a five-star grading scale. You can find this report at https://www.wa.dnr.gov/school-seismic-safety.
Downloading the DNR website can be difficult. It contains thousands of pages and megabytes of data needed by engineers to support their conclusions. That data is dispersed in multiple unrelated locations. All you really want to know is, “Are my schools on the list and if they are, are they safe?”
Two spreadsheets are provided below to answer your questions. The information in these spreadsheets should be sufficient to get you started if you need to dig deeper into the data. The page number for each building is included so you can find more details.
Over Labor Day weekend, school safety letters and emails were sent to 2,391 school principals, 254 fire chiefs, 313 fire district secretaries, 274 homeschool coordinators, 300 school district administrators, 57 Washington State PTA leaders, 13 WSSDA board members, all the county commissioners and 8 members of the press. That is nearly 4,000 contacts. Response has been good.
Jim hopes this information will mobilize the public to demand legislative action to fix these schools and protect our kids.
Click on this boldfaced title to access a State School Seismic Project Consolidated Earthquake Performance Assessment Tool, an alphabetical summary of Phase 1 and 2 findings. The header in the middle columns of each page tells you the percent damage and risk of entrapment, death, injury and usability predicted for each building in its present condition. The header in the right-hand columns of each page tells you the percent damage and risk of entrapment, death, injury and usability predicted for each building if it is prepared for an earthquake (seismic retrofitted).
Click on this boldfaced title to access the second spreadsheet, a Consolidated Statewide School Safety Earthquake Performance Assessment by School District and Name of Building Facility, which provides additional details about each building in the state of Washington. This includes the percent damage and risk of entrapment, death, injury and usability predicted for each building if it was built according to current building codes (brought up to code or rebuilt). It also includes the information on the soils (site class), liquefaction, shake amplification and replacement priority shown in the study.