The mountain basin that cradles this town is due for a whopping earthquake, the kind that's reliably on time and can topple buildings in a heartbeat.
With their borrowed time, Utah lawmakers are shoring up the marble Capitol building against the inevitable. But they can't soon afford to brace another known deathtrap: the University of Utah's main library.
In a quake of magnitude 5 or greater, the building is expected to "pancake" on itself.
"That's why at night I study at the law library," said Dwayne Madry, 23, an undergraduate history and chemistry student.
Officials say two out of every three buildings here are considered unsafe -- even from moderate shaking.
Geologists for years have warned that the basin is due for a powerful jolt, one that returns with fair regularity about every 1,300 years.
The Wasatch fault last slipped about 1,284 years ago -- and the intervals between each of the four most recent prehistoric quakes ranged from 1,270 to 1,442 years. For experts who determined those dates, it's as close to clockwork as geology gets.
And while Salt Lake City has long been known to be vulnerable to an ancient rhythm of immense earthquakes, geologists have only recently begun to understand how savage they can be.
A magnitude 7.5 quake could kill 7,600 people in the Salt Lake basin, injure 44,000 others and cause US$12 billion in building damage, a pair of Stanford University engineers calculated in 1994.
One leading advocate for building safety says this city's aging stock of unreinforced brick and masonry buildings looks a lot like San Francisco's before the 1906 earthquake devastated much of that city.
"I'll be very candid with you," said Lawrence Reaveley, chairman of the University of Utah engineering department. A cascade of peeling, buckling and collapsing buildings will, he said, "just flat-out kill you."
Around downtown, about 20 new or strengthened buildings stand among older buildings that are likely to fail in an earthquake. That could provide a vivid, side-by-side contrast between buildings left standing and others that could crumble, says city building inspector Larry Wiley.
Across the city and valley, about 56,000 houses are built of unreinforced masonry. With any kind of ground shaking, engineers say, their brick walls will instantly crack and could topple, bringing down roofs.
The warnings are underscored by recent debate over the University of Utah's Marriott Library.
It's considered so menacing the Federal Emergency Management Agency stepped up April 5 to help pay for earthquake bracing that the Utah Legislature had refused to fund only weeks before. But FEMA offered only US$2.9 million and the legislature still has to come up with the rest of the US$45 million.
FEMA's contribution "adds credibility to the importance of this project," says Arthur Brown, a partner for Reaveley Engineers & Associates. "It would be hard for the Utah Legislature to totally ignore it."
Legislators said they didn't want to go deeper into debt to pay for the library at the same time they were borrowing heavily to overhaul the Utah Capitol.
RSS