Word: retrofit
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Photographs of Kobe lead one to suspect that steel rebar and concrete reinforcements are missing from the expressway and other public projects. The Japanese should turn their formidable energy to a great national purpose: survival of a superquake. The government must oversee the inspection and retrofit of all structures in the Tokyo-Yokohama metroplex. Time is short...
...whether the joints should merely be restored to their prequake state or upgraded, whether such upgrading is even possible and, if it is, what is the best method. Similar debate swirls around how to revise building codes to do better in new construction and, even more important, how to retrofit older buildings--and who will pay the bill. Says Iwan of Caltech: ``The really difficult issue is what to do with the existing stock of less-safe, potentially hazardous structures. They're already built and paid for, there is probably a different owner, and now you've discovered there...
...Angeles there is only one rather minor incentive to retrofit: low-cost city loans to repair unreinforced masonry. San Francisco, says Iwan, more than five years after the Loma Prieta quake, is ``having a great deal of difficulty implementing anywhere near the kinds of retrofit regulations and laws that Southern California has,'' even though ``there are some very hazardous buildings there,'' many concentrated around Chinatown. In an era of government cutbacks, neither the state nor Washington seems likely to foot the bill. Insurance companies are not much help either. After picking up about half of the $20 billion losses from...
...does not carry ideas the way a truck carries coal. We shouldn't try to retrofit the art of 300 years ago with our moral attitudes. The past is a very foreign place...
While the most obvious damage has been repaired, huge expenditures still lie ahead. After a nine-month study, engineers have determined that the Golden Gate bridge, which apparently survived last year's quake in good shape, now needs a major retrofit of its anchorages and approaches that will cost at least $75 million. David Prowler, assistant to the city's chief administrative officer, says it is a "pretty good bet" that the board of supervisors will order a strengthening next year of some 2,000 unreinforced brick and masonry structures that are judged unsafe under current building codes. All told...