Local News in Brief : Ground Broken for New Quake Center

Ground was officially broken Friday for a $36.8-million Los Angeles County Fire Department command center designed to withstand an immense earthquake.

The state-of-the-art building, to be erected on a hilltop next to the department’s headquarters in East Los Angeles, will float on 32 “base isolators” that will function as shock absorbers when the so-called “Big One” hits, according to Thomas Anderson, an engineer who helped design the structure.

Anderson said each of the isolators is essentially a “sandwich” consisting of about a dozen alternate layers of rubber and steel in a cube about 18 inches on a side.

When a big earthquake hits, he said, the isolators would absorb much of the quake’s horizontal movement.

He said that there are about 100 other structures around the world--including a building in Rancho Cucamonga--that are supported by such isolators but that most of them are “display buildings” intended only to test the concept.

Anderson said the new building should withstand a temblor of 8.5 on the Richter scale. That’s comfortably above the maximum amplitude of the enormous quake that seismologists say is expected to strike Southern California sometime within the next 30 years.

Fire officials said it is especially important that this 32,675-square-foot building survive because it will serve as the county’s communications center in the event of a major disaster.