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Behind the News, The Observatory — Apri l 15, 2011 10:30 AM

California Watch is Watching

Investigation reveals lax oversight of seismic standards in schoolsBy Curtis Brainard

California Watch’s Corey Johnson was scanning the website of the state architect’s office one

evening in December 2009 when he noticed something strange. The state was changing the

status of schools with building projects lacking seismic safety certification, downgrading the

severity of the violations “in bunches” without ever visiting the schools, as Johnson tells it.

It didn’t take long to connect the dots. Johnson was three months into an investigation of

earthquake safety at California schools and had recently asked for a previously undisclosed list

of those with potentially unsafe buildings. A couple days after noticing the changes taking place

at the state architect’s website, Johnson obtained minutes of an internal meeting in which statemanagers warned, “Sensitivity has increased as to reporters digging deep into government

business. People need to be mindful of what they put into emails.” Elsewhere they urged, “We

need to figure out why Los Angeles has so many Type 4 letters,” referring to the most serious

violation of the Field Act, a 1933 law mandating strict oversight of earthquake resistant

construction at K-12 schools and community colleges.

Discovering the changes was an “a-ha moment” for Johnson, and just one of many

breakthroughs in an meticulously documented investigation that revealed at least 20,000

projects, “from minor fire alarm upgrades to major construction of new classrooms,” that were

completed without Field Act certification. What began for him as a “quick turnaround” story about the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco Bay Area

ultimately turned into a nineteen-month project that involved nearly four dozen staff members

and freelance contributors, as well as California Watch’s partners at KQED Public Radio.

California Watch—a project of the Center for Investigative Reporting launched in the summer of

2009—began releasing the multimedia series, titled “On Shaky Ground,” on April 8 in

California Watch is Watching : CJR http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/california_watch_is_wat

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coordination with a suite of newspapers, public radio and television stations, ABC news

affiliates, Patch.com sites, and foreign-language newspapers statewide. Three articles form the

backbone. Part 1 describes the lax oversight of seismic safety at schools, the history of the

regulatory system and how it broke down over time, and cases of specific schools lacking safety

certification. Part 2 reveals that many special seismic safety inspectors, hired by school districts

and trained in the Field Act, are still reviewing building projects despite histories of poor

performance. And Part 3 explains how restrictive rules have kept California schools from

accessing a $200 million fund approved by voters in 2006 to shore up seismically unsafe

buildings.

“It’s been a bear,” Johnson said in an interview describing the effort. “It’s an incredibly

complicated story with a lot of moving parts and technical details, and the government was not

that interested in talking straight or clear, so there was a lot of work—a lot of historical work,

even—that went into figuring out what the procedures and policies were, and what they really

meant, so that I could appropriately interpret what was being said by state officials and school

district people, because there’s a lot of spinning that goes on in a story like this.

“I’m trying to avoid the clichés you hear when reporters tell these kinds of stories, but it really

was brick-and-mortar. Somebody tells you a piece of information, you try to verify it, and it goes

from there. Ultimately, I started to work on multiple fronts, trying to pull together all of this

information, understand it, and deal with the various agencies who, once it became apparent to

them that they were the focus of an investigation, got really difficult to deal with. They started

saying that things didn’t exist, and I found that they did, and they started telling employees not

to talk. It was just the whole gamut of things that happen in America when people think they’re

under investigation, which they were.”

California Watch produced an excellent, step-by-step timeline of Johnson’s investigation,complete with a rolling document counter that rises to over 30,000 by early 2010, but it is even

more interesting to hear Johnson tell the story in his own words. After he learned of the state’s

list of schools lacking seismic safety certification, which hadn’t been released publically, a staffer

on the state legislature’s education committee said it would be hard to get details, but pointed

him to the Division of the State Architect, which oversees compliance.

“Those two bits of information—that there is a list that the state doesn’t want anybody to have

and that some schools might not comply with the Field Act—were the two things that got my

juices flowing,” Johnson said.

That’s when the heavy lifting began, literally. In a blog post describing the evolution of the

project, California Watch’s editorial director, Mark Katches, explained that:

[Johnson’s] desk soon became cluttered with reams of documents, forming a

fortress growing higher and higher. Tens of thousands of PDF files about


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earthquake safety in California’s public schools soon taxed his laptop hard drive.

The documents painted a disturbing picture of a system of oversight in disarray.

For months, Johnson worked on the story alone in our Sacramento bureau under

the supervision of his editor, Robert Salladay. He became a virtual embed at the

Division of the State Architect. Routinely, Johnson hauled our 30-pound copy

machine several blocks to make copies - cutting down on copying costs. He filedregular blog posts for us, but his first real story would need more time.

The extra time would pay off. By early 2010 Johnson had revealed that the regulatory apparatus

governing seismic safety in schools had clearly broken down, but that alone was not enough to

satisfy him. He wanted to know why it had broken down, so he kept digging.

In June 2010 Johnson was working in the library of the Division of the State Architect when he

noticed a binder marked “policies and procedures.” In it he discovered that California keeps

confidential evaluation records for a network of 1,500 specially trained seismic safety inspectorshired by school districts to vet building projects. Johnson had to fight for months to get them,

going back and forth with state officials and their lawyers, eventually convincing them that they

had no right to keep the ratings confidential since the inspectors are not state employees. Once

in hand, the records showed that nearly 300 inspectors had been cited by the state for

work-related deficiencies, even though at least two-thirds were allowed to keep monitoring

school construction jobs. Multiple inspectors had been accused of filing false reports with

regulators and failing to show up at critical moments during construction jobs, yet the state had

done little to nothing to reprimand them.

“These records had been very tightly held, and finding them was a result of being at the library,looking over my shoulder, and just happening to spot this dusty binder,” said Johnson. But the

discovery had consequences.

“Naturally, the day I asked to copy those policy documents was the last day they let me in the

library. Once they saw that I’d grabbed that off the shelf they said, ‘We have to renovate the

library,’ and ended up putting me right around the corner from a bathroom, totally away from

anybody and anything. And that’s when they assigned a person to watch me every day.”

Indeed, Johnson says the state’s minder was tasked with not letting him out of her sight, and

officials at the Division of State Architect began making him jump through other hoops as well.They insisted, for instance, that he travel to its Los Angeles offices to view records that should

have been easy to send north, and that the minder accompany him along the way. “That’s kind

of how it went for months, those kinds of games,” Johnson said.

Things really came to a head in the late summer and fall of 2010. In July, Johnson obtained

names of state employees that were members of a lobbying group, the Coalition for Adequate


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School Housing, which had repeatedly pushed for less regulation and oversight of school

construction. State officials denied that any employees belonged to the group, but were forced to

“backpedal” when Johnson pulled out a list at a meeting showing that several top managers at

the Division of the State Architect were indeed members (other records showed that regulators

were even told that taxpayers would reimburse their membership dues).

Johnson pulled off his most impressive feat of reportorial prowess in November, however, whenhe convinced a source in the Division of the State Architect to give him a hard drive with years of

e-mails, memos, reports, surveys, policy drafts and directions, and other confidential records

relating to the regulation of seismic safety across various agencies. Katches, California Watch’s

editorial director, called it a “treasure trove,” which revealed that for years officials across state

government had been aware of school construction problems, but failed to address them.

Johnson had to follow a circuitous route to get the hard drive. By that point in his investigation

the state and basically clammed up on him. “They were aware that I was this bugaboo

burrowing down for information,” he said.

In an effort to break the impasse, Johnson contacted someone whom he knew to be a friend of

an official in the state architect’s office that he wanted to reach. Bluffing to a certain extent

about already having some damning evidence in hand, he asked that person to arrange a

meeting, pointing out that “going through the front door would set off an awful lot of alarms and

bells.” The intermediary complied and the official in the state architect’s office agreed to talk to

Johnson, who laid his request on the line.

“Over a couple lunches, I said, ‘I need to know what I don’t know because as it stands right now,

you all are really screwing children.’ I said it just like that, and I said, ‘I don’t know of anybody

that’s going to take that, especially when voters approved all this money for seismic safety and you turn around and give them a bad building.’ I just told him: ‘Now, with what we have, regular

media would’ve already run this story, but I’m trying to get the other side, so if you’ve got

something, you need to quit playing games and give me something.’ And that appeal worked. It

worked. And he said, ‘Okay, I’ve got something,’ and this something proved our suspicions

[about lax oversight], because when we looked through the documents, it was worse than what I

could have ever imagined.”

The records showed that for years, various officials had complained that the state was neglecting

its statutory responsibilities with regard to earthquake safety, that inspectors and field

engineers did not have enough support, and that some projects had been completed withdangerous construction flaws.

“You name it, the hard drive had it,” Johnson said. “I mean, we got a lot of breaks along the way,

but that was huge.”

Around the same time, he received a vastly expanded list of uncertified projects at schools based

on the request he’d made more than year before. Originally, the state had provided a list of some


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9,000 projects. When the updated version arrived, it had more than twice that number (and

would’ve been even larger had the state had not cleared thousands of other project violations in

the intervening months).

The result of all this probative toil was California Watch’s ironclad series, which prompted state

and school district officials to begin changing their ways even before it was published. In

addition to its three main articles, the package features a variety of shorter pieces, including onerevealing that, pressed by real estate agents, the state shrank its earthquake hazards zones on

geological maps. There is also a searchable map and database that lays out schools located in

those hazard zones and identifies more than 2,000 uncertified building projects (the data and

methods California Watch used to create the map are explained in a separate post and useful

FAQ). There are also photos and videos, an interactive map of major California quakes since

1861, safety and action guidelines for parents, an earthquake safety coloring book , and a

myFault iPhone/iPad app that identifies seismic risks in a user’s area.

“We believe this is an important series of stories because it reveals problems and issues before a

school is badly damaged in a quake and a child or teacher is hurt or killed,” the Center forInvestigative Reporting’s executive director, Robert Rosenthal, wrote in a blog post discussing

the value of proactive, gumshoe reporting:

Johnson and the rest of the team of reporters have been asking the types of

questions that other news organizations would be asking, after the fact, if a school

had been damaged or collapsed in a quake.

What we have done here is ask those questions and investigate before the

potentially catastrophic event.

We are not saying disasters are imminent. What we are saying is that now is the

time to check and look at issues that might exist in schools and other buildings

throughout California.

Without appearing to be shrill or alarmist, these stories say, “take action.” They say

to the public and officials this is the time to engage and understand what is safe and

not in good shape or certified in your communities’ schools.

Through a wide, varied and multi-platform distribution partnership this package of

stories should reach millions of people.

So far, the series, or parts of it, have run in almost a dozen newspapers. In addition, it has been

translated into Spanish, Korean, Vietnamese, and two forms of Chinese and is being distributed

to foreign language papers via New American Media. It has run in at least five of the state’s

major television and radio markets. KQED, a public broadcaster in Northern California, worked


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with California Watch to produce a series of radio reports based on the “On Shaky Ground”

package. The two outlets also collaborated on an eight-minute video that was distributed to ABC

affiliates. The PBS NewsHour ran a version of the story April 11, which will be repurposed for a

half-hour special airing on KQED public television on April 15.

California Watch provided its stories and data to its distribution partners in all media two to

three weeks ahead of publication in order to allow those that wished to do their own, locally oriented stories and to solicit feedback from their editors, which both Rosenthal and Katches

called very helpful.

In an impressive extension of the investigative process, over one hundred Patch.com websites

throughout the state have produced localized stories based on California Watch’s data. Marcia

Parker, the organization’s West Coast editorial director, pointed to stories from Rancho Palos

Verdes, Rosemont, Venice, Pinole, and Echo Park that have homed in on seismic risks in their

area. Below stories from the Patch sites in Highland Park and Arcadia, readers have left

comments saying they intend to bring the information provided to the attention of local

officials.

“Patch is doing what it does best: Telling readers in the towns we cover what this story means

for their schools,” Parker wrote in a post discussing the benefits of collaboration. “California

Watch discovered a mess, and Patch is working to make sense of it school by school.”

California Watch has already received almost 30,000 orders for its earthquake-safety coloring

book, including a large order from the school district in Chula Vista, near San Diego, which

plans to give them to all its students from kindergarten through fourth grade, Rosenthal said. Its

iPhone/iPad app, which costs ninety-nine cents, has been downloaded a couple hundred times.

And the organization is organizing a series of community events throughout the state related toearthquake and emergency preparedness.

California Watch charges all of its partners for its content and data, either through its

membership network, which provides access to a handful of stories each year, or on an

individual basis. Prices vary based on circulation. “The revenue doesn’t come close to covering

the cost of the project,” said Rosenthal. “Conservatively, if you lay in salary, benefits, editing

time, and all the things you would if you were an accountant, you’re probably looking at half a

million dollars,” of which partner fees probably covered only about 5 percent.

Performing a valuable journalistic service that could protect thousands of schoolchildren across

the state, however, is priceless. Following in the footsteps of venerable reporting projects such

as USA Today’s “The Smokestack Effect—Toxic Air and America’s Schools,” California Watch’s

“On Shaky Ground” has “Journalism Award” written all over it. According to Rosenthal,

Katches, and Johnson, the response to the series has already been overwhelmingly positive.

Even officials in the state architect’s office have written to say that while they didn’t like the

stories, they could find no fault with them. California Watch’s work is not done, however.


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“The catch phrase we’re hearing from just about everybody is, ‘You’ve only scratched the

surface, young man. You’ve only scratched the surface,’” said Johnson. Thankfully, Rosenthal

and Katches plan to keep him on the story for the foreseeable future, with more investigations to

come.


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