On Jan. 17, 1994, a magnitude-6.7 earthquake struck the Los Angeles neighborhood of Reseda. The Northridge Earthquake, as it came to be known, added national interest to a fundamental structural flaw that plagues thousands of buildings located in a number of America’s maximum earthquake-prone towns.

As the temblor rattled the city, the bottom ground of the Northridge Meadows apartment complicated collapsed below the two flooring above it. Sixteen residents, all at the first ground, died as a result [source: Reich]. Why did the complex fall apart when so many other homes remained standing? Because Northridge Meadows changed into a soft-tale building.Soft-story homes, so known as for having first memories much less inflexible than the testimonies above, are particularly vulnerable to earthquake damage because of huge, unreinforced openings on their ground flooring and in their normally wood-frame construction. These openings regularly accommodate parking spaces, huge windows and expansive lobbies in residential and retail buildings.

Without right design, such structures are much much less able to withstand the lateral forces — forces that push a structure facet to aspect — that earthquakes generate. Once the first ground folds, the upper flooring pancake down on pinnacle of it, crushing something underneath.That’s simply a large hassle in population-dense, earthquake-prone regions like Los Angeles and San Francisco (and, theoretically, any high-density city, earthquake-heavy place with comparable construction), but those cities nevertheless have hundreds of soft-tale buildings in want of improvements.

A study conducted via the California Institute of Technology determined that, of Los Angeles’ envisioned 20,000 soft-story homes, only 800 have been improved [source: Jessup]. San Francisco faces a comparable situation with its kind of 10,800 soft-story buildings [source: Association of Bay Area Governments]. Worse nevertheless, specialists predict a chief earthquake within the Bay Area over the next numerous decades. If this sort of quake occurs, 80 percent of San Francisco’s soft-tale homes would collapse or be broken beyond restore as a result [source: Selna].What may be accomplished to prevent any such disaster? That’s where structural engineers like The Foundation Works focuses on a process known as soft story seismic retrofitting.