Unreinforced Masonry Building survey underway in Tacoma

Standing outside an alley near Commerce Street in Tacoma, a small group of yellow-vested workers squint up and inspect bricks and architectural shapes. Their job – to determine whether a building would be considered an unreinforced masonry building (URM) and thus be more susceptible to future earthquake damage.

Derek Ohlgren, a licensed engineer, stood next to Brian Terbush, the earthquake and volcano program manager for Washington Emergency Management Division (WA EMD). Ohlgren pointed at some veneer hiding bricks, creating a facade.

“This is almost detective work, sometimes,” Ohlgren said. “But the more we do this inventory work, the more information we will get.”

And, information, in this case, has the potential to save lives, says Maximilian Dixon, the hazards and outreach program supervisor at WA EMD.

“Today is a day for local champions,” Dixon told a few dozen volunteers, who sat through a training session last fall before starting survey work. “They don’t get enough credit. … This is going to take a long time and today is a great step forward. This is about collecting this data and putting it in a usable database so we can use it to make risk reduction decisions and ask for funding to eventually survey all of Washington’s unreinforced masonry building and make our state safer by getting them retrofitted.”

Unreinforced masonry buildings have the most potential to experience damage or collapse during an earthquake. These are old buildings made up of things like brick, stone and concrete. They are typically built prior to 1958, before modern building codes, and have masonry walls with wood-frame floors and roofs.

Tacoma’s URM survey kicked off on Nov. 15, 2024, and brought together more than 60 city staff members from Tacoma, Seattle, Bainbridge Island, the state and others, where they surveyed almost 300 buildings. Tacoma has continued its survey efforts since then and has now surveyed more than 800 suspected URM buildings.

This data will eventually be maintained and accessible in an unreinforced masonry buildings user portal, developed and housed by the Washington State Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation (DAHP). This portal will help communities prioritize emergency preparedness actions, emergency response resources and access risk mitigation funding.

The city of Tacoma is just the second city to do a survey like this, following efforts from the city of Everett in 2023.

In partnership with the DAHP, Cascadia Region Earthquake Workgroup (CREW), and WA EMD, the city of Tacoma’s effort was a crucial step in Washington’s broader earthquake risk reduction goals, according to Riley McNabb, earthquake program outreach coordinator with WA EMD working on the inventory.

Back in 2018, the state Legislature provided some funding for the state to conduct a survey of unreinforced masonry buildings. The result looked at 15,200 buildings statewide and found about 4,300 were URM or suspected URM buildings and another 2,200 were unknown. McNabb says this study was just the start of this larger effort that has continued since then with jurisdictions taking the lead in reviewing their own buildings to see what buildings in their communities might be URMs.

Teams of three spent a full day in Tacoma back in November doing this detective work.

One such team was made up of Ohlgren, Terbush and Ileana Ortega, permit specialist for the city of Tacoma.

Ohlgren, URM program lead engineer of the Seattle Department of Construction & Inspections, said he was happy to lend some time to help Tacoma.

Walking down streets and alleys, there’s remnants of old advertising signs interlaced among bricks on a nearby building and graffiti and street art elsewhere. One artwork near the Pantages Theater shows a shadowy figure with the word “FEAR” on it.

Terbush pointed to a building nearby constructed with hollowed clay tile – not brick, but another type of unreinforced masonry. Next to it is an older brick building, definitely unreinforced masonry. “It’s not easy to tell what every building is made of,” Terbush said. “We need to walk around each building before we can tell for sure.”

There were also signs of seismic retrofits on some buildings with parapets – which without bracing would be more in danger of falling off from earthquake ground shaking and onto the sidewalk and anyone who happens to be passing by.

Teams took pictures of buildings and then added descriptions into a web-based app that the city used for gathering information.

Tacoma’s survey began with the city’s principal plans examiner and chair of the Washington Association of Building officials’ (WABO) emergency management committee, Quyen Thai, who learned more about the URM survey process by volunteering to help review the data gathered in the initial Everett pilot survey in April 2023.Tacoma’s survey is a continuation of the partnership between WABO and WA EMD.

He reached out to Washington’s multi-agency state URM Workgroup, led by WA EMD, and brought his team together to start coordinating their own survey.

Chris Seaman, the commercial building review supervisor for the city of Tacoma, thanked all the jurisdictions for helping each other.

“We’re definitely in this together,” he said.

Pascal Schuback, the executive director for CREW, says he is creating a guidebook to help the hundreds of jurisdictions who don’t have a deep bench on their planning departments understand and plan what a URM inventory would look like in their community.

“We can take the data and nationally look at it, look at the economic loss we might have and that, in turn, helps fund programs like what the state of Washington has done,” he said.