Thor Matteson's second award-winning book, Earthquake Strengthening for Vulnerable Homes, includes over 270 pages and 400 photos, illustrations, and diagrams showing effective and economical methods to strengthen your home or wood-framed building to resist earthquakes.
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Our firm focuses exclusively on designing systems to strengthen your home or wood-framed apartment building to better resist earthquakes. We do not design decks, additions, bridges, or schools--only retrofits. We work with experienced contractors, and seek out their opinions and feedback on methods and materials. Our goal is to design the best strengthening system that your budget allows.

What we do:
Our work is broken down into three phases: Initial investigation, design engineering, and construction phase services.

Initial Investigation
The first step in our work is a field exploration of your building. We spend several hours under your house to determine how the existing structural members are connected and what would be the most efficient strengthening approach. Once we have documented the existing conditions we give you a prioritized list of strengthening measures we suggesst. We generally break these down into high, medium, and low-priority groups. We provide projected construction costs for the various groups of items, along with fixed-fee quotes for the engineering services to design those items; this allows you to choose the work that matches your budget, and pay only for the engineering work you need for the construction you can afford.
Please be aware that labor and material shortages can lead to fluctuating costs, and that while we do our best to provide realistic construction costs, we do not guarantee that our cost projections will match contractors' bids for the work. Our projections are best viewed as relative difference in costs between various priority levels.
Once you select which strengthening measure you wish to install, we proceed to the next phase of our services.

Design Engineering
This phase is the majority of our work: analyzing your building and designing the strengthening systems you selected based on our recommendations provided in the initial investigation.
Our plans are very detailed; this helps you get the most accurate bids from contractors who will install the work. The current guidelines available for earthquake retrofit work provide four different connection details for existing construction. We have developed dozens of details, with variations on each that amount to hundreds of different conditions that we have designed for. We have seen original construction methods that have not been used for generations, and devised methods to strengthen them. A good earthquake strengthening design includes a lot more than simply nailing plywood on the cripple walls under a building--if it was simple, Mr. Matteson would not have written a 270-page book on the subject.

Construction Phase Services
If your house or aparment building is worth an engineered earthquake retrofit design, it's worth verifying that the retrofit system was constructed according to the design. "Structural Observation" helps assure that construction meets the design intent. Municipal building departments sometimes require "Special Inspection" for certain work components. Special inspections are above and beyond the inspections provided by the city or county building inspector, and are carried out by the design engineer or by a third-party testing agency.
Since the sequence of construction, weather, unforeseen conditions (often in the form of damage caused by termites and decay) etc., can affect the number of site visits needed, predicting costs of construction phase services is difficult. For a typical residential earthquake strengthening project, owners should allow at least an additional 20 percent of the design fees as a guide for the construction phase services.

Mr. Matteson has written two books related to earthquake retrofits; both of them have won awards from the Northern California division and the overall state level of the Structural Engineers Association of California. He currently works as a paid subconsultant to the Applied Technology Council and the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center as a member of teams developing strengthening guidelines for wood framed buildings. The work is funded through FEMA, the California Earthquake Authority, and San Francisco's Earthquake Safety Implementation Program.

Many west coast homes built before 1985 do not survive earthquakes very well. Most houses of this era were built over a crawlspace beneath the first floor framing. The main floor of the house is supported on short “cripple-walls” that typically are not strong enough to brace against the shaking forces generated by an earthquake. The most devastating earthquake damage occurs to wood-framed homes when the cripple walls collapse and the house falls several feet to the ground. The image at right shows a house that fell about four feet (note the stairs leading up to the porch, and how the top of the front door is about three feet above the porch).

The image at left shows a house where the floor framing sat atop concrete footings; in this case the framing was not connected to the footings adequately, and the entire house slid off of them.


Other common weaknesses are the connection between the house’s foundation to the cripple wall or between the cripple wall and the main floor framing.


Further problems include the strength of the foundation itself and other factors that usually have to do with the floor plan or shape of the house.

A typical retrofit involves three basic tasks: Connecting the cripple wall to the footings; strengthening the cripple wall; and connecting the main floor framing to the top of the cripple wall.

Streamlined, simple design:
The philosophy behind this approach is that doing something, even if is not an all-encompassing design, is better than doing nothing at all. A retrofit using this “bare-bones” approach may cost $15,000 or so for the design and construction, and it might reduce earthquake damage by 80 percent. A very detailed analysis of the home and design & construction costs to strengthen every structural component that may be undersized by today’s standards could easily cost $100,000 and might reduce damage by 95 percent. Most people cannot afford to spend that much money, and would simply do nothing if given only the thorough retrofit option. Furthermore, the huge increase in cost for a thorough retrofit over the streamlined retrofit does not result in a huge reduction in expected damage. This makes spending the extra money for a thorough retrofit a relatively poor investment. Note that the preceding examples are estimates only, and no one can guarantee or predict any level of damage that might result from an earthquake.

Several San Francisco Bay Area cities are developing a “standard” plan for earthquake retrofits that presents simplified designs for houses that meet certain shape and size requirements. As of 2015, the city of Berkeley offers a tax rebate to new homeowners who proceed with earthquake retrofits. Other cities may offer discounted permit fees for earthquake retrofit work. Typically to qualify for the rebate, your home must either meet the requirements of the standard plan or the retrofit must be designed by an engineer or architect. Berkeley accepts the streamlined approach as an acceptable design that is eligible for the tax rebates.

Thorough, “complete” analysis and design:
Some home owners want more than the minimum protection of a streamlined design. In this case, engineers can perform as detailed an analysis and design as the home owner can afford.

A site visit by the engineer can give home owners a better idea of where to spend their money if they want to go beyond the minimum design; perhaps bracing the walls that flank a garage door, or anchoring patio roof covers, or tying two wings of the house together. Engineers often find plywood siding on newer houses that was not nailed correctly, such as that shown in the failure at right.

California has only recently adopted statewide standards for residential earthquake retrofits as The California Existing Building Code (Title 24, Part 10). This code section shows only a small fraction of the conditions that occur in the field; contractors or engineers must invent their own details for other framing situations. Sometimes the invented connections do not consider all of forces and movement that must be resisted by an effective retrofit. There are no special training or licensing requirements for contractors who engage in retrofit work. Many home owners spent thousands of dollars on retrofit work that will not protect their homes at all, or certainly not as well expected.

The length of angle-iron with pairs of bolts at top and bottom (shown at left) was intended to prevent earthquake damage. This sort of connection is untested and most structural engineers believe that it is very poor. The shiny silver connectors at the left of the image were installed to "retrofit the retrofit." These new connectors have been tested extensively and are accepted by almost all building departments; angle irons are not. There are many other sorts of connections that will not perform as hoped in an earthquake.

The following are only rough estimates; each building is different, and may have other issues such as termite damage that require repairs before an earthquake retrofit can be effective.

Design Costs:
The approximate costs to design an under-floor retrofit vary from about $4,000 upwards. This cost varies depending on the contractor's experience (contractors who specialize in earthquake retrofits can execute a design more effectively, therefore requiring less extensive details on the engineered drawings), number of stories, building outline (many jogs in and out complicate the design), slope of the building site, and other factors.

Construction Costs:
For a basic under-floor retrofit in the SF Bay Area, construction costs are approximately three to five percent of the value of the building (as of 2015).

Just before I graduated from college, I bought a home in a planned unit development in Paso Robles. The house has a concrete tile roof. Tile roofs add a lot of weight to a house, and increase the earthquake forces on them. About 60 other units in my development are virtually identical; the garages have narrow walls on either side of the garage door.

Eventually I changed jobs and moved three hours away, but kept the house as a rental. One time between tenants I took some initial steps to strengthen the walls that flank the garage door. I got about half-way through the process before my ‘vacation’ was over and I had to return to work. Soon the place was rented out to a professional roofer—I had installed about $25 worth of hardware, but I never completed the retrofit.

On December 22, 2003, the San Simeon earthquake hit. I called my tenant, the roofer, just after the earthquake to see how things were. He marveled, “It’s really weird—all the other houses on the block had the ridge tiles on their garage roofs thrown about three feet to one side, but not a single roof tile moved on this house!” And that was with an incomplete retrofit.

The image at right shows narrow walls that did not have the strength needed to prevent severe damage to a garage. Current building codes require much greater strength than the tall narrow walls shown. A fairly inexpensive retrofit could greatly reduce the need for extensive repairs after a quake.

Many condos were built in the 1960’s and 70’s. Rows of identical units provided economical housing. However, even though the buildings may have met the building codes in effect at the time, experience has shown that some common types of condominium buildings from that era do not survive earthquakes very well. Enormous advances in earthquake-resistant construction methods have occurred in the last 20 years. Also a huge variety of construction hardware specifically intended to resist earthquakes is available today that did not exist 20 years ago.

The image at right shows a typical wood-framed condominium building. The front wall has many openings for garage and entry doors. The rear wall of the building is similar, with large openings for patio doors and windows. These openings leave little wall length to resist earthquake forces.



The photo at left shows what used to be two 2-story buildings. The building on the left in the photo collapsed because the lower floor front wall did not have adequate strength to resist earthquake forces.