This is a reprint of an article published in the Los Angeles Times Sunday June 17, 1973

LOS ANGELES TIMES

NEW CERAMIC FOAM TO HOLD CITY HALL TOGETHER

Times Urban Affairs Writer

Since its dedication April 26,1928, the lofty Los Angeles City Hall has seemed durable-a fitting seat for municipal government.

An examination of the earthquake damage has revealed voids-empty spaces of varying sizes-behind the building’s exterior terra-cotta facing.

The spaces should have been solid. But crumpled newspapers, paper sacks and sawdust-all apparently dating from the time of construction-have been found where brick and mortar should be.

Workers repairing the earthquake damage say the voids were no accident.

The material is shot into the walls. It expands, bonds, hardens like rock and leaves the walls tougher than before the earthquake. Or 45 years ago.

Injecting this type of bonding -hardening material has never been tried before and it could open a new field in earthquake damage repair and building restoration.

Repairing City Hall would have simply involved getting the building back to its pre-earthquake condition.

"But we’re doing much more than that", said Ronald Galletti, project manager for VTN Corp., the Orange County-based engineering-architectural-planning firm directing the work.

"Restoration suggests that something that should have been there is not. We’re trying to put it back together again. This is the only way the building could have been saved".

The project is under the overall control of Army Corps of Engineers. Funds are being made available by the U.S. Office of Emergency Preparedness under it’s disaster assistance program.

The city did the interior earthquake repairs itself. The federal government provided $441,639.06 for the work. It ranged from fixing 20,000 square feet of cracked plaster to replacing 150 panes of glass and repainting 50,000 square feet of walls.

There was no earthquake damage to City Hall’s structural steel frame.

But the exterior repair work is a major undertaking. Coupled with restoring the building, it is costing the Office of Emergency Preparedness $2.78 million.

Of that, $2.1 million is going to Lundeen Coatings Associates of Los Angeles and M.M. Sundt Construction Co. of Tucson, which are doing the actual restoration work.

The Corps of Engineers awarded four other contracts-all with VTN for a total of about $175,000.

The first was for an investigation of damage to City Hall’s exterior walls.

More than 400 photographs were taken-some from helicopters-to locate and chart the earthquake cracks.

They appeared on enlarged photographs from the fifth to twenty sixth floors. Some were large enough to see through. The wind whistled through others.

The earthquake had shaken chunks of terra-cotta tile and brick from the building. In addition some floor-to-ceiling wall panels had begun to separate.

VTN then conducted a test program of core drilling into the walls to determine the best repair and restoration method.

The coring revealed the extent of the wall’s hollowness. X-rays and tapping with a hammer substantiated it.

These floor-to-ceiling wall sections, some 40 feet long, cover a total of about 2,000 square feet of City Hall’s exterior surface. They contain a total of about 700 pieces of terra-cotta tile. New tiles are being manufactured to replace them.

The restoration job also has required construction of a costly outside elevator. For years the lack of enough elevators has been a notorious City Hall deficiency.

Such deficiencies were not apparent to the thousands who turned out to admire City Hall when it was dedicated in 1928.

The observance lasted three days. Sid Grauman, the Hollywood impresario, staged a lavish historical pageant.

It was Los Angeles’ fourth City Hall, a proud "white monumental monolith" representing "the spirit of a forward-looking people".

A year and a half later there were rumblings of trouble. Mayor John C. Porter, then just taking office, complained that excessive prices had been paid for work in the new City Hall.

He used the charge - and similar accusations involving other public improvement projects - in successfully removing a city commissioner who had supervised City Hall’s construction.

Yet despite the mayor’s charges, records showed that the $5 million voted for the building more than covered the construction costs.

In his pre-restoration survey of City Hall, Galletti went beyond the physical structure itself. He said he found enough to know that he was working with a building that was "significantly different than the plans called for...".

Obviously, he said, the workmen took shortcuts. Hauling brick and mortar to the upper floors for "rubble" fill between the outer tiles and brick "back-up" wall was expensive. Money could be saved by not doing it, he said.

While most of the hollows were found to be completely empty, some were stuffed with a variety of rubbish-much of it period newspapers-including a 1927 copy of Illustrated Daily News containing advertisements for Norma Talmadge’s Criterion Theater and a Bebe Daneils movie at Grauman’s Egyptian.

VTN’s investigation showed that injecting the walls to give them more strength and make them solid seemed like the best-and least costly-solution to City Hall’s problems.

Several filler materials were tried. All involved multi-injection steps, a costly process.

Galletti, who has been working on the City Hall project since July, 1971, required something stronger, something that could be pumped into the walls in a one-step operation.

Epiceram®,- fast-setting, flame resistant and odorless - was the answer.

Fifty percent ceramic, the special purpose material contains a hardener and a resin. It has an expansion capacity of about 10 to 1, forming into what looks like solid shaving cream if it is not restricted.

However, the less its expansion, the greater its strength. Injected into City Hall’s walls, it is restricted to an expansion of about two and one-half to one or three to one. It bonds to almost anything, including, especially for City Hall’s needs, Terra-Cotta, brick, and concrete, as well as to itself.

An automatic mixing, pumping, metering and injection machine was built especially to shoot the material into the walls. It is injected through small holes drilled into the building’s terra-cotta skin.

By the time the project is completed in March 1974, an estimated 150,000 holes will have been drilled into City Hall.

All have to be patched, as an architectural cosmetic treatment, to match the terra-cotta.

In addition to the injection work, nine huge exterior wall panels, all severely damaged by the earthquake, will have to be torn out and replaced.

But Ralph Hunnicott, project manager for the Lundeen-Sundt joint venture, said the building, despite its failings, is not unsafe. Considering the "relaxed" building codes that prevailed in the 1920s, it is well constructed, he said.

When the restoration project is finished, the city will have a stronger City Hall than it did 45 years ago. The foaming ceramic is giving the building strength it never had.

As Frank Bonoff, an engineer writing in a city Bureau of Engineering letter put it:

"If another earthquake hits City Hall, one thing can be expected. Even if the whole building collapses, the Epiceram® will stay in place".

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