Earthquake symposium on risk of collapsing buildings stirs some controversy - LA Times

By Rong-Gong Lin II

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UCLA conference brings together seismic experts and structural engineers to assess retrofit needs. But some see a conflict in sponsorship by firms that stand to benefit from construction work. The story of the Theme Building will take center stage Wednesday at a symposium at UCLA called "Imminent Danger," which will bring in speakers from Caltech, LAX and UCLA to talk about the threat from and economic impact of building collapse in an earthquake. But the symposium has provoked some controversy among other structural engineers who say the event is being cosponsored by companies — Miyamoto, a structural engineering company with offices on the West Coast and in Tokyo, and Sun Valley-based Tower General Contractors — with a financial interest in drumming up more business for seismic retrofit contracts. (The third cosponsor is UCLA's George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation; all three entities worked on the LAX renovation project.)

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  • Rong-Gong Lin II (2010), "Earthquake symposium on risk of collapsing buildings stirs some controversy - LA Times," https://datacenterhub.org/resources/2116.

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