Bay Area hospitals race to rebuild, facing new earthquake standards

Bay Area hospitals are racing to rebuild, retrofit or replace aging facilities before California's 2030 deadline requiring them to withstand major earthquakes and continue treating patients. With 45% of hospitals noncompliant and a 63% chance of a major quake by 2036, executives warn of reduced access to care and job losses due to the high costs of compliance.

Getting your Trinity Audio //trinityaudio.ai player ready...Health systems across the Bay Area are racing to rebuild, retrofit or replace aging hospitals before a 2030 state deadline that requires medical centers not just to survive a major earthquake, but to keep treating patients after one. In 2030, California state health regulators will enforce stricter rules for structural integrity and resilience at hospitals. The rules were passed in the 1990s. With less than four years until the deadline, hospital executives are in construction mode with new hospitals in planning phases or already in construction, and retrofits are underway across medical campuses. “Every major healthcare provider in Northern California is doing something as it relates to seismic upgrade,” said Nick Palumbo, a healthcare project executive for the construction company Swinerton. In San Jose, Kaiser Permanente is building a new medical center to replace a facility that could not meet the new standards. Stanford Medicine is retrofitting hospital buildings on its Peninsula campus and as part of a $200 million expansion of its Tri-Valley campus in Pleasanton. Sutter Health has also proposed building Emeryville’s tallest tower https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/02/20/sutter-health-to-build-1-billion-emeryville-medical-campus-averting-alta-bates-closure/ , a $1 billion, 17-story hospital, to replace Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, where executives said seismic upgrades weren’t feasible. Hospitals are largely responsible for financing seismic construction upgrades, and the California Hospital Association has balked at the cost. Statewide, hospitals have spent $60 billion to retrofit buildings or build new health centers to come into compliance, said spokesperson David Simon, and another $75 billion of investment is needed. “The risk for access to care is grave,” Simon wrote in an email. “Hospitals will be forced to make difficult choices about reducing service, resulting in decreased access to care for patients and loss of jobs.” Some small and rural hospitals are eligible for three-year extensions. Most health centers will be required to comply with seismic standards — or transition facilities away from their uses as general acute hospitals. Executives have found little sympathy from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who vetoed a bill in 2024 allowing all hospitals to apply for a five-year extension https://www.gov.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/SB-1432-Veto-Message.pdf . Structural engineering groups and nurse associations opposed granting hospitals more time to comply. “California hospitals have known for 30 years that they face a 2030 deadline to be fully compliant,” Newsom wrote in his veto message. “The question is not if California will experience a significant earthquake, it’s when.” As of last year, 45% of California hospitals were not compliant with the 2030 seismic safety standards, according to a trade publication https://hconews.com/2025/02/27/navigating-californias-hcai-2030-seismic-compliance-for-hospitals/ that analyzed California Department of Health Care Access and Information data. “The hospitals that are taking the proper steps currently, and not trying to wait until the last minute, are aware that this process takes years,” Palumbo said. That risk is especially acute in the Bay Area, which has a 63% chance of an earthquake https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/05/23/the-next-big-earthquake-when-is-the-bay-area-due/ with a magnitude 6.7 or greater between now and 2036, according to the Berkeley Seismology Lab. In the past, hospitals have collapsed, with devastating consequences, during earthquakes in California. In 1971, a 6.6 magnitude earthquake devastated health centers in the Los Angeles area. Four buildings collapsed at a general hospital in Sylmar, killing 47 people. https://sanfernandosun.com/2021/02/10/time-hasnt-dimmed-memories-of-sylmar-quake/ The Kaiser Permanente hospital under construction in San Jose is slated to open in 2029. The 300-bed complex includes a 650,000-square-foot hospital, twice the size of the existing San Jose Medical Center, a spokesperson said. State data shows the old hospital’s structural systems — including its beams, columns and foundations — didn’t comply with the 2030 requirements, nor do its mechanical, electrical and plumbing components. “These buildings do not significantly jeopardize life, but may not be repairable or functional following strong ground motion,” according to the health care information agency. The new hospital “will replace our 1974 facility and is engineered to meet California’s strictest seismic safety standards,” spokesperson Elissa Harrington wrote in an email. It is engineered to operate off-the-grid for 72 hours if needed, she said, with onsite power generation and water storage. Harrington declined to share the cost of the new hospital. In 2024, a Kaiser executive estimated https://sanjosespotlight.com/kaiser-permanente-to-replace-old-san-jose-hospital-health-care-medical-center/ :~:text=Kaiser%20Construction%20Projects%20Director%20Lee,hundreds%20of%20millions%20of%20dollars. it would cost “hundreds of millions” of dollars. At Stanford Health Care’s campus on the Peninsula, construction workers are retrofitting buildings that date to the 1950s and 1960s, said Rick Millitello, vice president of construction. State data shows the structural integrity of buildings varies widely on the sprawling campus. A spokesperson declined to share the costs borne by Stanford. A plant generating steam for sterilization — vital for keeping a hospital running after a quake — has the highest structural rating and is already in compliance with the stricter standards, the data shows, deemed “reasonably capable of providing services to the public following strong ground motion.” Other facilities must be upgraded or transitioned to other uses. Millitello said the central core, a wing attached to the main hospital building that houses X-ray imaging devices, “is in the process of being made code compliant,” with upgrades to its structural elements, wiring and plumbing. Elsewhere, patient rooms are being relocated from a decades-old facility, he said, that wasn’t feasible to retrofit. “Now that 2030 is approaching, all hospitals within California must be seismically compliant by 2030, or they need to remove those buildings from acute care services,” he said. “That’s the ramification if hospitals do not comply.”