California college abruptly closes its biggest building over seismic safety concerns
Professors emptying out their offices and classrooms, hallways lined with moving boxes and carts, students and staff given just a days notice to get out.
It's the unexpected evacuation of Davies Hall at American River College in Sacramento County due to concerns over earthquakes.
"There could be catastrophic failure in this building," said Lisa Cardoza, ARC's president.
Cardoza says Davies Hall was built in 1967 and a recent structural survey shows it does not meet current state seismic safety standards. Its "lift slab" architectural design could crumble if there was an earthquake.
"With the information that we had, any event could potentially bring this building down and we just couldn't take that risk," Cardoza said.
The shutdown surprised many on campus Thursday.
"I've never really noticed or felt earthquakes, so I never thought it would be a huge concern here," said student Von Shaw.
Davies Hall is the college's biggest building, with 80 faculty offices and 200 classes here this semester.
"This really is impacting everyone across campus," Cardoza said.
For the next two weeks, all classes that had been here will now be held online.
After that, officials hope to find new spaces on campus for the classes to come back and finish out the semester.
Professors are now scrambling to change their lesson plans.
"It's going to be pretty chaotic for two weeks at least," said ARC professor Geraldine Machado. "My initial response was feeling overwhelmed. And then I put that aside and said, 'OK, let's problem solve this.'"
Campus officials say the fate of Davies Hall is still unknown.
"There won't be an answer or solution in the next weeks or months. We think this is a year's long process," Cardoza said.
Options include trying to retrofit Davies Hall with seismic reinforcements, but that could cost millions of dollars – and the president tells us it could simply be cheaper to tear it down and build a new building.
