Unknown Grant Program Can Help Protect Your Home From Earthquakes, But Desperately Needs To Find More Contractors In Humboldt County To Do The Work | The lost coastal hotspot

Following the December earthquake of one home in Rio Del. Photo: Ryan Burns.

One of the things last month’s earthquake showed—as earthquakes tend to be in Humboldt, every decade or so—is the importance of retrofitting the beautiful old buildings that make up the bulk of the county’s housing stock. When the big corporations strike, they always knock some old buildings off their foundations.

The December 20 earthquake was the most destructive in a while. It rendered 69 buildings in Rio del Rio del uninhabitable at least temporarily. Most of them had old, unimproved foundations.

This is a serious problem in Humboldt County. The Census Bureau’s most recent edition of the American Community Survey estimates that 59.4 percent of occupied housing units in the county were built before 1980, the year California instituted seismic safety standards for new construction. This is slightly higher than the state average (56.3 percent) and much higher than the national average (49.9 percent).

But it’s worse than that. As much as 15.4 percent of the county’s housing stock is very old—built before 1940. That’s twice the area of ​​the state as a whole. And the North Coast is the most seismically active place in the contiguous United States, and the really big place — the giant Cascadia Subduction Zone — is due for, oh, any year now.

There is a way to fortify old homes to better withstand large earthquakes. Called the “Earthquake Brace and Bolt,” it involves attaching the structure of the house to its foundation. There are two problems with that: It’s not particularly cheap, and it requires you to have a concrete foundation to get started. Some Humboldt homes don’t, but many do—and bracing and screws can save them.

“Every home in Rio Del that I’ve driven away from their foundation could have benefited from an EBB retrofit,” Janelle Maffei, a trained engineer who is now the California Earthquake Authority’s mitigation officer, said this morning.

Illustration of Earthquake Base + Bolt House Model from CRMP on Vimeo.

Maffei is in Humboldt this week because the Earthquake Authority—a semi-autonomous state-created nonprofit that provides earthquake insurance to homeowners—has a program that can make these retrofits and supports more affordable for homeowners. The authority offers $3,000 grants to people who want to bolster their owner-occupied homes, and even larger grants to people who meet certain income qualifications. These grants represent a large percentage of the cost of doing the work (provided, again, that the homeowner already has a tangible foundation).

the problem? Humboldt County does not have enough contractors registered to perform this work. As of this moment, there are only three local contractors registered with the authority, and they need more to meet demand. Mavi says it has 169 local people signed up for the grant program, and three contractors isn’t enough to serve them all.

That’s a little puzzling, Maffei says, given the turnout in other parts of California.

“The nice thing is that we’ve been able to provide this steady stream of income,” she says. “There are contractors who do this all they do. There are contractors who make this their industry.”

So here she is recruiting new contractors in Humboldt County to join the program, and she’s also listening to contractors to hear about any barriers they might face that would prevent them from joining. Earlier this afternoon, she met with the Humboldt Builders Exchange and made her offer. They had a “positive discussion,” she said, and that the builders asked a lot of great questions. She hopes more contractors will sign on.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in the grant program as a homeowner, there’s a bit of bad news: It’s currently closed to new applications for this year. But they will open applications again sometime in the coming months. You can sign up on this site to get their mailing list and be notified when this happens. If you’re in an older dock-and-post home, givers can also afford to put a concrete foundation—and, of course, cement your home with that new foundation.

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