- Program would have provided $33 million in grants to retrofit seismically vulnerable apartments.
In a
letter dated Wednesday, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) urged U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to reinstate the funds, which would’ve been used to strengthen between 750 and 1,500 apartment buildings.
The grants — originally green-lit through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is part of Noem’s department — were meant to help retrofit the kind of vulnerable apartment buildings that crushed people to death when they collapsed during California’s last major urban earthquakes.
Autopsy reports indicate that a number of those killed in these apartment collapses during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and the 1994 Northridge earthquake died from suffocation. The weight of debris made it impossible for them to breathe.
Accounts from the collapse of the three-story, 163-unit Northridge Meadows apartment building in 1994 describe some victims in ground-floor units slowly dying in their beds, not able to
breathe as the weight of the upper two stories pressed upon them.
[These funds are part of a larger program (now entirely cancelled) funding work in many states: Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities [BRIC]]
BRIC was originally created in 2018 — during President Trump’s first term — through the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, according to the
American Society of Civil Engineers, which supported the program. The goal, that organization says, was “to ensure a stable funding source to support” projects that seek to reduce the risk from future natural disasters.
[FEMA statement:] “The BRIC program was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program. It was more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters."
