Communities take pains to keep children safe for the minutes it takes them to get to and from school -- with traffic signs, yellow-painted buses and guards at crosswalks.
And that's what makes it so puzzling, say a group of earthquake experts, why even the simplest steps have not been taken to make sure that an earthquake doesn't level the buildings where children spend hours a day.
That concern is behind a three-year effort to size up how Utah's school buildings would weather a big earthquake and to draft a priority list of schools that need attention most.
And, on Friday, the Utah House reconsidered the Utah School Seismic Hazard Inventory, HB72, and sent it on a 50-to-18 vote to the Senate for consideration in the final days of the 2010 Legislature.
"It's something long overdue," said sponsoring Rep. Larry Wiley, a West Valley City Democrat.
Wiley, a building inspector whose bill is backed by the Utah PTA, sponsored successful legislation 4 years ago to inventory state buildings for seismic safety. The work was done by volunteers from the Structural Engineers Association of Utah, just as Wiley's latest bill proposes to do for the schools.
An informal survey four years ago found that 58 percent of about 800 school buildings were constructed before the modern seismic standards started being used in the mid-1970's. With about 560,000 students in public and charter school buildings, assessing earthquake-worthiness and tackling a statewide to-do list is urgent, earthquake experts say.
"It's critical," said Roger Evans, chairman of the Utah Seismic Safety Commission, "because you can see what happened in Haiti and Chile can happen on the Wasatch Front someday when we have the Big One. It's a real issue for all our school kids."
The possibility that an earthquake could kill Utah schoolchildren has always been on the radar for commission members, but it became grimly real when members studied video of schools crumbling in the Sichuan Province earthquake of 2008.
But some lawmakers and school advocates have failed to see the value of the priority list. And Wiley failed in this year's first attempt to win House passage for HB72 on Wednesday.
Why make schools look for hazards they can't afford to address now, legislators wondered? Why raise potential liability issues? Why create a statewide inventory when many districts already have done their own?
"This isn't any kind of a mandate that says they have to repair all that, but at least we know where they stand on it," said Rep. Curtis Oda, R-Clearfield, who was one of the legislators who reversed his position on the bill after opposing it in Wednesday's vote.
Rep. Mike Noel, R-Kanab, also changed his thinking on the bill. He reminded lawmakers that about one-third of the $186 million spent upgrading the State Capitol a few years ago was to enhance its seismic safety.
Sen. Jon Greiner, R-Ogden, is the bill's Senate sponsor, and supporters hope the bill doesn't wind up in the legislative rubble once more.
"You never know until it's over," said Evans, noting that time is short. "We're just keeping our fingers crossed."
Christian Vanderhooft contributed to this article.
Modern building codes have played a big role in reducing deaths from large earthquakes. Seismic sensibilities are credited for reducing casualties in last weekend's earthquake in Chile, where about 279 are believed to have lost their lives in the 8.8-magnitude temblor. In contrast, the 7.0-magnitude quake that struck Haiti in January is blamed for 232,517 deaths and made it one of the ten deadliest natural disasters in history. A 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, resulted in an estimated 68,712 deaths, many of them children who were in six schools that collapsed in the 8.0-magnitude shaking. The Big One on Utah's Wasatch Front could be as much as 7.5 magnitude, with an estimate of up to 500 students among the dead.
