OK, that's an exaggeration. The State Capitol and the City-County Building are examples of historic buildings that have been retrofitted, at great public cost, to better withstand a major earthquake. Over the years, building codes have been strengthened.

But there still are many public buildings made of unreinforced masonry that could collapse or be severely damaged in a major temblor. Some of those are schools.

The Utah Seismic Safety Commission estimates that if a 7.5 Richter Magnitude quake were to occur in the Salt Lake City area, 7,600 people would die and approximately $18 billion would be lost to physical damage and economic disruption.

To help get a handle of the size of the risk, the commission is about to compile an inventory of public unreinforced masonry buildings in the state, including schools. The Legislature passed a resolution earlier this year ordering the commission to undertake the inventory. However, it did not provide funding, and it killed a bill, including a $500,000 appropriation, that would have set up a public school seismic safety committee to evaluate just public schools.

That leaves the commission and some public-spirited structural engineers to patch together a method, perhaps using federal grants, to complete the inventory.

Because no major quake has occurred on the Wasatch Fault since the Mormon settlement of the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, it is hard for people to get their heads around the earthquake threat here. But geophysicists assure us that a big earthquake is not a matter of if but when. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has ranked Utah sixth in the nation in projected annualized earthquake loss.

That doesn't mean Utahns must run out and replace every unreinforced masonry building immediately. In the first place, that's not possible because of cost. In the second place, it makes more economic sense to improve seismic strength as old building are remodeled or replaced.

The Salt Lake City School District is well along in this process, which it began with a $70 million bond issue the voters passed in 1993. But other school districts have not come as far. And without an inventory, it is impossible to assess the risk and prioritize projects.