Few experiences are more terrifying than a devastating earthquake. One moment, everything is fine. In the next, the world is literally shaking apart. For years, “the big one” has been fabled to hit the Los Angeles area. Despite people taking greater precautions as a whole, some buildings don’t have all of the safeguards they could. These safeguards are necessary to keep a building as well as the people inside it as safe and secure as possible. In this blog, we’ll explain how our earthquake retrofit company works and how we can benefit you.
The necessity of an Earthquake Retrofit Company
We tell people that it’s important to bring in a retrofit company if your home was built before 1979. That’s when many of the major safeguards began to be implemented. Homes before then just didn’t have them, which makes them more susceptible to earthquake damage. If your home has a wood frame, you should bring someone in, too. Wood frames aren’t nearly as strong as other kinds of frames. They may need buttressing so as to withstand an earthquake.
How Earthquake Retrofitting Works
When you bring in our earthquake retrofitting professionals, they’ll look at your building and figure out the best way to help in the event of a massive earthquake. Often, what we do is we use anchor bolts, sheer paneling and other kinds of connections to secure the home. They can make your home that much stronger and more secure. Many times, we encounter homes that already feature sheer paneling, anchor bolts and the like, but they do tend to wear over time. We replace them so that your home is ready for anything that comes.
Raised Foundations
For many of homes, a basement is more than just a basement: it’s a place for the kids to play, it’s an office for a secondary source of income, it’s a storage room, a study, and so many other things. However, homes with a raised foundation (ones that have a basement underneath them, a crawl space, or something similar) are at risk of sliding off of their foundation in the event of an earthquake. We can perform a brace and bold seismic retrofit to keep that from happening.
Earthquake retrofitting is just one of the many retrofitting services that we can provide. To learn more about how we can make your building better, call us at (818) 629-0923 or head to our site.
