Northridge quake threw UCLA sports a curve
One year later, Wooden
Center still recovering
from trembler damages
By Lawrence Ma
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
The game must go on …
During most meteorological events Mother Nature can muster, the
games do usually proceed, rain, sleet, snow, or whatever.
But a year ago today, Mother Nature came up with a giant temblor
that knocked the UCLA sports community out of the routine, for at
least a little while.
The Morgan Center, where the Athletic Department is located,
lost 75 percent of its ceiling. Debris lay strewn everywhere on
Morgan’s second floor and pipes in the ceiling were exposed.
Coaches, counselors, and administrators took turns to move their
offices down stairs as the repairs went on.
The Men’s Gym, where the UCLA men’s volleyball team practiced,
suffered damages to its facade and roof. At the Wooden Center,
glass fell from the facade near the entrance and Yates Gym, where
the UCLA gymnastics teams practiced.
A few ceiling tiles fell onto the floor of Collins Court, where
men’s volleyball matches, women’s basketball games, and gymnastic
meets were scheduled, not to mention seemingly thousands of pick-up
basketball games and intramural contests.
Despite the damages, the games did go on. Men’s volleyball moved
practice to Pauley Pavilion, which went through the quake
unscathed. The gymnastics teams drove out to Broadway Gymnastic
School in Santa Monica for practices.
Most UCLA teams were scheduled to compete on the road during the
week following the quake and the Bruins went on to compete right on
schedule. The one team that was home — the men’s basketball team
–practiced on the day after the quake and on the next day, 12,832
showed up at Pauley Pavilion to see the No. 1 Bruins defeat
Arizona, 74-66.
Meanwhile, the repairs continued back home, particularly at the
Wooden Center.
"At the time, we thought it was mostly windows and ceilings,"
said Dennis Koehne, the assistant manager of the Wooden Center. "We
have a lot of dropped acoustical ceilings here and all that stuff
was taken care off within a period of six or seven weeks, including
all the windows."
As the work continued, Koehne and his crew actually found more
problems to address. Way up on top of the student lobby, the
engineers found that some of the framing had twisted.
"Just now in this past week, we started to get all the painting
and plastering done," he said. "And in the course of things, we
found some problems with the frames along the walls of Yates Gym,
which is where the building’s expansion joint is and where two
parts of the building kind of slam together.
"The engineers are still trying to figure out how much work it’s
going to take to get that fixed. It’s either some inadequacies in
the way it was welded or because of the weirdness of the earthquake
that caused that. It’s just something when the plasterers went up,
they noticed that some of the metal had twisted. We’ll see if that
in fact carries some significance or not."
Wherever else Koehne’s crew could go up and inspect, everything
about the structure of the Wooden Center checked out fine. Collins
Court, which seats 2,500 spectators, is in fact in the best
shape.
"Collins Court was absolutely the safest place to be," Koehne
said. "If we ever have another earthquake of that kind of
magnitude, I hope I’m in here."
As for Yates Gym, the broken glass has been replaced with glass
that conforms to the current building codes, which differ from
those in 1983, when the Wooden Center was built.
The Wooden Center reopened just four days after the quake, which
was good news for all students, from those looking to work up a
sweat to the varsity teams looking to practice and compete. The
Wooden Center receives an average of 700,000 visitors a year and it
averages 4,000 in the month of January.
A year removed from the Northridge quake, Koehne is confident
that the Wooden Center will make it through just fine.
"Our glass is made of a little different material and it’s hung
a little differently," he said. "We feel very confident that even
if a bad one hits, we’ll be in good shape."