{"id":378246,"date":"2026-06-28T13:44:10","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T13:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/378246\/"},"modified":"2026-06-28T13:44:10","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T13:44:10","slug":"bay-area-hospitals-race-to-rebuild-facing-new-earthquake-standards-the-mercury-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/378246\/","title":{"rendered":"Bay Area hospitals race to rebuild, facing new earthquake standards \u2013 The Mercury News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Health systems across the Bay Area are racing to rebuild, retrofit or replace aging hospitals before a 2030 state deadline that requires medical centers not just to survive a major earthquake, but to keep treating patients after one.<\/p>\n

In 2030, California state health regulators will enforce stricter rules for structural integrity and resilience at hospitals. The rules were passed in the 1990s. With less than four years until the deadline, hospital executives are in construction mode with new hospitals in planning phases or already in construction, and retrofits are underway across medical campuses.<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery major healthcare provider in Northern California is doing something as it relates to seismic upgrade,\u201d said Nick Palumbo, a healthcare project executive for the construction company Swinerton.<\/p>\n

In San Jose, Kaiser Permanente is building a new medical center to replace a facility that could not meet the new standards. Stanford Medicine is retrofitting hospital buildings on its Peninsula campus and as part of a $200 million expansion of its Tri-Valley campus in Pleasanton. Sutter Health has also proposed building Emeryville\u2019s tallest tower<\/a>, a $1 billion, 17-story hospital, to replace Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, where executives said seismic upgrades weren\u2019t feasible.<\/p>\n

\"ExistingExisting office buildings at 5300 Chiron Way (lower left) and 5555 Hollis Street (center) that will be part of a Sutter Health campus with a newly constructed medical center (not pictured) in Emeryville.<\/p>\n

(Sutter Health)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hospitals are largely responsible for financing seismic construction upgrades, and the California Hospital Association has balked at the cost. Statewide, hospitals have spent $60 billion to retrofit buildings or build new health centers to come into compliance, said spokesperson David Simon, and another $75 billion of investment is needed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe risk for access to care is grave,\u201d Simon wrote in an email. \u201cHospitals will be forced to make difficult choices about reducing service, resulting in decreased access to care for patients and loss of jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some small and rural hospitals are eligible for three-year extensions. Most health centers will be required to comply with seismic standards \u2014 or transition facilities away from their uses as general acute hospitals.<\/p>\n

Executives have found little sympathy from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who vetoed a bill in 2024 allowing all hospitals to apply for a five-year extension<\/a>. Structural engineering groups and nurse associations opposed granting hospitals more time to comply.<\/p>\n

\u201cCalifornia hospitals have known for 30 years that they face a 2030 deadline to be fully compliant,\u201d Newsom wrote in his veto message. \u201cThe question is not if California will experience a significant earthquake, it\u2019s when.\u201d<\/p>\n

As of last year, 45% of California hospitals were not compliant with the 2030 seismic safety standards, according to a trade publication<\/a> that analyzed California Department of Health Care Access and Information data.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hospitals that are taking the proper steps currently, and not trying to wait until the last minute, are aware that this process takes years,\u201d Palumbo said.<\/p>\n

That risk is especially acute in the Bay Area, which has a 63% chance of an earthquake<\/a> with a magnitude 6.7 or greater between now and 2036, according to the Berkeley Seismology Lab.<\/p>\n

\"TheThe 1971 San Fernando earthquake (also known as Sylmar earthquake) struck the San Fernando Valley near Sylmar at 6:00:55 a.m. PST on February 9, 1971, with a magnitude of 6.6. This scene is of the rescue efforts at the collapsed Vetreans Hospital in Sylmar where most of the 64 deaths occurred. (Daily News File Photos.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the past, hospitals have collapsed, with devastating consequences, during earthquakes in California. In 1971, a 6.6 magnitude earthquake devastated health centers in the Los Angeles area. Four buildings collapsed at a general hospital in Sylmar, killing 47 people.<\/a><\/p>\n

The Kaiser Permanente hospital under construction in San Jose is slated to open in 2029. The 300-bed complex includes a 650,000-square-foot hospital, twice the size of the existing San Jose Medical Center, a spokesperson said.<\/p>\n

State data shows the old hospital\u2019s structural systems \u2014 including its beams, columns and foundations \u2014 didn\u2019t comply with the 2030 requirements, nor do its mechanical, electrical and plumbing components.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese buildings do not significantly jeopardize life, but may not be repairable or functional following strong ground motion,\u201d according to the health care information agency.<\/p>\n

The new hospital \u201cwill replace our 1974 facility and is engineered to meet California\u2019s strictest seismic safety standards,\u201d spokesperson Elissa Harrington wrote in an email. It is engineered to operate off-the-grid for 72 hours if needed, she said, with onsite power generation and water storage.<\/p>\n

Harrington declined to share the cost of the new hospital. In 2024, a Kaiser executive estimated<\/a> it would cost \u201chundreds of millions\u201d of dollars.<\/p>\n

At Stanford Health Care\u2019s campus on the Peninsula, construction workers are retrofitting buildings that date to the 1950s and 1960s, said Rick Millitello, vice president of construction. State data shows the structural integrity of buildings varies widely on the sprawling campus. A spokesperson declined to share the costs borne by Stanford.<\/p>\n

A plant generating steam for sterilization \u2014 vital for keeping a hospital running after a quake \u2014 has the highest structural rating and is already in compliance with the stricter standards, the data shows, deemed \u201creasonably capable of providing services to the public following strong ground motion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"ConstuctionConstuction workers work on a new 303-bed, state-of-the-art hospital at the San Jose Medical Center at Kaiser Permanente San Jose in San Jose, Calif., on Thursday, June 25, 2026. (Shae Hammond\/Bay Area News Group)\u00a0<\/p>\n

Other facilities must be upgraded or transitioned to other uses. Millitello said the central core, a wing attached to the main hospital building that houses X-ray imaging devices, \u201cis in the process of being made code compliant,\u201d with upgrades to its structural elements, wiring and plumbing.\u00a0 Elsewhere, patient rooms are being relocated from a decades-old facility, he said, that wasn\u2019t feasible to retrofit.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow that 2030 is approaching, all hospitals within California must be seismically compliant by 2030, or they need to remove those buildings from acute care services,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s the ramification if hospitals do not comply.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Health systems across the Bay Area are racing to rebuild, retrofit or replace aging hospitals before a 2030…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[7,2949,153088,131182,88,90,89,153089],"class_list":["post-378246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-jose","tag-california","tag-earthquake","tag-earthquake-safety","tag-hospital-safety","tag-san-jose","tag-san-jose-headlines","tag-san-jose-news","tag-seismic-safety"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}