Preemptive Strike

by Daniel Glenn

The warnings were apocalyptic: "Dorms, classrooms and dining halls would freeze. Students would be sent home, their tuition money returned, and MSU would be out of business for months ... Without heat, $250 million in university assets could be destroyed ..."

These were the dire predictions if an earthquake of a large enough magnitude hit Bozeman and Montana State University's 80-year-old smokestack came tumbling down and destroyed the campus heating plant.

With the engineers' reports in hand, and the budgets weighed, the dangers assessed and tabulated, the cost-benefit scenarios laid out for all to see, the university made the decision: the smokestack must come down. Demolition costs $88,900; reinforcing the structure would cost $350,000. Therefore, the logic goes, we save the state $261,100 by demolishing the smokestack, and we save a quarter of a billion dollars in potential future damages to the university's assets. An additional argument against reinforcing the stack was that it still could not be brought "up to code." Of course, if the Leaning Tower of Piza or any of the world's other historic load bearing masonry towers had to be "brought up to code," they would all have to be imploded.

The goal should not have been code compliance for the building. It should have been assuring the safety of the plant and its workers. If, as was stated by the engineers, its principle danger lie in the potential of it collapsing back onto the physical plant, couldn't there have been some way of stabilizing it so that if it fell, it would fall in the other direction?

Instead, one more piece of our history -- an extraordinary piece of industrial sculpture towering 150 feet above the campus and creating a landmark visible from miles away, designed by the city's greatest architect, Fred Willson, 81 years ago -- is being dismantled brick by brick. The smokestack is the centerpiece of the Italian Revival-style Heating Plant listed by the MSU university system as a Heritage Property. Earthquakes are real threats that we must plan and design for in this region, but the wholesale destruction of historic structures is not the solution.

I have always wondered, when it comes to historic structures that have stood undisturbed for decades or -- in some cases -- centuries, who it is that wakes up one day and decides that tomorrow may be the day that particular building or monument will implode and wreak havoc and destruction. The approach of implosion today to ensure a safer tomorrow smacks of a "preemptive strike" based on shaky intelligence.

I have lived in two cities that have been rocked by massive earthquakes: Mexico City and Managua. Both of these cities have suffered under earthquakes of extraordinary magnitudes that cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars in destruction. I barely missed the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City. I flew into Mexico City in mid August of 1985 and stayed overnight on my way to Managua. The earthquake hit on September 19. On my way back at the end of September, I returned to Mexico City and tried to make arrangements at the same hotel, but it was no longer standing. That earthquake had a magnitude of 8.1 and killed more than 10,000 people, destroyed 1,000 housing units and caused over $4 billion in damage. During my last visit to Mexico City, in 2001, significant areas of the city remained visibly damaged by the earthquake.

However, one of the oldest structures in the city, the Metropolitan Cathedral, withstood that earthquake, as it has withstood many other earthquakes in the four centuries since its inception in 1563. This structure was built with load-bearing adobe bricks, and it remained standing while countless modern buildings in the blocks that surround it collapsed. Thousands of other sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteen and nineteenth century buildings also survived the earthquake. Most of the damage, in fact, was suffered by twentieth century structures over five stories tall and poorly constructed apartment buildings. Nobody, to my knowledge, has proposed a preemptive dismantling of the Metropolitan Cathedral, which towers over the city's massive central plaza, the Zocalo, teeming with thousands of people each day.

Managua was a different story. Its historic core was largely leveled in a massive earthquake in 1972. Five square miles in the heart of the city were nearly totally destroyed. Its cathedral was one of the few buildings to remain standing, but it was damaged beyond repair. By the mid-1980s, when I ventured there, the central part of the city remained barren, dotted with many empty shells of buildings and large areas simply abandoned while the city's new buildings extended outward in a horizontal sprawl. The historic buildings in Managua were not built out of load-bearing adobe or brick. They were built instead using a system similar to the English system of wattle and daub, called taquesal in the Nicaraguan vernacular. In the earthquake, these structures failed at the foundation because their walls were supported by wooden columns buried in the ground. The wooden columns had rotted after a century or more underground.

Earthquakes wreak havoc in unpredictable patterns. If an earthquake hit Bozeman that was strong enough to take down the Physical Plant smoke stack, Main Street itself could very likely be leveled as well. Bozeman's historic core is largely composed of late nineteenth and early twentieth century load-bearing brick buildings. Of course, it is perhaps just as likely that these historic buildings would survive a significant earthquake relatively unscathed, as so many did in Mexico City. Because they are composed of thousands of individual units acting together, the true complexity of load-bearing structures makes their performance in an earthquake nearly impossible to accurately predict. So instead of wholesale dismantling of every building built before the invention of reinforced concrete and steel framing, we focus on the dangers posed by the buildings that are deemed "obsolete" and take these down one by one.

No one has yet proposed that we start taking down the buildings of Bozeman's Main Street brick by brick, although such proposals have been made for some of our most significant buildings, including the East Willson School. Perhaps, someday, some foresighted gathering of lawyers and planners and engineers and bean counters will determine that Main Street poses a grave threat to the public welfare and that we will just have to raise it to protect us from the potential dangers of an unpredictable future.

Daniel J. Glenn is an associate professor at the Montana State University School of Architecture and principal of Glenn & Glenn Design Associates in Bozeman. Comments are welcome at danielg@montana.edu.

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