The Capitol-Records-surrounding Millennium Hollywood project may not be the only development in town with earthquake troubles: the LA Times reports that Westfield's 39-story residential tower on Santa Monica Boulevard in Century City may be in jeopardy, too. Like it's similarly troubled Hollywood cousin, it turns out that the project may sit right on top of an earthquake fault. If it does, it's perhaps liable to split in half in the event of an earthquake on that fault, and if that's not deterrent enough, it would also be illegal to build under the state's Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act. And the issue stems from the same place as MillHoll's: there are no up-to-date, detailed fault maps of the whole city. In this case, the city and developer relied on older maps that showed the general location of the fault, but didn't do any further testing to find where the faults are exactly. But Metro has, and they found trouble.
This is the same fault that Metro steered clear of in its planning for the Purple Line Extension, and is one of the reasons the agency chose to put the planned Century City station further south, requiring tunneling under Beverly Hills High School. (Crazy conspiracy theory for when this all gets turned into a movie: what if Westfield has been backing the nutso Beverly Hills campaign to put the subway station on Santa Monica Boulevard to make the area look totally safe? This is not even the first developer-related conspiracy theory in this whole thing.) Westfield is now going back and doing extensive testing to pinpoint the fault location, but there's no word on when that will be done. Meanwhile, the California Geological Survey is working on the first detailed mapping of the Hollywood fault, and will start work on the Santa Monica in the spring.
· Century City tower site runs into quake fault questions [LAT]
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