Los Angeles Times

A new report finds that it wasn’t the earthquake alone that killed 228 people nearly a year ago in Mexico City. Dozens of buildings that collapsed in the quake had been shoddily constructed and wrongly deemed safe by building inspectors to increase profits.

The Bay Area was once the national leader in seismic safety. However, new efforts have stalled in San Francisco and other surrounding cities, while communities in Southern California have expanded mandatory seismic retrofitting efforts.

New research warns that estimates that at least 800 people could be killed and 18,000 more injured in a hypothetical magnitude 7 earthquake on the Hayward fault centered below Oakland. Hundreds more could die from fire following an earthquake along the 52-mile fault.

A Big One isn't defined by the initial event, but what happens afterward. What made the San Francisco Earthquake a Big One wasn't the 7.8 magnitude shaking, but that the region was so damaged that it took Bay Area communities decades to recover.

Countless cost-wary property owners in Taiwan have sidestepped quake safety over the decades despite numerous warnings and disasters. But after a deadly quake Feb. 6, the central government said it would require reviews of more than 34,000 existing structures and, for the first time, make their owners ensure safety.

While existing seismic standards are designed to keep buildings from collapsing, a major earthquake could damage them so badly that they would be uninhabitable for months. A new bill proposal in California calls for all new "engineered" buildings to be sturdy enough to function — perhaps with some minor repair — and be reoccupied quickly after a strong earthquake.

A few cities across California have in recent years stepped up requirements that property owners retrofit vulnerable buildings to better withstand earthquakes. State officials and the publicly managed California Earthquake Authority established a program for certain ZIP Codes that offers grants of up to $3,000 to retrofit homes.

With the frequency and cost of catastrophic wildfires climbing in California, the idea of compensating property owners to not rebuild — or using economic pressure to discourage them from building in the first place — is gaining supporters among those searching for ways to cut wildfire losses.