I will take some issue with this piece of alarm. I’m not suggesting that a major EQ that knocks down buildings would be any sort of fun party.
It’s now code that buildings have to have valves on their NG feeds that shut off in the event of a serious EQ.
Existing buildings have, or should be sheetrocked. They are not bare studs sticking in the air.
It don’t know but I don’t think this was a NG fire. This was either an instance of vandalism or arson (or both) committed on a building mostly framed but with no sheetrock/fireproofing nor sprinklers (obviously) in place.
As an incomplete building, this had no fire alarms, no smoke detectors. That there were no security guards watching the site, essentially a city block full of standing-up kindling, for the crappy $6-7K/month that might have cost is a foolish economy on the part of the builder, IMHO. Unless he wanted it to go poof.
The fire investigators are looking seriously at arson for this case. No proof yet, but it does not look like an accident to them.
Some union or enviro-nazi thugs obviously wanted it to go poof!
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LA has just instituted even more strict codes for earthquakes than the rest of the STATE. So far, we’ve done well.