Selling “fear and doubt” is a strategy often used by sales people in a variety of industries. But for NW Seismic, whose business is seismic retrofitting of area homes, that approach isn’t necessary to clinch a client: “People who come to us are concerned for their safety and a desire to avoid losing their home in the event of an earthquake; they are already afraid,” says Michael Wieber, partner and Director of Operations for the family owned, NE Portland-based firm.
In addition to seismic retrofitting of homes, NW Seismic focuses its business mission on foundation replacement, foundation repair, and installing earthquake-activated gas shut off valves. “Our work is calculated to avoid losing their home to the extent a homeowner can shelter in place after a moderate to strong seismic event. If we look at the project and don’t believe we can do that, we lose interest,” says Wieber.
The company’s website describes the process of seismic retrofitting as the technical process of transferring the lateral loads generated in an earthquake from the house to the foundation. For the non-engineering crowd, that means attaching a house to its foundation. NW Seismic’s foundation repair and replacement services are a necessity that goes hand-in-hand with seismic retrofitting due to the likelihood a home’s foundation is in poor condition. “We find about 50 percent of the homes built prior to 1930 have foundations formed of unwashed Willamette River sand, which has a high clay content, and/or poorly formulated concrete. We even find bricks and 2x4s embedded in the foundation mix. These materials make for a foundation not worth retrofitting to,” says Wieber.
Happily and exhaustively self-taught on the subject of seismic retrofitting, Wieber was motivated as a result of the Spring Break earthquake of 1993, which caused his parents’ Portland home to shake, pushing them to seek earthquake insurance. Denied for lack of seismic retrofitting, they asked their son to do the work. “The work qualified them for insurance, but I eventually realized the retrofit anchor bolts installed wouldn’t save the house,” Wieber says. That reality pushed Wieber to educate himself via copious amounts of reading and spending time with Bay Area contractors and engineers knowledgeable about the subject of how buildings respond in earthquakes. “Maybe because I’m a recovering Catholic, but I found that people in the retrofitting industry didn’t spend much effort to understand what actually happens to a home during an earthquake. I wanted to know.”
In 2008, Wieber launched NW Seismic with his brother John, who serves as the company’s director of production, following the “prescriptive path” approach to retrofitting houses, but kept encountering situations where that approach wouldn’t work. When structural engineers would design an appropriate alternative, Wieber wanted to understand why. It turned out that designing effective retrofits was a very complicated endeavor and is a learning process that continues to this day.
Wieber says there is no city code requirement for seismic retrofitting—permits being issued solely on the basis of work performed as proposed, not whether the work will keep the house from coming off its foundation in an earthquake, and he finds this code inadequacy puts uneducated homeowners at risk—which is one of the main reasons he spends a great deal of his time educating the public about the realities of home retrofitting. “I was approached by the Multnomah County Library years ago to present on the subject via their library programs about once a month. I readily agreed because I believe consumers should be more aware and more protected.”
To learn more about NW Seismic, a valued advertiser and supporter of this newsletter, visit nwseismic.com, call 503-741-8311, or email office@nwseismic.com.