SAN JOSE, California — Bay Area hospitals are racing to rebuild and retrofit facilities to meet California's 2030 earthquake safety standards, a mandate that requires hospitals to not only survive a major earthquake but continue treating patients afterward.
The standards, passed in the 1990s, give hospitals less than four years to comply with stricter requirements for structural integrity and resilience or transition facilities away from general acute care use. According to the California Department of Health Care Access and Information, 45 percent of California hospitals were not yet compliant with 2030 standards as of last year. An estimated $60 billion has already been spent statewide on retrofits and new construction, with approximately $75 billion more in investment still needed.
In San Jose, Kaiser Permanente is building a new 303-bed hospital spanning 650,000 square feet, roughly twice the size of its existing medical center, which opened in 1974 and could not meet the new standards. The facility, slated to open in 2029, is engineered to operate off-grid for 72 hours with onsite power generation and water storage. Stanford Medicine is retrofitting buildings dating to the 1950s and 1960s at its Peninsula campus and upgrading its Tri-Valley campus in Pleasanton as part of a $200 million expansion. Sutter Health has proposed a $1 billion, 17-story hospital in Emeryville that would replace the Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley.
The Berkeley Seismology Lab estimates a 63 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or greater earthquake striking the Bay Area between now and 2036. The 1971 San Fernando earthquake, a magnitude 6.6 temblor, caused four buildings to collapse at a Sylmar hospital, killing 47 people. Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill in 2024 that would have allowed all hospitals to apply for a five-year extension, stating that California hospitals have known about the deadline for 30 years.