Officials Identify More Than 20 California Hospitals as Structurally Unsound

California state and hospital officials have identified structural weaknesses in more than 20 hospital facilities in the state, including buildings at risk of crumbling during earthquakes, according to an NBC report.

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Many high-risk facilities are located in southern California, where the collapse risk for some is as high as 30 percent. To calculate collapse risk, the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development considered factors such as structure strength, distance from a fault line and expected ground motion during a seismic event.

The state mandated the structurally weak hospitals be retrofitted or replaced in anticipation of seismic events. If the hospital is unable to fulfill these safety requirements, they are required to remove patients by 2013 or 2015.

Read the NBC report to see which California hospitals are structurally unsound.

Read more about California hospitals:

More Than One-Third of California Inpatients Readmitted Within a Year

Number of Hospitals, Beds Dwindling in California

UCLA Study Shows Intervention Program Improves Heart Failure Care

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