Every building in the U.S. and most every other country is designed for code-prescribed loads from ASCE or equivalent, and those loads are based on mean recurrence intervals set by research and code committees. I have personally designed buildings nationwide including CA. There's nothing inherently more "strict" about the building code itself in CA than OK. They are nearly identical. Yes, the environmental loads are different depending on location, but the code is the same. It all falls under ASCE 7.
There are two major disconnects between what CA does and what we do in OK, for example.
1. The natural hazards in CA are simply different than here in OK. For example, a large magnitude earthquake could cause catastrophic damage to entire regions. Like, every single building impacted over hundreds of square miles. They also get earthquakes of large magnitude fairly often. You have a large-scale, a major risk to loss of life and property if something fails, AND a relatively frequent event at a relatively known location. It's just a higher, more quantifiable risk. In OK, a tornado doesn't cause nearly the same scale of damage, and we have ways of protecting life without having to design entire structures from the wind speeds and debris, and they're super random.
2. IBC requires third-party inspections on most structures. Places like CA take that very seriously (some would say too seriously), and places like OK don't even enforce them at all most of the time. The children that were killed at Plaza Towers Elementary could have potentially been saved had those inspections caught the fact that there was no mechanical attachment from the roof to the top of the CMU walls. It was simply resting on the wall with no anchorage. Wind pressure sucks the roof upward, no more connection to brace the top of the wall, the wall falls down. Not saying it's 100% responsible, but most in the structural engineering community believe that structures that are simply built per the drawings could withstand MUCH larger forces (including small tornado-level wind forces), but contractors just get away with not building them correctly, and inspections never catch it. In fact, I once asked a contractor in OK when the City of OKC was going to send their inspector out to look at the building, and he stated that the City inspector straight-up told him that he didn't want to show up on site until after the drywall was installed so he didn't have to "look at the structure". That's just how they do it in OK, and since I don't think a city can be held liable, they just don't care.
I can tell you this; when an engineer of record stamps drawings, they are usually being pretty "strict" with the application of the code. Whether or not that gets built or inspections take place is an entirely different conversation.
There are two major disconnects between what CA does and what we do in OK, for example.
1. The natural hazards in CA are simply different than here in OK. For example, a large magnitude earthquake could cause catastrophic damage to entire regions. Like, every single building impacted over hundreds of square miles. They also get earthquakes of large magnitude fairly often. You have a large-scale, a major risk to loss of life and property if something fails, AND a relatively frequent event at a relatively known location. It's just a higher, more quantifiable risk. In OK, a tornado doesn't cause nearly the same scale of damage, and we have ways of protecting life without having to design entire structures from the wind speeds and debris, and they're super random.
2. IBC requires third-party inspections on most structures. Places like CA take that very seriously (some would say too seriously), and places like OK don't even enforce them at all most of the time. The children that were killed at Plaza Towers Elementary could have potentially been saved had those inspections caught the fact that there was no mechanical attachment from the roof to the top of the CMU walls. It was simply resting on the wall with no anchorage. Wind pressure sucks the roof upward, no more connection to brace the top of the wall, the wall falls down. Not saying it's 100% responsible, but most in the structural engineering community believe that structures that are simply built per the drawings could withstand MUCH larger forces (including small tornado-level wind forces), but contractors just get away with not building them correctly, and inspections never catch it. In fact, I once asked a contractor in OK when the City of OKC was going to send their inspector out to look at the building, and he stated that the City inspector straight-up told him that he didn't want to show up on site until after the drywall was installed so he didn't have to "look at the structure". That's just how they do it in OK, and since I don't think a city can be held liable, they just don't care.
I can tell you this; when an engineer of record stamps drawings, they are usually being pretty "strict" with the application of the code. Whether or not that gets built or inspections take place is an entirely different conversation.
