Barry Welliver, a structural engineer and chairman of the Utah Seismic Safety Commission, had also warned in 2006 that such structures "are the single worst performers in an earthquake" — and many could suffer severe damage in earthquakes as small as 5.0 on the Richter scale, let alone the 7.0 that hit in 2008.

Utah accumulated more than an estimated 200,000 such buildings through the years, including 65,000 to 85,000 in Salt Lake County alone, most of which were homes.

Welliver said they were "a building type that worked well for a number of years because of the ability to be constructed handily" and at low cost. But that was before their quake danger was known. Building codes eventually would ban new construction using this method, but laws did not force upgrades of existing homes.

Unfortunately for Utahns, they had far more such buildings than other earthquake-prone areas such as California.

"California only has 25,000 URMs (unreinforced masonry buildings) in the whole state," Welliver said in 2006; Salt Lake County alone had three times as many.

Welliver said, "That shows we haven't been shaken here (in Utah) enough to appreciate the potential damage from those buildings."

The earthquake of 2008 changed that.

In large part because of so many unreinforced masonry buildings, the quake at least moderately damaged 42 percent of all buildings along the Wasatch Front, contributing greatly to the estimated $40 billion economic loss from the quake.

That included damaging 120,000 buildings beyond repair, as had been predicted in 2006 by Carey. Not surprisingly, 65 percent of them — 77,200 — were unreinforced masonry.

Amid the destruction in 2008, nearly 200,000 single-family homes sustained at least moderate damage — about 40 percent of the total. And 99,000, or one of every five, were damaged beyond repair.

Among other types of buildings damaged beyond repair, close to what was predicted in 2006, were 14,200 other residential buildings, such as apartments; 4,500 commercial buildings; 160 government buildings; 79 churches; and 1,600 industrial buildings.

In the quake, again close to what had been predicted in 2006, about 850 people died in homes, apartments and condos, and another 13,000 were injured.

Limiting damage

Damage and carnage — at least from unreinforced masonry buildings — could have been reduced. Seismic upgrades, even relatively simple ones, could have greatly increased their chances of survival. The state for years had included some how-to information about such upgrades on its Web sites.