Dive Brief:

• Buildings in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, Calif., have been erected closer to known earthquake faults than state law would have allowed without extensive studies — had city officials known where the faults actually are.
• The buildings, about a dozen of them in the past 10 years, include a 49-unit apartment building.
• Local officials used outdated state fault-zone maps in making their decisions, and those did not show that the construction sites were actually within a 500-foot zone where state law says no one is going to build without a lot of data to back up approvals.

Dive Insight:

Thanks to state budget cuts, California is about 300 maps behind on getting the best data laid, making it hard for local officials to know what's what below the ground. There were more accurate maps for the L.A. and Santa Monica areas, however, but city officials did not know they were using out-of-date data until newspaper reporters showed them they could get better information.