Earthquakes Los Angeles

Cindy Ventuleth was a wide-eyed 19-year-old when Cal State Northridge was just beginning construction on its main library in 1971. For two years, she passed the site every day on her way to class wondering if it would ever be completed. It opened in 1973--and it has practically been her second home ever since. The self-avowed bookworm joined the library staff after graduation.

A day after the state Assembly declined to curb insurance company donations to candidates for the post of insurance commissioner, a Senate committee Tuesday recommended broad reforms in the wake of the Chuck Quackenbush scandal. The legislative and administrative reforms were contained in the Senate Insurance Committee's report on its five-month investigation of former Insurance Commissioner Quackenbush, who quit last month rather than face impeachment.

Gov. Gray Davis on Monday nominated retired judge Harry Low to be the state's next insurance commissioner, and announced that Low's first priority will be to review Northridge earthquake claims. Davis said he picked the 69-year-old jurist to fill the vacancy left by the resignation of Chuck Quackenbush because he believes Low will restore credibility to an agency tarnished by scandal.

Former Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush acted without legal authority when he made settlements after the Northridge earthquake that required insurers to contribute to foundations whose activities were not related to the disaster, an opinion by state Atty. Gen. Bill Lockyer said Wednesday.

More than six years after the Northridge earthquake destroyed the Granada Hills Recreation Center, the new center will be dedicated Friday by the city of Los Angeles. The 14,000-square-foot building includes a gym, a stage, an exercise and ballet room, two meeting rooms, staff offices and restrooms. Since the earthquake, the park staff has worked out of a rented trailer. The $2.

On Friday the city of Los Angeles will dedicate the Granada Hills Recreation Center, more than six years after the previous center was destroyed in the Northridge earthquake. The project is the largest to be completed in the San Fernando Valley with funds from Proposition K, by which voters in 1995 approved spending $750 million for park improvements over 25 years.

In an unusual about-face, a Sacramento judge notified the state Senate on Wednesday that he intends to stop the dissemination of confidential Department of Insurance reports that found thousands of examples of mishandled claims after the Northridge earthquake. Reversing his own decision, Superior Court Judge Joe S.

Quite aside from Chuck Quackenbush, the insurance-buying public certainly had every right to expect that the private institutions dealing with the Northridge earthquake's aftermath--the insurers and the trial lawyers, particularly--would behave properly. But six years after the disaster, it appears that proper dealing was in short supply. This situation cost some of those who suffered losses more than the quake itself did.

Homeowners could get an additional year to file Northridge earthquake insurance claims under a state Senate bill introduced Tuesday. Senate Leader John L. Burton (D-San Francisco), who introduced the bill before the Judiciary Committee, said he wanted to give homeowners who had claims denied because they had not been made within a year of the earthquake a chance to be "fairly compensated for their losses."