What to inspect after a quake, why a jammed door can mean a racked opening, and how California earthquake coverage actually works.
Codes are amended locally. Where a city adopts an amendment that changes the answer, the section below says so — and the permit counter, not this page, is the final word.
After shaking, a garage door that binds is often reporting on the opening rather than on itself. Look at the header, both jambs and the slab for fresh cracking, and at whether the opening is still square. A racked opening is a structural question and it comes before any conversation about track alignment.
Rollers still in their tracks; tracks still plumb and parallel; springs intact with no gap in the coil; both cables still seated on their drums and evenly tensioned; the opener still on both of its mounts with an unbowed rail; nothing fallen against the inside of the door; the threshold still flat. Clearing fallen contents is safe. Everything else on that list is a technician's job.
Living space over a wide, open ground-floor garage is a soft story, and it is one of the most common failure configurations in California's housing stock. The 1994 Northridge earthquake made the point at Northridge Meadows, where a large apartment building came down onto its tuck-under parking. Los Angeles's mandatory retrofit ordinance followed from that class of failure, and FEMA P-1100 addresses the single-family version of it directly.
A standard California homeowners policy excludes earthquake damage. Cover comes through a separate earthquake policy, most commonly through the California Earthquake Authority, typically with a substantial percentage deductible. That deductible is usually larger than a garage door repair, which means most door damage after a moderate quake is paid out of pocket — worth knowing before you spend a day on a claim that will not clear.
The California Residential Mitigation Program runs grant programs for brace-and-bolt retrofits and, separately, for the soft-story living-space-over-garage case. The CEA offers a premium discount on verified retrofits. Program caps and eligibility change annually, so check current figures rather than a figure you read once.
If you carry earthquake cover, the record you make in the first hour is the record the claim rests on. Photograph the door, the opening, the cracking and the contents before anything is cleared or straightened.
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