Allan, re: "Northridge"
At my old employer,while I was their QC manager, I noticed a mention of BOCA and the FEMA 350 documents on a project we had in PA. I started looking into these FEMA 350 docs to see what was required of us, and holy cow did we get an eye opening. I started highlighting all of the changes that our shop would need to incorporate to be in compliance with these docs and we realized pretty quickly that we, nor any of the other contractors on that job had enough money in for all of that. After I called and asked the EOR about this, he quickly backed up and basically told me that one of his buddies had similar specs written on another project on the West coast and he thought that it would add a bit more quality into his project, so he included them. He relaxed a lot of the requirements except for the erector. So, the erector was effected the most due to requalifying all of his welders, and writing new welding procedures and establishing new methods to meet all of the criteria spelled out in the FEMA 350 docs.
All of this came about shortly after Northridge. Now we have AWS D1.8 that helps guide us through this vs trying to use those old FEMA docs.