S.F. preparing Embarcadero for disasters
San Francisco is stepping up efforts to remake the Embarcadero in light of two very different threats, the ever-present danger of earthquakes and the long-term likelihood of sea level rise.
City Hall and the Port of San Francisco also are putting real money into the deal — starting with $40 million for a 10-year contract with a team of 21 consultants that includes everything from civil engineers to landscape architects.
“Our main concern starting out is to assess the most vulnerable sites along the waterfront in terms of life safety and disaster preparedness,” said Peter Wijsman of Arcadis, an environmental consulting firm. “We also need to address a problem that hasn’t been confronted before — how do you prepare a city for sea level rise?”
Arcadis, which was founded in the Nether-
lands and has a San Francisco office, is working with the Colorado engineering firm CH2M to lead the consultant team. The team’s client in turn is the port, an autonomous branch of city government that last year estimated that the cost of upgrading the Embarcadero seawall to withstand all natural perils could top $5 billion.
This may sound excessive. But the rock-and-concrete seawall, completed in 1916, is all that keeps San Francisco Bay from reclaiming inland blocks built on landfill, including portions of the Financial District.
While the seawall won’t collapse in a major earthquake, according to a 2016 study for the port, it could sag and lurch toward the bay. This could cause buildings along the Embarcadero to collapse while water floods into the BART tube.
These problems would be amplified by sea level rise, which a 2012 study by the National Research Council said could lift daily tides in the bay as much as 66 inches by 2100. Already, extra-high tides during the winter spill across Embarcadero sidewalks on either side of the Ferry Building.
The team led by CH2M and Arcadis began work this month and will spend the next 16 months determining what stretches need help first.
“These are big investments we’re going to be asking people to make,” said Steven Reel, who has been leading the port’s seawall assessment efforts since 2014. “We need intense evaluations to really drive the initial recommendations.” None of this will be easy. The port and city need to craft an overall standard for a rebuilt, seismically stable seawall. At the same time, they need to plan for the rising tides that are anticipated by nearly all credible scientific research — but to do so in a way that doesn’t mar the urbanity of the Embarcadero, which has become one of San Francisco’s most important promenades since the elevated Embarcadero Freeway was dismantled after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
“The critical entry point in our studies has to be life safety, but the port needs to pair this with other issues” that can’t be cleanly forecast, such as the pace and extent of sea level rise, said Lindy Lowe, the port’s new “resilience director.”
This helps explain why there are 21 firms on the consultant team, including three each for “stakeholder engagement” and “environmental permitting.”
Even a topic like historic preservation figures in.
The Ferry Building and other landmarks on piers have been renovated to house attractions that include the Exploratorium science museum, so the seawall can’t simply be raised a few feet or the connections to the piers could be severed. And, of course, even the piers that have been restored and strengthened are imperiled by rising tides.
Because of this, the team includes three firms that will tackle the architectural and design aspects of a remade seawall.
“This is a big challenge with a lot of moving pieces,” said Kevin Conger of CMG Landscape Architecture, one of the urban design firms. “The port has asked for a premier urban waterfront out of this — as compelling as it is now, or more so.”
The initial round of studies and recommendations should coincide with a $350 million seawall bond that Mayor Ed Lee and the Board of Supervisors are likely to place on next November’s ballot. If the bond is approved by voters, it would create a pool of funds for the initial round of seawall improvements, as well as the layers of review and permitting that accompany waterfront projects.
The schedule set by the port for the seawall effort calls for designs and environmental studies to be completed by 2022, with construction to follow.
“Hopefully, by year 10, we’ll have real improvements in place,” Wijsman said.