San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Virus response helps shape S.F. quake readiness
The pandemic has put San Francisco in the throes of a slowmoving disaster for more than a year now. And it’s given the city an unexpected chance to prepare for another kind of catastrophe: the Big One.
Exactly 115 years after one of the most devastating events in California history, the great 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire, city leaders say their emergency response to COVID19 has taught them lessons they can apply when the next major temblor strikes.
One of them is to focus more immediately on equity and inclusion. Having now targeted much of San Francisco’s approach to COVID19 testing and vaccinations toward the neighborhoods
hardest hit by the virus, city officials think that strategy shouldn’t be limited to pandemics.
“What that looks like in an earthquake is, you don’t set up shelters for people in the Mission out in some other faraway place like Golden Gate Park,” said Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of San Francisco’s Department of Emergency Management.
Once the pandemic abates, Carroll said she wants the city to organize regular meetings with organizations that serve Latino residents and other community groups to talk about earthquake preparedness, building off ties developed during the past year of pandemic response.
“That’s not something we’ve done before,” she said. “It’s not that we’ve never done preparedness with communities, but never in the way that we understand it now.”
The magnitude 7.9 earthquake that shook San Francisco on April 18, 1906, remains the most severe disaster the city has ever endured. An estimated 3,000 people died and more than 80% of the city’s buildings were destroyed in the earthquake and fire.
But the pandemic, which has claimed the lives of more than 500 San Franciscans and infected 35,000 more, has tested the city’s disaster response apparatus in unprecedented ways, forcing it into a constant state of emergency management. Some city workers have been redirected from their usual jobs into pandemicrelated duties for more than a year.
San Francisco has also had to ensure that critical infrastructure such as water and power ran smoothly despite physical distancing and remote work situations. Community organizations not normally dedicated to emergency response have stepped in to help with pandemic aid, including through the Latino Task Force Resource Hub in the Mission. The city transformed Moscone Center into a mass vaccination hub and, before that, a homeless shelter — a possible use after an earthquake.
“It really helped us stress test some of our systems,” Brian Strong, the city’s chief resilience officer, said of the pandemic.
At the state level, emergency managers last year received a crash course in responding to not one but several disasters overlapping simultaneously. As the virus spread widely and rapidly, wildfires also raged out of control, burning a record 4.2 million acres.
The same thing could happen if a catastrophic earthquake were to occur while a massive wildfire is already burning. In such a situation, officials in the affected area would lean heavily on aid agreements from other cities, counties and states. Other countries could come to assist with the response too, as has happened in fires before.
“We do premise our stuff here in California based on the assumption that we could have more than one major event at the same time,” said Christina Curry, chief deputy director of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “We’ve designed things with that possibility in mind.”
Curry said she has also learned a lot of lessons from the pandemic that could apply during an earthquake — especially when it comes to rapidly transforming work systems. “An earthquake might make a business center in a major city something we might not have access to for a while,” Curry said. “How do you reestablish government, industry, keep the state running when you cannot access your facilities like you normally would? For a different reason, in the pandemic, a lot of places had to move to an alternate way of doing work.”
Experts can’t predict the next San Francisco earthquake. Peggy Hellweg, operations manager at UC Berkeley’s seismology lab, compared the subterranean situation to a stretching rubber band — eventually, the band will break, triggering a major earthquake like the one that devastated San Francisco 115 years ago.
“We really don’t know how much we need to stretch it before the next Big One happens,” Hellweg said. “It could happen tomorrow. It could be 50 or 100 years.” Compared to the San Andreas, which runs through San Francisco, the East Bay’s Hayward Fault has “been stretching for a longer time,” Hellweg said. The last major earthquake on that fault happened in 1868, and millions more people now live along the fault zone.
But population growth alone doesn’t spell doom for everyone living on top of the Hayward Fault.
“Housing of all different types built in the past 20, 30 years is much more likely to be safe in an earthquake than houses built before, say, 1970, simply because of all the things we learned from (past) earthquakes,” Hellweg said.
Still, just because a building stays standing doesn’t mean it won’t be structurally compromised beyond repair.
“The question of whether that housing will be usable after an earthquake has a very different answer,” Hellweg said.
San Francisco has been trying to get ahead of that problem by requiring building upgrades to some of the most vulnerable dwellings. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged many of the Marina district’s softstory buildings, characterized by their wood frames and wide, streetlevel openings that often contain garages or commercial spaces. City officials have mandated seismic retrofits for about 5,000 such buildings, and the program, set to finish this year, is more than 80% complete.
After soft stories, San Francisco’s next priority is to address concrete buildings, said Strong, the city’s chief resilience officer. Within the next year or so, city officials plan to get a more detailed understanding of exactly which concrete buildings are vulnerable and which aren’t as they contemplate new local rules.
“Unlike soft stories, where you can drive by and tell, it’s a lot harder with these concrete buildings,” Strong said. “You really have to go in and look at them much more closely.”
The city is also protecting critical portions of its water system from failing in a major earthquake. This summer, workers will install new pipes with flexible joints at the College Hill Reservoir in Bernal Heights, which supplies water to San Francisco General Hospital. Made by the Japanese company Kubota, the pipes can move horizontally and vertically like a ball and socket, said Katie Miller, director of water capital programs at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
“As the earth moves from the stresses of an earthquake, the entire pipe network can react and move with it, instead of the joints pulling out,” Miller said. “They can withhold those forces and hang in there even if the ground completely collapses around them. It’s really cool.”
About 4,000 feet of aging pipe is set to be replaced in the work expected to start in June. It’s part of a multiyear project that should cost about $50 million overall.