City and County Mitigation of Earthquake Hazards and Risks

Results from an ABAG Questionnaire Sent to Bay Area Cities and Counties

The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake marked the escalation of city and county efforts to prepare for future earthquakes. Dozens of Bay Area city halls, police buildings, fire stations, libraries, theaters, and other public buildings have been abandoned and rebuilt or have undergone structural retrofits since that quake. The work has been escalating during the last five years. San Francisco has been a leader, with approximately 70 total public buildings strengthened, including its City Hall. A total of at least 175 buildings have been made safer, including those strengthened prior to the Loma Prieta earthquake.

This is just one of the findings of a comprehensive survey of the 109 cities and counties in the Bay Area conducted by the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) in 2002 and returned by 80% of these local governments. The survey will be a benchmark to document measurable improvements in earthquake preparedness during the next five years.

Cities and counties have made extensive plans for recovery of operations. The most common elements of these plans include emergency communications and emergency power in their buildings, included by over 95% of local governments. Although no data were collected as part of this survey on recent improvements in these programs, separate information points to strong improvements as a result of planning for Y2K and the State's power crisis. Many (86%) indicated that they had a plan for protection of data and recovery of records. Only the other hand, the lowest percentage (69%) had plans for emergency power related to transportation, such as for traffic lights or fuel pumps for emergency vehicles.

The efforts of local governments have extended to privately-owned buildings, as well. Of those responding to the questionnaire, 40% had conducted an inventory of at least one other type of potentially hazardous private building in addition to the State-mandated inventory of privately-owned unreinforced masonry buildings. However, 67% of the local governments have adopted one or more retrofit standards. 31% even offer some type of financial incentive to private owners to retrofit. Thus, an inventory of hazardous private buildings is not necessary for adoption of voluntary retrofit standards or for provision of financial incentives. Programs related to privately-owned buildings reflect the diversity of hazards and concerns of local governments. Reviews of these diverse programs should show opportunities for local governments to learn from each other in creating innovative and effective programs to manage earthquake risk in these buildings.

For example, many cities are concerned about "soft-story" buildings where apartments are built on top of a parking garage or commercial space that may collapse in a strong earthquake, a problem in San Francisco's Marina District in the 1989 quake, as well as in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. The cities in Santa Clara County have joined with the county to create maps showing the areas with high densities of these buildings for use by emergency response personnel. San Leandro has a preliminary inventory of suspected soft-story buildings and is working on a "validation form" for building owners that will discuss ways to get their buildings taken of the list. Fremont's efforts have focused on developing a model standard for retrofitting these buildings. Berkeley has been investigating ways to develop a package of financial technical, and educational materials to encourage retrofitting. City staff are developing an outreach campaign intended to develop a team approach among building owners, tenants, and the technical structural engineering community to encourage retrofitting of these buildings and have placed a measure on the November 2002 ballot to provide funding for this new earthquake safety program.

The ABAG survey was jointed sponsored by ABAG's Earthquake Program, the ABAG PLAN Corporation, and the Earthquake Engineering Institute (EERI) Northern California Chapter's Quake 06 Project.

The entire report is available ONLINE (Adobe Acrobat file).

ABAG, the Association of Bay Area Governments, is the regional planning and services agency for the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. The development of these ABAG lessons from the 1999 Turkey earthquakes has been funded by Grant No. CMS-0085288 from the National Science Foundation (NSF), with additional support from The George Washington University and the Association of Bay Area Governments. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies.

Photos courtesy of T. Holzer, U.S. Geological Survey.

This page was last updated 8/25/03 by jbp.