How a pandemic can help San Francisco respond to the next major earthquake

The pandemic has placed San Francisco in the midst of a slow-moving disaster for more than a year now. It gave the city an unexpected opportunity to prepare for another type of disaster: the major disaster.

Exactly 115 years after one of the most devastating events in California history, the Great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, city leaders say their emergency response to COVID-19 has taught them lessons they can apply when the next major earthquake strikes.

One of them is the immediate focus on equity and inclusion. With much of the San Francisco approach to testing COVID-19 and vaccinations now targeted toward neighborhoods hardest hit by the virus, city officials believe the strategy should not be limited to pandemics.

“What it looks like in an earthquake is that you’re not setting up shelters for people on the mission somewhere as far away as Golden Gate Park,” said Mary Eileen Carroll, executive director of the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management.

Once the epidemic recedes, Carroll said she wants the city to organize regular meetings with organizations serving Hispanics and other community groups to talk about earthquake preparedness, and build the relationships developed over the past year of the pandemic response.

“This is not something we’ve done before,” she said. “It’s not that we never prepared with the communities, but it’s not in the way that we understand it now.”

The 7.9 magnitude earthquake that shook San Francisco on April 18, 1906, remains the most severe disaster the city has ever suffered. An estimated 3,000 people were killed and more than 80% of the city’s buildings were destroyed in the earthquake and fire.

San Francisco Public Utilities Commission stock of earthquake-resistant tubes.

Nick Otto / History

But the pandemic, which has killed more than 500 San Francisco residents and infected 35,000 others, tested the city’s disaster response apparatus in unprecedented ways, forcing it into a permanent state of emergency management. Some city workers have been redirected from their usual jobs to pandemic-related assignments for more than a year.

San Francisco has also had to make sure that critical infrastructure like water and power run smoothly despite physical distancing and remote work situations. Community-based organizations not normally designated for emergency response have stepped in to help help combat epidemics, including through the Mission’s Latina Task Force Resource Center. The city turned the Moscone Center into a comprehensive vaccination center and before that, it was a shelter for the homeless – a potential use after an earthquake.

“It really helped us with the stress test of some of our systems,” said Brian Strong, the city’s chief resilience officer, of the pandemic.

At the state level, emergency managers last year received an intensive course in responding not to a single disaster but to multiple, overlapping disasters simultaneously. As the virus spread widely and rapidly, forest fires also broke out, burning 4.2 million acres.

The same could happen if a catastrophic earthquake occurred while wildfires were already burning. In such a situation, officials in the hard-hit area will rely heavily on aid agreements from other cities, provinces and states. Other nations can come to help respond as well, as has happened with fires before.

“We are setting our assumptions here in California based on the assumption that we can have more than one major event at the same time,” said Christina Carey, deputy director of the governor’s office for emergency services. “We designed things with this possibility in mind.”

Carey said she also learned a lot of lessons from the pandemic that can apply during an earthquake – especially when it comes to rapidly transforming business systems.

“An earthquake might make a large city mall something that we might not be able to get to for a while,” said Carey. “How do you re-establish government and industry and keep the country running when you cannot access your facilities as you usually do? For a different reason, in an epidemic, many places have had to move to an alternative way of doing the work.”

Experts cannot predict the next San Francisco earthquake. Peggy Hellweg, director of operations at the Seismology Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, compared the situation underground with an extended rubber band – in the end, the band would break, causing an earthquake as large as the one that devastated San Francisco 115 years ago.

“We don’t really know how much we need to extend it before the next big event happens,” Helwig said. “It could happen tomorrow. It could be 50 or 100 years.”

Compared to San Andreas, which passes through San Francisco, the Hayward Fault in East Bay “has been running for much longer,” Helwig said. The last major earthquake occurred on this fault in 1868, and millions of people now live along the fault zone.

But population growth alone does not spell doom for everyone on the Hayward Fault.

Helwig said: “Dwellings of all different types built in the past 20 or 30 years are more likely to be safe in an earthquake than homes built before, say, 1970, simply because of all the things that we have learned from earthquakes ( Past) “.

However, just because a building remains standing does not mean that it will not be irreparably structural.

“The question of whether this housing will be usable after an earthquake has a completely different answer,” Helwig said.

San Francisco is trying to overcome this problem by ordering building upgrades for some of the most vulnerable residences. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed many of the soft-storey buildings in the Marina District, which were distinguished by their wooden frames and wide openings at street level that often contained garages or commercial space. City officials have commissioned seismic adjustments to about 5,000 such buildings, and the program, which is due to end this year, is more than 80% complete.

After the soft stories, San Francisco’s next priority is tackling concrete buildings, Strong, the city’s chief resilience officer, said. Within the next year or so, city officials plan to gain a more detailed understanding of which concrete buildings are at risk and which are not when they consider the new local rules.

“Unlike soft stories, where you can drive and tell, it’s more difficult with these concrete buildings,” said Strong. “You really have to go in and look at them closely.”

Portions of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission stock of earthquake-resistant tubes.

Nick Otto / History

The city also protects important parts of its water system from failure in a major earthquake. This summer, workers will install new tubes with flexible connections at the College Hill reservoir in Bernal Heights, which supplies water to San Francisco General Hospital. The tubes, made by Japan’s Kubota Corporation, 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.

“When the Earth moves from earthquake pressures, the entire pipeline network can interact and move with it, rather than pulling the joints,” Miller said. They can block these forces and stay there even if the ground around them collapses completely. It is really cool. “

About 4,000 feet of old pipes are scheduled to be replaced with work expected to begin in June. It is part of a multi-year project that should cost around $ 50 million overall.

J.D. Morris is a writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: [email protected] Twitter: thejdmorris

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