Oldest concrete buildings in San Francisco raise earthquake concerns – CBS San Francisco

By Abigail Sterling and Brian Hackney

SAN FRANCISCO (KPIX 5) – We probably won’t know for months what exactly caused the fatal apartment collapse in Surfside, Florida. What we do know is that it was an old multi-storey concrete building. San Francisco has a lot of them. And some of them have been a safety concern for years for various reasons – specifically earthquakes.

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Concrete elevations built before 1980 are the most vulnerable. KPIX has discovered that the city has already compiled a list of buildings to be examined. Many may have to retrofit.

On February 9, 1971, the 6.5-magnitude San Fernando earthquake in the suburbs of Los Angeles was a big surprise that day. Another surprise – new buildings such as the Sylmar Hospital have collapsed. It was a new concrete building, but fragile.

In Mexico City a few years later, the same thing happened. Then in Northridge in 1994, and most recently in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2011.

“The same thing, over and over again over the years,” said Peter Yaniv, a longtime structural engineer.

And San Francisco? The city is filled with thousands of old concrete buildings that are in danger of collapsing in a major earthquake.

“Well, the old ones didn’t have enough rebar and we’re looking here on the roof. A few of those buildings didn’t have enough steel, so they’re not really ductile.” After a major earthquake, likely, what We didn’t fix it, to have a number of big collapsed buildings.”

“Okay, think about [double-decker Interstate Highway 880] Cypress structure during 1989 [Loma Prieta] “An earthquake that would have been uncoiled concrete,” said Skip Walker, an independent building inspector. “In San Francisco, you’ll see the city blocks where just about everything is, these old, non-ductile concrete buildings.”

It’s a problem the city has been aware of since that day in 1971. “It was a defining moment for California. We changed all our codes in response to [the San Fernando] said Brian Strong, San Francisco’s chief resilience officer. “Right now we have weak concrete or what we call low plasticity concrete buildings in San Francisco.”

But here’s what we don’t have: software to actually check them and – if they’re found faulty – make them even safer. In fact, 50 years later, we don’t know exactly how many, a problem Yaniv described as “very big.”

“We know that there were about 2,700 or so concrete buildings built before 1990,” Strong said. “The city has identified about 3,200 buildings that fit its criteria,” Walker said.

Fifty years later, the city finally identified and painted 3,700 concrete buildings, with help from the Society of Structural Engineers of Northern California.

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“What we look at when we look at this inventory is the occupancy of the building,” said Emily Guglielmo, president of the association. “If it’s a high-density multifamily unit, these are the structures we want to pay close attention to.”

Many buildings are concentrated in the areas of high-rise apartments and commercial centers in the city center. “All building owners will receive a letter stating that you are part of this program and you will have a certain time frame to bring in an engineer to complete this checklist,” Guglielmo said.

The city gave us a map packed with dots, but no addresses. Despite repeated requests from KPIX 5, the city is on the list of unannounced buildings. One possible reason: “The money we’re talking about is huge,” Walker said.

Yaniv agreed that it would be costly to modify such buildings.

“We now know that buildings are unsafe, and at least many of them need to be looked at and analyzed to determine the cost/benefit and then some decisions, and some tough decisions will have to be made,” Yaniv said.

“It doesn’t make sense for us to ask every landlord with a concrete building to do a costly appraisal of their building,” Strong said.

But in Los Angeles, where it all began, the city implemented a mandatory inspection and a modernization amendment ordinance. They identified older buildings likely to be at risk of earthquakes, inspected them and where necessary, ordered modernization modifications.

San Francisco has only finally taken the first step, which is to identify suspicious buildings. But it has not yet decided what to do with the information that hundreds of thousands of people may be living or working in avalanche risks.

“I don’t think we’ve made that decision yet,” Strong said.

“You know what the problem is, you know how to solve it. We need to use the resources to start making that happen,” Walker said. “We could throw the can on the road, obviously for a long time. But that’s the wrong approach because there will be a day of reckoning on this, there will be.”

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