SPUR Forum: Existing Buildings and Disaster Resilience

Your BOMA advocacy team attended today's SPUR forum: Existing Buildings and Disaster Resilience where David Bonowitz, Structural Engineer and one of the primary authors of SPUR's article The Resilient City Part I: Before The Disaster, What We Need To Do Now To Recover Quickly From A Major Earthquake, presented the findings of his research on existing buildings and 'resilience'. The article can be found here.

Mr. Bonowitz discussed San Francisco's seismic resilience--the ability for the City to bounce back after an earthquake. Indeed, the types of buildings that are most vulnerable in an earthquake are:

• Tilt-ups
• Unbraced cripple walls
• Hillside houses
• House over garage
• Unreinforced masonry buildings
• Parking garages
• Pre-Northridge earthquake steel frame
• Non-ductile (pre-1980) concrete frames
• Soft-story woodframe

There are also non-structural risks (i.e., pieces of a building):

• Water tanks
• Chimneys
• etc.

And lastly, contents risk (not in the building code).

So what is the City's priority for resilience? Where do we start?

Traditional approaches to resilence, at the low-end of the priority ladder, were the killer buildings (unreinforced masonry buildings), and at the high-end, essential facilities (hospitals, etc.). What about the mid-range? That is, what about combining occupancy and vulnerability?

The City's priority for resilience depends on building's stock and occupancy.

Recommendations on where to start:

• Soft-story mulit-unit buildings
• Shelters (e.g., schools used for shelter)
• Recovery phase services (private social services and medical services)
• Non-ductile concrete buildings
• Gas lines and equipment (bracing them/installing shut-off valves)
• Unreinforced masonry buildings

Please refer to the SPUR article for the details.