BOMA San Francisco’s Emergency Preparedness Committee

Our Emergency Preparedness Committee (EPC) has been busy these last three months! The work of the committee occurs in four subcommittees:

Communication Subcommittee: The communication subcommittee is currently developing an emergency preparedness survey to be distributed, first to the EPC members, and then to the entire BOMA membership. The subcommittee is also updating the BOMA San Francisco EPC website to include the most up-to-date sources of information related to emergency planning in high-rise buildings

Event Subcommittee: The event subcommittee is planning an evacuation exercise that will allow for BOMA members to observe how emergency teams from both the public and private sector shelter tenants in place, and then have them evacuate a building. This will be the first planned building evacuation in San Francisco. There will be a follow-up seminar to discuss the lessons learned from the exercise and the best practices that were involved.

Training Subcommittee: The training subcommittee is working on sponsoring a series of brown bag lunches that would feature experts on a variety of topics related to fire/life safety and disaster planning in office buildings.

Neighborhood Subcommittee: The neighborhood subcommittee is developing a model program for neighboring buildings to use in a disaster situation that would pre-establish building to building mutual aide protocols that would function if the public sector was unavailable.

A few of the public agencies that participate with the EPC committee include:

• San Francisco Department of Emergency Management
• San Francisco Fire Department
• San Francisco Police Department
• San Francisco Health Department
• FBI
• Homeland Security
• National Guard

The expertise of the committee members in property management, security services, and public safety is phenomenal.

The next committee meeting will be on May 12, at the Pyramid Center, 600 Montgomery St., 48th Floor from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. BOMA members are invited to join the committee! Please contact the EPC Chair, Ellen Kovach, at ekovach@swigco.com.