Feature
by Emily Landes, Janan New & Matthew C. Sheridan
In 2004, Mayor Gavin Newsom appointed former San Francisco Supervisor
Annemarie Conroy to serve as head of the Office of Emergency Services
and Homeland Security. At the end of her first year on the job,
Conroy sat down with SFAA Executive Director Janan New, San Francisco
Apartment Magazine Editor Matthew Sheridan and Assistant Editor
Emily Landes for an exclusive interview about how a disaster of
the magnitude of the 1906 earthquake could affect housing in San
Francisco and practical tips on what apartment owners can do to
be prepared.
Q. Other than a standard tenant-welcome packet, do you have any other ideas for apartment owners about effective ways to communicate with tenants regarding emergency preparedness?
A. Send a reminder to everybody in the building: “In the event of disaster, it is your responsibility to be prepared for at least 72 hours. Here is the web site: www.72hours.org. Here is what you need to do to be prepared.”
In San Francisco, we fight complacency. We romanticize that San Francisco survived the 1906 quake. But there were 225,000 people who were homeless, living in the parks for lengthy periods of time. The city had to be completely rebuilt. Half the city was gone—the 1906 quake was a very tragic event. My great-great-grandmother actually died in the quake and fire. But there is this romanticism about 1906. “We San Franciscans can rise from the ashes; we are strong and nothing can stop us.” During the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, the same type of thing occurred. While not that many people were impacted, it was a terrible event—we lost lives and about 3,000 or more were injured. But for the rest of San Francisco, life went on and our generation thinks that was our big earthquake. If you take that epicenter from sixty miles away in Santa Cruz and move it closer to western San Francisco, you would have catastrophic building collapse.
Q. What measures are in place for permanent housing if a building collapse of that magnitude occurs?
A. We have done a lot of work on our mass care and shelter plan. San Francisco had only identified a few thousand beds or places where you could put a few thousand people in cots. Our mass care and shelter plan now is at 50,000 to 60,000 people—most staying in San Francisco. We have a consultant that is out in the field right now surveying all of these different sites in San Francisco, whether they’re schools, gymnasiums, privately held buildings, or places where we could put a number of displaced San Franciscans. This will be a very good tool for the city to have. Right now, San Francisco has an idea of where we might put people. But this would actually have all the plans, how you would lay out a shelter, where the sleeping areas would be, what needs to be done to make the building ADA [Americans with Disabilities Act] compliant, where you would put the portable bathrooms—all the things you would need to make it a shelter. Some buildings may need very little; others will need a lot.
Shelters will be spread throughout the city, so if one neighborhood is significantly impacted, we know we can’t use those shelters and can open shelters in other sectors of the city. All this will be in a computer database so we can see the layout of the city, determine what is needed, how many people can go where and also which sites could be pet friendly.
There are over 150,000 dogs in San Francisco. That’s more dogs than there are children in San Francisco, and that is something we have to deal with. We’ve been working very closely with the SPCA [Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals], Pets Unlimited, the Animal Care and Control Department, and the different veterinary groups in the city on animal care, which is part of our care and shelter plan. We are working with storage of different types of crates and supplies to establish emergency kennels nearby shelters so people can feel safe leaving their pets. If people do have pets, it is critical to remind them to get their pets microchipped. It helps with reunification.
Q. In terms of temporary housing, is there anything that SFAA can do to assist the city after the disaster?
A. In a major event, if there were available apartments for people to move into, that would be great. I know it’s hard with all of the different rent control laws; we’ve looked at this post-Katrina. People want to give someone a place for six months or eight months, but the way the rent control laws operate in San Francisco it works against us. Also, we may be able to use buildings with very large lobbies if necessary.
Q. What steps can multifamily building owners take to properly prepare their buildings for emergencies?
A. Well, I think that question is best put to the Department of Building Inspection and to structural engineers as to what you can do for your particular building. The city has the CAPSS Program—the Community Action Plan for Seismic Safety—which found that soft-story construction is of tremendous concern to the city. We don’t know whether that study will get the funding to finish and move on to the mitigation phase, which is the most important phase in looking at the retrofit of different buildings, the actual types of retrofit and how the city can help.
San Francisco had the UMB Program [unreinforced masonry buildings] that voters had approved after the 1989 earthquake. The program had some problems, but the concept was there and it showed that San Franciscans would accept a bond program to retrofit different buildings. That same bonding capacity could be used by the housing community to develop low-cost programs to accomplish seismic retrofits, but I think it’s going to be based off of that CAPSS report. So it is really important that the CAPSS report gets finished, and the city can move on to the mitigation phase—structurally fixing the buildings.
As a property owner, the second way of being prepared is to assist the tenants in your buildings in being prepared. I think it would be a good and philanthropic thing for larger apartment buildings to have earthquake kits on hand. If there is storage in your building, take one of the storage units and just spend a couple of hundred dollars on emergency preparedness kits. Store some bottled water, store some ready-to-eat meals and have ten or twelve extra flashlights stored, depending on the size of your building.
Apartment owners should know about medically fragile or older tenants. These vulnerable tenants should sign up for the city’s “disaster registry,” which allows the disabled or elderly to register with the Department of Public Health and the city will check on them after an event. [Check out www.sanfranciscoems.org/drp.php for more info on the registry program.] And there are some things that property owners could do if a tenant is kind of irresponsible and doesn’t really have what they should have—maybe keeping some extra supplies, depending on the size of the building, like transistor radios with fresh batteries, which is our best way of communicating instructions and information to the public if the power is out.
Q. How will local and state agencies communicate with one another during an emergency?
A. In San Francisco, we’ve invested quite a bit of money in our 800-megahertz system. The police department, the fire department, in fact all of our major departments, with the exception of the municipal railway system, are on the system. That didn’t exist in New York, and one of the biggest problems in 9-11 was that there was not interoperability of communications. Since that time, the issue of interoperability has been very much at the forefront at the Department of Homeland Security, and we’ve worked with them on a couple of different projects.
We’ve applied for a number of grants so that we can work county to county. We’re really focused on investing with our partners in the region to have a microwave backbone throughout the entire Bay Area in order to get the 10 counties, including Santa Cruz County, to talk to one another; and any federal or state agencies coming in that are on different frequencies would be able to plug right in. It’s a very expensive undertaking. The interoperability of communications is complicated and expensive.
Q. How interested are other counties in being involved?
A. We’re actually embarking on a first-in-the-nation regional plan. We’ve taken the ten Bay Area counties, and we’re all working together on emergency response and planning at a regional level, whether it’s an act of terrorism or Mother Nature. The questions are: how do we all work together? Where are all of the assets in the Bay Area? How do you access them, or the federal or state assets? What do the different cities have and what are they buying with their Homeland Security money? So if something happens to San Francisco, we know what Oakland and San Jose has; we know what types of programs they have for hazardous materials, for example. None of that is done right now, which was just amazing to me walking in the door here. It has not been standard protocol. We don’t want to be looking for these things in a state of emergency; for example, we want to know what types of teams San Jose has, what Marin has, and what various agencies and entities can bring to bear in the Bay Area.
Another
part of that regional plan is looking at how we move mass casualties
around the Bay Area if we have a number of trauma patients. San
Francisco can only handle so many, and the question is, how to
move them around the region. We are looking at transportation issues.
If the bridges are down, how is that all going to work? We’ve also
brought in a consultant, the URS Corporation. We’re spending several
million dollars in San Francisco, working with San Jose and Oakland
on this whole regional plan.
If the bridges are out, we are going to be very dependent on ferries,
so we are working on prioritizing ferries. Who gets on what ferries?
Hospital personnel, police, fire or public health—it depends on
the type of emergency. So, we’re working on prioritization of what
personnel city agencies are planning to recall back into the city.
Plus, San Francisco can’t have all the ferries; there are other
cities and counties that are going to need their personnel returned
as well.
Q. What happens if city residents need to be evacuated? How do you move mass amounts of people around or out of San Francisco?
A. In San Francisco, in terms of evacuations, we’re moving people from one part of the city to another. So if it’s an evacuation of the downtown corridor, you are moving people out of the downtown corridor into another area of San Francisco. If it’s a tsunami warning, of a warning level that you’ve got to evacuate, you look at our inundation zone—which is up to about 45th Avenue—you need to get everyone off of the Pacific Coast and out of the inundation zone. We are working on plans for all of those types of things. So our evacuation plans really look at moving people within San Francisco, but we also have evacuation planning as part of the larger regional plan, including coordination with the state and California Highway Patrol with bridges, freeways and transportation mode out of the city.
Q. What is your biggest concern for preparing for a natural disaster with the city?
A. I worry about a major earthquake. Short of a massive bombing, a major earthquake affects every part of the city. I think Mother Nature and her wrath is very lethal in scope. People can do some pretty horrible things; bioterrorism is also high on my list of concerns. But—short of a nuclear bomb—the biggest thing I worry about is an earthquake.
Q. What concerns you most in terms of the preparation for an earthquake?
A. People are not thinking about their civic duty to be prepared. Our first responders and government need to be focused on the people most in need and most impacted by an event. If you are a person of means, if you are caring for children or an elderly person, or just a single person living in San Francisco, you’re responsible for yourself and your dependants. You can’t rely on government to provide food, water and the basics. That’s your job: to take care of yourself and your dependants for at least the first 72 hours, until federal assistance arrives.
If you make it through a catastrophic event and you are fortunate enough to be in a structure that is still standing, to expect government to take care of you is wrong. What we’re—the government—is asking people to do is meet us halfway. Be prepared, so that we can go out and help the people that are most in need. Everyone in San Francisco is lion-hearted, and they will volunteer to do things after an event. We’re asking you to do that ahead of time.
If we can get you off our checklist so that we know that our citizenry can take care of itself, we can go and do the work that we need to do. That is the fastest way to recover in San Francisco—particularly in a terrorist event. If we know that our citizenry is prepared, the faster we get up off that canvas after being hit, we’ve defeated terrorism. So it’s really people’s civic duty to be prepared. And it sounds like a broken record, but it really is the best thing that you can do.
Q. What’s in your emergency-preparedness kit?
A. We have stored water, things for our dogs, making sure they’re cared for, and everything that’s on the checklist: sturdy shoes, a flashlight, a transistor radio with batteries, first-aid supplies and other disaster supply items.
You should have one “to-go” kit at each bed, and ideally, one by each door, in your car, office and garage. Some people even have supplies buried in their backyard in a plastic container; in case their house is severely impacted, then they have enough food and supplies to survive until help arrives.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of SFAA or the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. For more information about emergency preparedness, please visit www.72hours.org. Copyright © 2006 by the San Francisco Apartment Magazine. All rights reserved.