Facing up to next Big One

Quake group points to "best practices"
Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer

In the Wild West, sheriffs formed posses by deputizing local citizens to help track down bad guys.

In today's San Francisco, though, the "deputies" are likelier to be structural engineers. That's one of the imaginative ways in which Bay Area government agencies and corporations are preparing to face a future super-earthquake, 13 years after the Loma Prieta quake.

The semiofficial Quake '06 Campaign, a regional effort that aims to greatly improve Bay Area building safety by April 2006, named 12 especially admirable local efforts Wednesday to safeguard structures against the next Big One.

These "best practices" include a San Francisco program to deputize private structural engineers as official building inspectors. In the event of a major quake, the engineers are authorized to inspect and re-open designated buildings after they file an inspection report with the city department of building inspections.

In theory, the Building Occupancy Resumption Program, or BORP, will hasten building reopenings. This should avoid long delays in reopening buildings, like the delays caused by the shortage of city inspectors after the Loma Prieta quake of 1989.

Only 18 official building inspectors were available after the Loma Prieta quake, said Quake '06 Campaign spokeswoman Victoria Costello.

On Wednesday, Campaign officials identified BORP and 11 other "best practices" in hopes of encouraging other communities to consider taking similar steps. The campaign is run by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute's Northern California chapter in collaboration with local corporations and municipal, state and federal agencies.

They identified the 12 best practices at a fitting site: the steps of the historic Pacific Stock Exchange on Pine Street in the heart of the Financial District. As a nerve center of the Pacific Rim economy, the exchange could lose more than $5 billion in trading activity if shut down for three days after a major quake, campaign officials said. That's how long the exchange shut after the Loma Prieta disaster.

The exchange is one of more than 50 corporations that has joined the BORP program in its six-year history. To join, a firm designates in advance at least one structural engineer, who must belong to the Structural Engineering Association of California. The firm must also file with the city building inspections department a formal plan that describes exactly how the post-quake building inspection will be conducted. A typical inspection entails a visual review of walls, ceilings and building joints.

The goal of the Quake '06 Campaign is to greatly improve building safety by April 2006, the 100th anniversary of the 1906 quake.

Up to 4,000 might die if a 1906-type quake happened today, said Charles Scawthorn, vice president of the EERI Northern California chapter. According to computer models, that same quake could cost up to $82 billion in damages and leave 200,000 homeless.

The campaign is a coalition of organizations, governments, corporations and private citizens that EERI runs in collaboration with the Association of Bay Area Governments, the state Geological Survey, the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state Office of Emergency Services.

On Wednesday, campaign officials also singled out for praise "best practices," including:

• The city of Berkeley's incentive program for encouraging homeowners to seismically retrofit their homes.
• The Kaiser Permanente hospitals' seismic retrofit project.
• The Berkeley Unified School District's seismic improvement program.
• A program to guarantee post-quake water flow through the East Bay Municipal Utility District.
• A survey of multifamily buildings' vulnerability to quakes by the cities of Berkeley, Campbell, Fremont and San Leandro.
• The city of San Jose's emergency response and recovery plan.

E-mail Keay Davidson at kdavidson@sfchronicle.com.