amazingly difficult adventure, which is basically what it is. so, you know, hearing people talk now 22 years later, it's amazing to me how much things have changed. you hear fema talking about community-based recovery. you see the fire and police people with all the training. you know, none of this existed back then. so a lot of things have changed. technology. i mean, think about it. here we are, we go to an event and everybody says, turn your cell phone on to silent. then we do that. then we do our email and everything. you know, they gave me a cell phone in 1989 when they gave me the orange vest that said incident commander. and by the way, at that time probably two weeks before the earthquake i wouldn't have known an incident commander from commander cody in the lost planet airman. that's a reference if you're a

certain age. but in any case, they gave me the cell phone. remember what a cell phone was like in 1989? it was a sear's die-hard battery. you have to carry this around, charlie. i was like, oh, yeah. ok. it was pretty cool. i tried it a couple times. after about a day of that my shoulders were hurting and everything. i said, this is a repetitive stress injury waiting to happen. so i kind of scratched that. i think the point is, though, technology can be really important no matter where we are at whatever age and that's something that's always changing so you have to kind of really utilize that. but at the same time certain things stay the same and we have been talking about partnership, right? and what is a partnership with the leading agency which is the local government and the communalt? -- community?

it's people. people connecting with people. it's one thing to talk about something in the abstract and it's another thing to actually figure out how to do it in real time with all sorts of things happening at once. and it's tricky. so what i'm going to do -- first of all, i want to say by reference people ask me what recovery is about, and basically what i've decided now is it starts as a sprint and it ends as a marathon. only when you're sprinting you don't realize it's a marathon. and that's probably a good thing. so you get worn out too soon. but really the sprint part of it is really the emergency response and the immediate aftermath. i say a couple things about that and community engagement with the business community and then the marathon part is really the long-term recovery and i'll say about that and vision santa cruz.

so in santa cruz what happened that cloud of yellow dust was actually about a million square feet of the downtown with a third of it collapsing, essentially, or near collapse and a third of it probably ok and a third of it undetermined. the red, yellow, green business which got to eventually. but what was the right thing to do? at the moment the right thing to do is what police and fire did which was to get everybody out of there and do search and rescue and so that worked really well because they had actually rehearsed that in august and that's what fire and police did and that's what emergency response was. nobody really knew that much about recovery or thought about it. but the first thing that happened is everybody leaves after 24 hours. they're fine with that. then after 48 hours people kind of dust themselves off and get up and say, you know, i got some medicine in my apartment

unit downtown or i'm a business and i've got all my records that i need to get. or what am i going to do? all of a sudden at one time multiple needs emerge, and these come into conflict with the fundamental value of keeping everybody safe. so the earthquake was on tuesday, and it wasn't until friday that the world figured out that loma prieta was not next to san francisco and oakland, that it was down near santa cruz and watsonville and the president of the united states shows up and the first thing that happened is they walk him down the middle of pacific avenue in this area that everybody had been forbidden to go in for the last four days and the business people are kind of going, now, wait a minute. this is the most guarded person in the world and he's going right where you say we can't go.

and there are secret service guys up on the roofs of the buildings and all that stuff. so that created a little bit of a problem because, you know, recovery's not singular. recovery is pleural. -- recovery is plural. recovery is thousands of people, individuals, families, groups, organizations, businesses, communities, regions, each organism in its own way having decisions to make and needing to be empowered to make those decisions and to do the things that they need to do to recover. and, you know, as a public agency you can be in the way of that or you can support it. and it's way better to support it. because what happened in santa cruz is everybody in city hall and the e.o.c. was stumped what to do next. their first thought was, ok, we can't let anybody in until we demolish all the buildings. well, that was a big nonstarter

for the business community because their livelihoods depended on getting access to those buildings. so the long story short is after about a week of kind of floundering with what to do, the city kind of reinvented itself and that's when i got plunked in as incident commander and that really i think illustrated two things. one is that you have to reinvent your organization. even if you're well planned you have to reinvent things because you don't know who's going to be available, you don't know who's going to be stuck on the bridge, you don't know who's going to show up and you really don't know how people individually are going to react. so that was one thing, and the second thing is recognition of part of the mayor and the leadership of the city that they needed to partner with the business community and the downtown. i just happened to be the guy because i had been working a lot with the business community on downtown economic issues in the general plan. i'm a city planner, right, so

what do i know about command and control? so anyway what we had to do is basically five things. the first thing is we had to establish trust because there was an adversarial thing going on and it wasn't pretty. and one of the reasons, one of the big reasons people distrust city hall is they don't feel like they're getting the straight story or they feel like they're being paternalized and people don't like that, particularly small businesses and entrepreneurs. and i can't tell you how many times i heard it from higher ups when i was doing this, loose lips sink ships and that was sort of the thing i heard a lot. and you know i thought about that. i thought, that's really important in world war ii in the north atlantic when you got, you know, german u boats trying to torpedo you.

does that really apply here? i kind of reversed that whole notion of holding your cards close and the first thing i did, try to do anyway was get every bit of information i could and then convey it out to people so they could make their own decisions so they felt empowered. and part of that, the second thing is to really understand the big picture. you get swallowed up in the details after a disaster. believe me, it's just millions of details. somehow you got to stand back from that and figure out the bones of the situation, the big picture, so i was trying to do that as well and that was kind of taking the information. but what happened by sharing information is it was almost immediate transformation to relationship because then suddenly people are saying, oh, ok. this is hard. this is difficult. you know, i said, this is what we know. this is what we don't know.

you know, they look at me and say, that pathetic guy, we need to try to help him out. that is what happened essentially, and then we became partners. so we didn't have to spend any time, you know, nert being mad at city hall and people saying, why don't those people like us? i say bunker mentality is the number one enemy of the e.o.c.'s so the way you can avoid that and open it up -- so the third thing we did is we established a network of communication using the business community and the leadership structure, the chamber of commerce, the downtown association to purble the information back out and also to get feedback in. so we understood what were the big things that people needed. then, we had to build an ad hoc organization and another thing about disasters is they're bigger by definition something you can manage. it's not manageable. that's why it's a disaster,

right? if it was manageable, it wouldn't be a disaster, it would be an incident, right? so we had about 15 or 20 people that i brought out of city hall, just picked people i kind of thought would be good at thinking on their feet and didn't need to read a book to now what the rules were. so we brought them and then we used hundreds of volunteers to support that. and the big project was trying to find a way to get policies and process in place to allow the downtown businesses to start their own recovery which meant faking acceptable risks which meant -- taking acceptable risks which meant, what are acceptable risks? the things that are dicey to trying to figure out and the fire chief tells me fire people will not go in those buildings. by the way, if there is a fire there and leaking gas

underneath the street it's going to blow up. you know, comforting things like that. so i asked him to be in charge of finding out what he could about the gas mains underneath the street and i'm still waiting for that report, by the way. [laughter] so the fourth thing was the network and the volunteers and the organization. the fifth thing was really to get to the substance. you know, what plans did we have to make for individual businesses to have some access in acceptable ways based on engineering that was sort of ongoing, and then we had some bigger plans going on. and the whole project then became one of -- you remember october 17, and then what was the day after thanksgiving? we didn't know it was black friday in those days. it was just thanksgiving. we knew we had the downtown open in some fashion or form. and so then the enterprise

shifted to getting these pavilions set up and all the volunteers and structures, leases and use city parking lots and the pavilions. it was an impossible thing that just couldn't have happened except organically with everybody doing stuff. as much as we can empower them, keeping in mind we had to maintain some control and decorum and some safety features. and, you know, thank goodness nothing really bad happened. we were there until 10:00 at night the night before thanksgiving doing the final touches on paving and we had a downtown. accessible in parts by the day after thanksgiving. so that was sort of the sprint. the long term, and i'm keeping me from my parking meter so i'll do this quickly. the long term is that -- the long-term plan for santa cruz

and then watsonville is really the marathon. and you talk about what makes good plans and good planning is really good process and you have to design the process to respond to the conditions in your community or your community. you could have multiple plans in a larger city, for example, and then try to coordinate those altogether. now, the question here -- seen here is, how do you involve the community? and there's sort of this whole notion of bottom up instead of top down. actually you need both. you need both. we sort of overreacted in the 1970's about experts or just paid hacks and that sort of things and there are still consultants out there that will just listen to the community and all they get is something from the community which is all wonderful expression of values and valuable but recovery is all about investment, right,

particularly in the business district? you have people to risk real money on real projects in your downtown which means you need expertise on retail. we tried to design a process that involved the whole community. we had this vision of santa cruz committee of 36. a year and a half to do it. people got a little impatient over that period of time. i kept telling them, the avocado seed in the jar, you have to watch the things go underneath before anything comes up out of the ground. they didn't even buy it. it was a good try. and then it's the long haul of carrying this all out, but redid have a knock down, dragout process in the community. berkeley, tom, you know what that's all about. an academic community challenged to do something other than have a good conversation. you know, the status quo is not an option. so just having a conversation is only part of it.

you have to actually get to real projects so that's what we did. it is pretty successful. we're still now 20 years later looking to do retail enhancements, changing some things because, you know, planning doesn't start and end at one period of time. so that's what we did and we're still standing. thank you. [applause] >> ok. that concludes the formal presentation part of this event. now, let me make you all work a little bit. not really. i did want to say, though, i want to acknowledge some things. the panel, it's always interesting when you're tapped to do a panel like this and you wonder if it's going to fit, are all the pieces going to work together? i think you all guys touched on very important issues that really speak to this issue of whole community. so i want to give you guys an applause and really thank you for taking the time to be here today.

i also because i know some of you out there kind of want to acknowledge some people and some of the things that they've done i think that are very important contributions. nancy ward over here was my colleague in the state for a lot of years and has now been -- with fema for 10 years? and i got to tell you, nancy really did a lot to push forward funding for planning in the bay area when they were overlooking us and looking at the other areas in the country. because of her efforts we have now had a pretty steady stream of funding coming through. also want to acknowledge mike deyton in the state for this as well. but we've done i think some of the best regional planning in the country here in the bay area. and i have to -- in the interest of full disclosure, i am an employer of u.r.f. we have do a lot of those plans. with that said i think we've done an incredible amount of work here in the bay area to

address the a lot of deficiencies and issues that became apparent after loma prieta. also i think it's important to acknowledge a lot of our community partners and having worked down here in the bay area for a couple years as part of the bay initiative. we have emily white and greg smith here from red cross who are part of our advisory team. alyssa domo who carries the flag forward being executive director and working with a lot of nonprofits in san francisco and even extending elsewhere now. now a lot of the work that's being done is being done throughout the state. also here hodge who is a huge partner from the faith community here in the bay area representing hunters point bayview area and just did a tremendous job in boosting awareness and preparing that community for a lot of different hazards that could

strike them. also yokilly recommendo. another intermediary group that works with nonprofits. once again, the bay area is just an incubator, just so important in terms of this whole concept. i also wanted to mention a lot of the work that's done in the private sector. michael cummings. i worked with him when i was with fritz institute. he has gone to fema. that's an important effort that fema has undertaken. something that the deputy administrator was talking about. i think the state should bring somebody in there as well. [laughter] yeah, right. i have toe say here in the state we are lucky to have the california resiliencey law and peter who has done a lot of incredible work with the private sector. so once again, so many good

ideas, so many things have happened here. just remarkable. state of the art. now, the work that you have to do, we have some questions. my colleague prepared some questions. we don't have a lot of time. we have one mike there in the center, and we had way too many questions. we have 15 minutes or so. but i think maybe the best question to ask, jim, is the last one that we had which is like looking back at the last two-plus decades since loma prieta, you know, what concerns us collectively as a group, you know, most about our current response and recovery capacity and what do we think our greatest stride has been the time as regional community to engage bay area communities to become stronger and more resilient? what has worked and what do we really need to focus on for the future? that is really what it comes down to. i am just going to throw that

out to our panelist or to the audience. first off, let me see if there's any comments from the panel. come on. >> i just think we've come so much further on the communication side of it and i think -- when i think not being able to call someone for seven or eight hours and now the idea that you can text, i think that's one of the biggest challenges, how do we take that new technology -- not new -- but newer and use it in a way that can help us both before and after and i think that's a huge opportunity for all of us. >> i just like to say one thing, too, that i think people now realize and have studied a lot more about recovery and emergency response and recovery and i think that's really, really important. and i like to think of this sprint marathon as a kind of relay that you don't necessarily, you know, have everything worked out,

obviously, in the preevent planning but you understand that transitions have to act quickly. the baton gets passed from one group to the next in terms of the focus of the work and so on and that's a really good mindset to have going in so you're not going in there thinking it all has to go this way or that way, that you're flexible. >> i have to say that san francisco and the bay area is very culturally confident. we have lots of language capability from staff. even from the city level to nonprofit level. i would still say that cities and counties still need to really work on the ability to shelter their population. watsonville, it was about 8% of their population that was homeless for a long period of time. we have to work how wrer going to manage that large population for a long period of time. >> one of the things that happened and i think was important happened in the legislature which was the

standardized emergency management system. once we got that in place when people could actually communicate and work, because that was one of the biggest problems is people couldn't communicate. >> thank you. >> hi. i'm glenn pomeroy, the state created earthquake insurer for homeowners. we are here talking about preparedness to recovery. speaking in terms of the individual, the future survivors that was spoke about so eloquently. just a quick comment. the only way that those individual homeowners or apartment dwellers that could have the financial strength to rebuild is if they have an earthquake insurance policy that is provided in our part by this nonprofit state traded california earthquake authority. earthquake insurance is specifically excluded from your homeowners insurance. it's important for people to

realize that. the only way they have financial security for earthquake damage is to purchase a separate earthquake insurance policy. they created a. we're a nonprofit carrier. we are trying to make the cost is affordable. it isn't cheap. senator feinstein in the senate and three republican members in the house have introduced identical legislation cause the earthquake insurance act. we would save $100 million a year for california policyholders so i would encourage all californians to get behind that effort. let's make earthquake insurance more affordable and more broadly available, get more homes prepared to recover following an earthquake and, yes, we need to do mitigation too. i want to come by and visit about all the efforts we have under way both on the mitigation side and insurance side. working together we can get more homes protected. >> sir, how much money do you have available in the event of

an earthquake? >> 15 years later, california earthquake authority has $10 billion of claims. good for what we estimate to be one in 500-year event so our friends from fema understand how significant that is. we're ready for a big one. the problem is most people don't buy insurance. 90% of the homes in california are not insured. i don't want you to discourage people but encourage people. >> i encourage people to strengthen their homes. that's what i want them to do. >> we're with that on mitigation too. i'd like to visit you. >> i didn't like the legislation. i thought it was too costly. didn't have enough protection. and you had to put this money aside. $10 billion would go like that. $10 billion is just chicken feed. >> actually, for homes that we insure, for the number of homes we insure we could handle another northridge and loma prieta. financial security and strength is not a problem. it's the problem that most

people so far have not elected to purchase it. that's the work we have. >> you guys are rolling out a mitigation program now, right? >> we have a terrific mitigation program. getting ready to launch. we have $22 million to provide cash incentives for people to mitigate their homes. so we got a lot of things going on. thank you. >> before you start, one thing i wanted to mention, i have a former colleague, lori johnson, not to put you on the spot. lori has done a lot of research on cobay and also on new orleans. i just want to know, if there's anything specific you have that could add to this discussion. you don't have to. i know i'm putting you on the spot. given the opportunity. all right. [laughter] ok. >> good morning. this question is a two-part question. probably would be best directed to barbara. one of the things is, as being

an administrator of a church in the bay area, a vulnerable community, being part of the inner faith council, have you contacted or have m.o.u.'s with any other churches in which you could have health departments set up in there with emergency medical supplies or anything in case of an earthquake in the area so that we would already be a part of the city's plan? and my next question is, we are on third street here in the city and third street is one of the only corridors that you could leave the city without going over a bridge or overpass. to my understanding, third street is not one of the emergency corridors. instead, on a peninsula, in having a street like that, i wonder why. >> i can answer your first question. what we just done is incorporated the individual -- the organizations that have

contracts with us. we're now launching a community preparedness program and that's something we'll work with d.e.m. in terms of a citywide m.o.u. that will go to faith-based programs and i'm sure that ann will be very supportive of that. right now we're borking with our community-based organization -- working with our community-based organizations so they know where all our radios are in that community so we already started in the southeast. but that's an excellent point to look at the faith-based churches and have m.o.u.'s work with them and that's something that clearly needs to be happening. i see ann in the front row. she's shaking her head to that. as we move from the community-based organizations that have contracts with us, then we have to work with organizations like yours. sure to come. >>ry don't know if i can -- i don't know if i can address the corridor issue. >> hi. my name is lynn. i am proud to say i have been a member of the nert program

since 1994 when i graduated with my husband. at the time it cost us $25 each and it was the best investment we have ever made. and i'm so proud that it is free to all of our city residents as well as the people that work here. i am proud to say that our nert program as part of the certificate programs in the bay area has been an open dialogue with each other. we know core, we know panda. we know the people at berkeley. we continue to learn. i think we have already had this whole community approach since 1989 and we just continue to grow it. which brings me to my biggest question which is that we have reached 20,000 people in san francisco through word of mouth. 20,000 people is an excellent force multiplier but when you look at a population that grows to more than a million during the day, when you have tourists and schools and people visits who don't know what to do, it's not going to be enough. how do we reach more people to get them into nert training,

give them the incentives to get them out of their house into training classes? can we require this of businesses, require it as schools, require it as institutions and give them a payback for it? can we give them insurance reductions? can we give them tax breaks? can we give small businesses rebates? if people are trained and certified in nert and stay active, how can we bring people in the training when it does hit we really are ready? because the time we spend now in getting ready and being prepared that will shorten that recovery time in a very great and significant way. >> i would just say we wrestle with getting more people in our community to get involved. we have our drills and it's the people that are engaged that come out to the drills. i don't know about incentives for businesses but i think what we find is when the businesses supporting it you can see it. i can go down the wharf and say