is to look at ways to even if the buildings, we don't go for higher performance of the building per se, what can we do to facilitate through programs, reducing the impeding factor, and the ultimate goal, might not be able to read all the numbers but in the report, being able to reduce those functional recovery

times, not changing anything in the building but impeding factors, beyond that is the question of enforcing higher performance standards beyond the basic california building code forgiven that san francisco has a lot of tall buildings in close proximity that serve important functions both for office and for residential. so a quick kind of run through that, appreciate your attention, i think we will move on now to probably the first panel discussion. thank you. [applause] >> ok. our next panel is a discussion on strengthening building performance. i will be your, the facilitator

for this paneling. with us, my first guest is john hooper, who is with the applied technology council, who has been another gentleman who has been right with us from the very beginning, thinking about everything on tall buildings. we have angus mccarthy, the president of the building inspection commission. we have mary ellen carroll, the director of the department of emergency management, and joel coppel, with the planning commission. ok. so, i'm going to ask a very important question and we are just going to go straight down the line, and let's just get straight to it. what do you think is the most important task we can do to strengthen building performance? >> now i'm on. two areas we could do. i can't do just one.

the first one is we could improve the repair time numbers that he showed on the screen earlier, changing how we design tall building, affect that by reducing drips and things like that, one piece. but i think the larger effort could be on those impeding factors to reduce that time, where the majority of the down time comes from. improving the program and things of that nature will facilitate quicker recovery times and getting back in the building. >> so for me, i think because we at d.m. are responsible for the safety assessment program and the coordination and resourcing for that, my recommendation would be to expand borp as much as we can, we'll learn more about that, in the panel later on. to be able to accelerate reentry and assessment of your buildings, i am a huge advocate

for it. >> on behalf of the planning department staff, director, and president melgar, thank everyone for showing up today and let you know that we are extremely concerned with public safety, the safety of our buildings, all over the city especially downtown, and our commission is deeply committed to maintaining the integrity of our built environment. >> obviously i echo the statements made here, i just want to point out we have commissioner clinch here for serious academic questions you may have, he sits on our engineer and commissioner walker who sits at the tenants. so, thank you for coming here this morning and seeing everybody here this morning. i sit on the builder seat, so we have a very lot of round table discussions, particularly in the building community. with escalating costs and as you know, builders, developers, we complain a lot how are we going to build these things and so on.

but one thing as somebody who was in the 1989 earthquake, remembers it very clearly, the aftermath and the damage that was done, so, educating the new development community on how important it is to come up with really strong policies and how we build our tall buildings is probably the most important thing we can do over the next couple of years. >> excellent. and so we saw a presentation by professor deerline. is there anything that really stands out that we should focus on immediately and then maybe in the long-term, and i'll just let anyone jump out. >> the building stock of tall buildings and the new building design, separate buckets for me. how do we look at the ones that professor deerline mentioned about the cohorts of buildings

from the early 1970s to the 1980s to what we do today, and i can they should be looked at and recommendations are included for both, and it's hard to decipher, because we can improve the new buildings incrementally, a small percentage of what we see in the community, but the existing buildings are out there, and vulnerable buildings were mentioned that should have a look see and see if we can't improve their performance as well. >> and so today's, and having everyone here today is very important. existing buildings, a lot we don't know about, and so maybe angus with building inspection and planning, joel, think about what would we have to do to try and, from a city standpoint with new buildings it's easy, we can just set new regulations and build them according to those building codes. but walk through some of the process of what we have to go through with existing buildings.

>> well, i think a lot has happened, the department, d.p.i. is very committed to safety, that's our primary concern, and 1982 and 1983, back to 2008 was introduced, i think that kind of sent out a strong message, we have been on this quite a while. lately, s80 and for those geo tech, geo tech people in the audience is a big ask of the development community, but we are asking for two forms of geo tech analysis on buildings and so on. so, we are moving as fast as we can. it's kind of on a monthly basis, we seem to come up with new policy and procedures that would be good, obviously it takes time to implement them, but the department of building inspection is doing everything it can to keep on top of changes and involvement on a regular

basis, particularly when it comes to tall buildings. >> as far as planning is concerned, we have a pipeline of upcoming tall buildings. recently approving tall buildings and whether it's a commercial or residential or hotel use we take that into consideration just because there might be different safety requirements, not just as the structure of the building need to be built directly, but also the, the systems within the building need to notify people if there is an accident and coming from -- we always work hand-in-hand with the fire department for our life safety inspections with extra signage, egress routes and emergency lighting to make sure the buildings are safe to be in habited and safe to stand. >> and mary ellen, in thinking about this from your head of the department of emergency management, kind of think about, we, if we have this earthquake, what happens with our down time,

down time if the building does not get back up online in a time period, and how does that affect our recovery? >> i think one of my favorite recommendations in the report, even though one of the most daunting, is the downtown recovery report, or study. that we need to do. and what i think about is our downtown has grown and diversified so much recently, it's not just financial and commercial. we have residential, we have more hotels, and so it's so critical that we look at all of these issues about the performance and then what we are going to do both kind of in the immediate aftermath and then how we recover. some buildings may perform well, but are not going to be accessible because buildings around them have not performed well. and so i think that the -- the

other thing is that we have the time frame for potentially getting buildings back online, but i think we need to look a little bit deeper into the, whether those are real or not depending on debris removal that we have to do, lifelines restoration, there's a lot of sort of competing and interdependent factors that go into our recovery. so, this is incredibly important and i'm not the engineer or the technical person, but we all need to work together to make sure that our assessments and our planning are interdependent, that we are looking at the enter dependensies, and we are doing just that. >> thank you. and while i'm asking questions up here, i would ask you to start writing questions to pass

forward so you can ask the panel as soon as we finish here with our conversation. and there's a gentleman in the back, bill barnes, and they will pass out cards if you are interested in asking questions of this panel. other areas that we have been talking about, we have been talking a lot about, especially in downtown san francisco, is the geo technical. we have a lot of structural engineers and i think we have that down. we realized in the last couple years the geo tech, the foundation, we live in a city that has different types of soils, just within a few block radius. i know angus you talked about the administrative and the sheets, but maybe talk more about what it means and how we

think it through going forward and the different processes as a city. >> that was one of the recommendations that professor deerline showed. the process for improving how we do foundation and geo technical engineering is underway. taken that under their wing, and the first draft is available and scrutinized by the full geo technical community, to help raise the bar, if you will, of how geo technical engineering is done, to make sure we are well founded in the geo technical area here, it can vary greatly on the same city block. and hopefully that will be done and the future of foundation and geo technical engineering will be improved by that effort. >> any other thoughts about that? >> just to conclude, the department is doing very, very good work in that area, and i

see my son there, interned here, and ever a job to go after in college is geo technical if you move to san francisco. the biggest challenge i see, we don't have a bigger pool of geo technical. it's a real challenge, as somebody who built the first building in south america in the late 1980s, i learned about the geo technical and the soft, to create a foundation that's going to work in very difficult. and here we are with the tall buildings again and asking the same from the community. i think they are very, very huge part of us getting this whole thing right, and we need more geo technical engineers, no question about it. the development world, we have a very small pool to go to, and that's something i think is another part of this equation i would love to see more increase in those professional, thank

you. >> i wanted to just take a second to thank mayor breed and the leadership she's been providing. we have been recently hearing presentations, there are climate change issues to make the buildings more energy efficient downtown, but at least having the discussions on a public level to help us gain knowledge and know more for the future. >> excellent. so, some of the questions i've gotten from the audience and we can talk about is where is the u.s. geological survey in this conversation, and what is being done about the continued areas -- mission bay, embarcadero. u.s. geological survey, i know the office of resilience and capital planning has regular conversations with them, and part of our conversation, not just here on tall buildings, but

in the earthquake safety implementation program, and we are very much involved in our retrofit conversations and our -- we are working with them on a regular basis. as for like our continued areas of liquifaction, downtown is now growing and people now consider mission bay downtown, and so i just, even watching the warriors games, the last game in oakland and moving to downtown san francisco, i'm like that's not downtown, that's mission bay. but they now said over and over the last couple of weeks. so, we have had conversations, i know mary ellen was the first one to bring this up. i don't know if you want to have thoughts how we take this work. do we focus right now, scale it around, scale it to other neighborhoods, what are your thoughts around this?

>> liquifaction or in general. >> both. >> we have done a lot of great work in planning around our response. the immediate response. but really looking at a recovery discussion and i'm so happy to say that we are just on the precipice of kicking that off. also because that discussion goes well beyond the city. we have, and that's why you are all here. we are only 30,000 strong, and we have really got to get everybody involved in this conversation. we want to understand what you need to know from us, what your assumptions and expectations are. it will -- it will fire us and force us to really dig into, more into some of these

discussions. for me, i think the issue of lifelines, and looking at lori johnson and other people here who have done a lot of work on this, really our ability to get in, back into the city and to work is so critical, and so moving through the steps of response and recovery, putting these in some sort of order, because as i mentioned before, you can't do building assessments if you can't get through the streets necessarily, although drones are an option. there are some options. but you can't house hundreds of engineers, geo technical, civil or structural if you don't have a place for them to stay and power and water. so, so i think this discussion, it's global and we have to look at each section of our city, both as a whole, but separately also. so, those are the things that i'm thinking about, and really looking forward to that i think we are going to make a lot of progress in this recovery plan

on. >> recently this question came in and we talked about it, there was a recent "new york times" article about the use of base isolator, which san francisco city hall is on base isolators. and japan uses them a lot more, and the "new york times" articles that california is not using them as much and should san francisco be looking into that approach, too. i like to think, since san francisco city hall is on base eye isolators we are thinking about it here in the city of st. francis. any thoughts from the panel? >> a nice job painting what the issues are, and most engineers on a project will offer that as an option to the owners. it's not all always taken mainly because of the challenge and the cost associated with them, and so that's the impediment here on

the west coast that's different than we see in japan, uses it a lot more. tall building inventory, isolators are not as effective because of the nature of how those buildings perform naturally. it's a better fit for buildings like this that are, you know, robust and strong and stiff, and so that's a better play for that. but certainly we could do more, especially for those buildings that want to be essential facility basis, like hospitals and emergency operations centers, etc., where they are best implemented and get the performance we really need out of those structures. >> i have some good questions here about even if the tall buildings survive, and goes to the interdependency issues, and pointing to lori johnson who did the study, what about the streets. what about the infrastructure around the streets. what about even if my office is open, will i have daycare, what is all the recovery issues, and so we have a lot of thoughts

about that. mary ellen, you want to jump in, angus, all of you, i think a good one to think about how we are all interdependent upon each other, our streets, our roads, the economic recovery, i can't get to work if the train system is down, i can't get to work if i have no place to send my kids and family. so -- >> from the beginning, one of the things i think about especially downtown, getting people out of dodge, right? so if it happens during the week and we have hundreds and thousands of visitors and people that work here who need to get across the day or on a plane and to their family, their homes, that's sort of the initial, and that's a huge lift right there. again, the conversation has to be multidisciplinary. this tall building study i think is so unique and innovative,

it's really diving into the complex technical issues that is pushing these other questions. and again, we have a number of different initiatives, we have our emergency response initiative that responses and plans that the department of public -- d.m. is responsible for. like a 400-page debris removal plan but then we have life lines and now this, and the connection that i feel that has been missing has been to the broader community, to our residents, to our businesses, to really bring you all into this discussion. we are all going to be affected. we want to keep, we want you to stay in san francisco or if you have to leave, we want to bring you back as quickly as possible and the late mayor ed lee rings in my head all the time. a year and a half -- shortly

before he passed away we were in a meeting and said this is my legacy, and it is, it's all of ours to come together and we are finally there. at such a good time. so, the beginning of discussions and the real work that's going to bring us together to find the solutions we need. >> and thank you for mentioning the late mayor ed lee. this is all, this culmination of the work product he started when he was mayor and he truly cared about life lines council, restoration timelines, recovery effort. the tall building strategy. he asked that we do this, and so thank you for mentioning the late mayor ed lee. ok. next topic. what about buildings like 181 fremont that went above code. why can't we ask all buildings to go above code? what are the barriers and what are the costs? i know that gets very technical quickly, but at a high level, and i know there is a lot of

technical people in the audience to answer that in detail, but this panel's thoughts. >> there are requirements in the san francisco building code and in the administrative bulletin 83 that caused those things to happen. so, hats off to d.b.i. again for that. any building over 240 foot height limit that you want to take a code exception to, something outside the building code, mainly make it taller, then the code might allow, requires us to do more sophisticated analysis or sophisticated design, and with that comes a peer review panel that helps oversee what we do to make sure the engineer is doing it as best they can. that includes people like professor deerline and other academics to help make sure we are getting it right. it's a natural cause of doing that process that makes, i would argue, safer than the code

prescriptive design, that does not have the layer of goodness, if you will. there is a cost to that, though, like you mentioned. cost is not exorbitant, i don't think, so the question, how many buildings? what buildings are important to take on this additional level of design and oversight and review? that's a discussion that should be had by the city and the developers and the owners, etc., to see if that cost would be worth it. >> as a builder and developer, my projects have never met that criteria. and at the end of the process they are happy. the two i did talk to, they can now go to the world and say i have one of the finest buildings this side of america, and i think that's a huge thing for people in the world of selling

product and buildings and see it now in the advertisements, and they go out of the way to talk about the structural issues and how the building was built, and some of them say -- it's interesting. so i think the developing world is embracing the extra work peer reviews and so on, and are using that to tell the world that they are, you know, moving into one of the most solid buildings built that can be done in this day. so -- >> when it comes to codes, you have to remember that codes are the bare minimum. we are always going to encourage people to overbuild things. we can't make them, but being in this city, this is the city to overbuild something for longevity, and you know, if we are not going to ding you if you don't overbuild it but encourage you to. >> i want to add one thing, not really on the agenda so i'm going off a little bit.

but we are going to talk about the council on friday, but dealing with climate change issues. we are talking about seismic here, but actually, truly believe that climate is going to be just, you can guarantee that that's coming, actually has already arrived, and so that's another area that i think as a city we need to be looking forward to making sure that our buildings are habitable for a different kind of climate than we are used to. >> thank you for that, especially since we had a very hot, hot, hot week last week, and we are struggling looking for cooling centers and air-conditioning and places for folks who live in san francisco who don't have air-conditioning and where to go. here is a good question. why is borp not known among the architectural and engineering firms and building owners? what can we do to get borp in

the state safety assessment program more publicity, get more folks certified as inspectors, get our buildings -- this is all part of recovery. >> right now borp is a voluntary program and people opt in, and the owners are deciding we want to recover faster, have their engineer be accessible after a major event to get the building back online. one of the initiatives is require that for buildings of a certain height or criteria, and that would publicize it. engineers know about it, the architects less so, and a handful of owner types do but it's out there, and certainly they know about it, and we need to get the word out and maybe make it required for certain buildings and set the criteria what the buildings are. >> i second everything said

there. for me, learning about borp, only the last year and a half that i got educated. i did not know et existed. and my reaction, if i own one of these buildings, these tall buildings, why would i not have this? and so i'm -- i'm totally in the camp and i might, i don't know a lot of the development community feels about it, but totally in the camp this should be a part of requirement of when you finish a building that you have borp in place. i think it's a no brainer. i know might be added cost, but the overall result that you get from it after a crisis i think is just, you can't put a number on that. i'm totally in favor of that. >> s.a.p., safety assessment panel today, and it will make you want to look into borp, i think. >> ok. thank you. all right. you know, a lot more on like

lifelines and the most important life lines. getting a lot of questions like what are we doing to harden and strengthen our infrastructure around buildings, a lot of that is public. we have a ten-year capitol plan we are looking at like our water, wastewater, streets. but also i think we learned a lot about this, looking at christchurch, new zealand, the shattering of glass after an earthquake and how are we thinking of that, too. >> i'll talk about it on the tall building side. all the tall buildings that have been designed since about the mid 2000s, the gladding design is enhanced for the code for a standard building. we thought about that, and so the cladding, including the gra glass, we hope is more resilient, so put that into the tall bls, so we are doing better

because of that. and did not need the lessons from christchurch, that was thought about almost 15 years ago, so we are doing better because of the rules in place since about mid 2000s. >> again, really happy we are having this discussion today. i think boma is doing a good job leading the way, setting themselves up to succeed if and when something like this does happen, i see a lot of building owners and managers here today and a lot of the buildings are existing and older historic buildings, and i just want to, you know, make sure that they have time to implement these processes, whether it be windows or whatnot, the owners will need time to fix their buildings and make them more healthy for the future. >> all right. so, there was a lot more questions that came in, i could not read the handwriting or very technical, a lot on a lot of

d.b.i. codes and whatnot, i want to point out the d.b.i. team here today, if you have more questions, they are all sitting down, at this table right here. [laughter] please come over and ask us questions, but i have a very important one, the reason why we are here today, and would like everyone to talk about this. what we don't want to do is, you see a lot of recommendations and 16 recommendations that our best educated, highly educated learn ed thoughts, with you don't want to do it without the input from the stakeholders, and so one of the questions i thought would be great we end on, how would you help to inform the planning department, department of building inspections, board of supervisors, to implement policies based on facts and data. there's a fear of some new policies that only serve short-term political agenda, that's not what we want to do

today and that's why we are here to have these conversations. so, from, you got the building inspection, the planning department, emergency management and applied technology council, and academic experts. so, please, would you respond? >> again, i want to thank our department. we have a robust department that's constantly working, doing a lot of the legwork for us, addressing these very issues. we see just the tip of the iceberg on thursdays when we hear these items as a commission, but i'm very confident that staff is working with all different departments throughout the city and the mayor's office to ensure that we are looking at improving the healthiest buildings we can. >> that's all with a very loaded question. as a builder/developer again, i keep wearing that hat, we are all trying to do the right thing and to the departments, particularly in d.b.i., we get a lot of great ideas but honestly,

a lot of bad ideas, too. and we entertain the bad with the good, and we try and do our best to process. the only time the consequences are something we talk about in the commission, particularly when we have so much from planning and what they are asking and how it works with our code here. and we are always asking ourself, so the best answer i can give, everything is really hashed over. so, if policy, or, is changed and if the code changes, we like to believe it's for the better, and we have vetted it as best we can. we also always put language in there, if something is not working, we can go back and revisit it and clean it up, and we do a lot of that as well. so, we do our best, we perfect know, we love input and the biggest problem we have sometimes with some of these policies and procedures, we don't get enough even though the staff do an amazing job, it's hard to get people's attention

on everything, and the consequences of some of the decisions we made. but we can always reverse if we have to. thank you. >> i would just say that i agree that any decisions we should have should be data driven. we still have a lot more of discovery to do around what data inputs we need, and again, these kind of forums, this type of report is just the beginning for us to start digging in deeper and i think again, many of the initiatives that we are already, we have already begun, our life lines council, this process, and then through the emergency management and expanding that is the direction we need to go in. >> being part of the applied technology team, working with these departments, interactive and involved the whole team was. so i see good things ahead because of the interaction and

the buy-in for the report and the recommendations to date, i cannot see it going forward in the right way down the road. >> i just want to thank the panel members for taking the time out to be here today. thank you. [applause] so, this panel changes out, we have another panel session, and then we'll take a break. so, keeping you riveted on this stuff. we want to talk about the downtown recovery plan and framework, mary ellen carroll will be back up again to give an introduction. she's going to get her next note. but we do want to say we have brought some experts from seattle and santa rosa, and brian strong coming to the stage, barb graph from seattle, sean mcglin from santa rosa, and

lori johnson. >> all right. while our panel gets settled here, i'm the director of the department of emergency management. here in san francisco one of the reasons why we are here, our philosophy really is we want recovery and we believe that recovery is going to be most successful when we as a city, and when i say we as a city, that's we, are in the driver's seat. and so i really applaud all of you for joining us here to help us go in the right direction in there. last year mayor breed asked a city administrator, naomi kelly

and i to establish and leave the city's disaster recovery task force. this task force places the city and our community in charge of our own destiny in how we will influence and to be the influence and not have outside influence and how we want to rebuild this city. this is, includes our neighborhoods, businesses and infrastructure after a disaster. so, again, thank you for being here to take part of the drivers wheel with us and help us along our way. to help us guide this discussion, we have assembled a wonderful group of experts who have researched plan and also witnessed firsthand the reality of disaster recovery. so i would like to introduce our panel. dr. lori johnson, who i've already shouted out to has nearly 30 years experience ins urban planning and

disaster-related consulting management and research, written about land use and risk, disaster recovery and reconstruction and the economics of catastrophes. she's co-authored many things, but two noted after great disasters, and in-depth analysis of how six counties manage community recovery, and clear as mud, planning for the rebuilding of new orleans. dr. johnson is a visiting project scientist at the pacific earthquake engineering research center at u.c. berkeley and chairs the national community for hazard reduction. sean mcglin, the city manager of santa rosa, thank you from san francisco. and county seat of sonoma county. around 175,000 resident and budget of 324 million, a general fund of 148 million. in october 2017, a series of

wildfires caused devastation throughout the north bay. the tubbs fire spread through santa rosa and more than 2800 structures were burned, economic loss of 1.2 billion. and as city manager, sean has firsthand knowledge of the time and resources it takes to recover from such a catastrophic disaster. lucky to have you here to learn from you. my friend barb graph, the director of the seattle office of emergency management, responsible for the city's all hazard community wide emergency management program. since 2005, the city, seattle emergency ops center has a response to 16 major exercises, 50 incidents, eight of resulted in a presidential declaration. so they are beating us right now on that. on disasters. barb and her team also developed the seattle disaster recovery

plan, which provides the framework for how the city recovers and rebuilds from disasters, and so we are happy to have you here to learn about that process. and finally my colleague, brian strong is responsible for the ten-year capital plan, it's capital budget and the implementation resilient s.f. plan, thank you, including the earthquake safety and emergency response bond program, the nation's first sea level guidelines, and the first building by building has the seismic assessments. so, brian is going to be here to facilitate and kick us off. [applause] >> thank you, everyone. thanks so much for being here. we really appreciate it. and i'm excited to be facilitatingis