The Works

25 Years After World Series Earthquake, San Franciscans Safe in the Stadium But Not at Home

While public works projects in the Bay Area are retrofitted to withstand a major earthquake, privately owned structures lag far behind.

Repair efforts at Candlestick Park after the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake (AP Photo/John Mabanglo)

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Tomorrow night, Major League Baseball’s World Series returns to San Francisco for the Giants’ third Fall Classic appearance in five years. They’ll host the Kansas City Royals for Game 3 — an auspicious number given what happened 25 years ago.

On October 17, 1989, fans settled into their seats at Candlestick Park, then the Giants’ home stadium, for Game 3 of the World Series between the S.F. team and the Oakland Athletics. Minutes before first pitch, the Loma Prieta Earthquake hit the Bay Area. Television coverage of the game provided a brief live glimpse of the shaking stadium before the connection went dead.

Candlestick withstood the 6.9-magnitude quake, the city’s worst since the legendary 1906 earthquake estimated at 7.8 magnitude, with some structural damage but no reported injuries among 62,000 fans. Their arrival before rush hour had kept thousands from being on the roads when disaster struck. Nevertheless, fires in San Francisco’s Marina District and a freeway collapse in Oakland claimed 63 lives and caused $6 billion in damage.

A quarter-century later, the Giants now play in modern AT&T Park along the Embarcadero, a downtown waterfront redevelopment project following an elevated highway teardown. Equipped with the latest in seismic-resistant technology when it opened in 2000, the stadium is part of an alarming trend. While public works projects in the Bay Area are retrofitted to withstand a major earthquake, privately owned structures lag far behind.

In 2013, the city passed a seismic retrofit ordinance targeting “soft-story buildings,” generally built before 1978, when more modern building codes took effect. They include much of the city’s older housing stock, namely wood-frame buildings of three or more stories with at least five apartments with garage doors and first-floor glass windows. A report earlier this month from the City Department of Building Inspection discovered that the number of San Francisco buildings in need of retrofits is 60 percent over the initial estimate and collectively represent the housing for upwards of 70,000 residents in this city of nearly 840,000. Already several hundred ominous “EARTHQUAKE WARNING!” signs have been posted on buildings that failed to meet the most basic deadlines of the retrofit law.

“Following Loma Prieta there was a real urgency to say, ‘Hey, look,’ that in order for quick and efficient response and recovery, infrastructure needs to be strengthened before the next earthquake comes along,” explains Darrick Hom, president of the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California. He points to a constant sight around the Bay Area: construction workers “jacketing” columns that hold up highway overpasses and elevated trains running Caltrain commuter rail and BART rapid transit.

By far the biggest project was the $6 billion replacement of the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, which proved vulnerable during the 1989 quake. The new span opened last year and will be able to withstand the worst possible earthquake projected over the next 1,500 years, according to engineers.

But such large-scale public works projects, while costly and logistically complicated, are actually easier to achieve than retrofitting small private buildings, especially ones with renters or ground-floor storefronts. “The private sector has not accomplished what the public sector has accomplished mostly for the lack of suitable alternative uses,” says Steve Sherman, public relations chair of the San Francisco Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

While 275,000 vehicles crossed the Bay Bridge daily, construction crews took advantage of holiday weekends and other off-peak times to complete the replacement span. A landlord, by contrast, cannot work around a family or small business in the same way. “In a city with a housing crisis, where do you put people when you have to renovate?” Sherman asks rhetorically.

Indeed, two-thirds of San Franciscans are renters and small businesses in particular have found themselves forced to close from the combined loss of business and increased rent. However, Gabriel Metcalf, executive director of SPUR, a San Francisco urban planning think tank, is blunt: “If we leave the buildings alone, people — mostly tenants in older apartment buildings — will get killed. This isn’t an option, it’s life or death.”

The 2013 retrofit law stipulates a deadline from three to six years depending on the type and use of the building, in order, Metcalf says, “to come up with a fair way to balance costs between owners and tenants.” Even simple fixes for which the California Earthquake Authority provides $3,000 grants — like bolting a house to its foundation — could help structures in the event of a disaster. “When it comes to an earthquake, one of the biggest issues for the government is providing shelters. We’d love for people to stay in their own homes after an earthquake event, even without water and gas,” Hom says.

In contrast, Sherman believes, “Public buildings have an easier time securing financing for this sort of thing because nobody wants to be in City Hall or the old Candlestick Park when an earthquake happens.” In 1997, voters approved a $100 million bond toward the construction of a new stadium on the site of the Stick, as the drafty multi-use stadium, home to the Giants and the NFL’s 49ers, was affectionately nicknamed. Instead, both teams decided for different reasons that moving was a better strategy. The 49ers decamped to a new stadium in suburban Santa Clara and the Giants alighted for the bayfront. The bond was repealed, and the Stick will be demolished next year.

AT&T Park was the first baseball stadium built without public funds since 1962. However, it benefitted from a $10 million tax abatement and an $80 million contribution from the city toward infrastructure improvements, including transit connections. While this kind of public-private partnership occurred at a scale far beyond the average San Francisco landlord or homeowner, hopefully it will inspire the city’s residents to take the earthquake threat as seriously as they do their beloved Giants and render the Royals’ bullpen more vulnerable to collapse than a vintage painted lady.

The Works is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

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Gregory Scruggs is a Seattle-based independent journalist who writes about solutions for cities. He has covered major international forums on urbanization, climate change, and sustainable development where he has interviewed dozens of mayors and high-ranking officials in order to tell powerful stories about humanity’s urban future. He has reported at street level from more than two dozen countries on solutions to hot-button issues facing cities, from housing to transportation to civic engagement to social equity. In 2017, he won a United Nations Correspondents Association award for his coverage of global urbanization and the UN’s Habitat III summit on the future of cities. He is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners.

Tags: affordable housingresilient citiessan franciscocaliforniadisaster planning

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