Examiner recently reported, that during a recent Building Inspection Commission meeting, a consultant with the Community Action Plan for Seismic Safety predicted a grisly (and expensive) fate for San Francisco if a major quake hit. Now they’re reporting on a city-commissioned study from an outside consultancy that says things could be even worse that those doomsday projections, because there would also be fires to contend with. Big fires.
Up to 1,000 people could die, 85,000 housing units and $5 billion to $15 billion in business could be lost, and repair costs could range from $17 billion to $54 billion if a 7.0 (or above) quake were to occur on the San Andreas fault. Major damages, the Community Action Plan for Seismic Safety says, would be incurred due to the many non-retrofitted privately-owned soft-story buildings we have here in SF.
But those estimates don’t account for the as many as 3,500 buildings destroyed and $5.8 billion lost in the average of 38 to 95 fires we can expect after a 6.5 or more magnitude quake.
According to a report from Geohazards International, a Palo Alto based non-profit consulting for the Department of Building Inspection, “(b)uildings that survive the shaking can succumb to fire, including those that have been seismically retrofitted.”
Even better news — the Ex says these fires could “strain San Francisco’s firefighting resources beyond the brink” and says the consultancy’s report says that “(o)ut-of-town firefighters would probably not reach The City for many hours as firefighters in neighboring cities will be absorbed with their own community’s problems.”
So we’d be both in over our heads, and on our own, if we start to burn up post-quake. Maybe it’s time to get that renter’s insurance?
