You got it. We're just gonna swing right into it.
Alright! Well, our first session will be "Community-Based Risk Reduction."
So I'm just gonna call up Robert and Danielle to take it away and explain what we're going to be doing.
Robert and Danielle.
Thank you so much, Sarah. Thank you, John. Appreciate it.
My name is Robert Emberson, I'm the Associate Program Manager for the NASA Disaster Program, and I'm really excited to be here and to moderate this session.
With Danielle as well. She's here herself. In a second, we're gonna take turns to introduce the presenters.
We're really excited for the session today.
And yeah, this is gonna be great. As mentioned. Please post questions.
Show questions in the chat, and any longer more involved questions, please wait for the
Q&A at the end of today's session, which will be, I guess at 11:15 Pacific.
If there are any questions that I notice in the chat that seem to be kind of more significant,
I will also take note of those and come back to it in seconds. But yeah, we're looking forward to this. Danielle over to you to introduce yourself. Thank you all.
Thanks. Robert. Good morning, everyone. I'm really excited to be here today.
Moderating, this session with Robert. I'm Danielle Muller.
I'm with the city of Alameda in the East Bay, and I will be introducing some of the the sessions.
But I'm going to turn it right back over to Robert to kick us off. Thanks, everyone.
Thanks again. Danielle. Well, fantastic. So the first talk we have today is by Janise Rodgers, from Geohazards International.
And it's titled "Effectiveness of Past
California Earthquake Scenarios in Motivating Mitigation."
And so I am really cool to do this. Thank you, and over to you, Janice. Apologies if I'm pronouncing your name incorrectly.
Hello! My name is Janice Rodgers, and today I'll be speaking about the effectiveness of past California
earthquake scenarios in motivating mitigation.
This is a collaborative work with the co-authors from many different technical disciplines that you see on your screen.
So this is applied research on the effectiveness of past earthquake scenarios and scenario-based plans and motivating mitigation and we're focusing on mitigation rather than say, earthquake preparedness for a couple of reasons. Firstly, we feel that the
connection between scenarios and preparedness is much better understood, and, secondly, because a number of the major scenario development organizations in California have motivating mitigation as a goal.
So we're going to see how we're doing with that.
This is part of a larger study that's supported by USAID, the part I'm talking about today was funded by USGS, but the larger study is looking also at practice advancements in developing scenarios and then applying those advances in the low and middle income countries
where USAID typically works and we're Geohazards International typically works.
Now, the types of scenarios that we are looking at in this research have three essential components.
First, there is a science-based assessment of the selected hazard, event or events.
Secondly, an estimate of the resulting damage to buildings, infrastructure, and our land.
And that's got to be based on engineering or scientific principles.
And then an estimator description of the likely consequences and we're only looking at scenarios that are publicly available. Now in California
we know there are a number of scenarios developed for, say, private companies that are are not going to be publicly available.
Our research questions were, first of all, how are people using scenarios?
Are they using them for mitigation, decision-making?
What did they find useful both in terms of features and process?
What actually is happening in terms of mitigation? Did anything happen as a result of scenarios?
And what degree of influence did scenarios have compared, to say, other factors and influences, and also how important was credible and detailed hazard information for people using the results?
And is there a threshold of scientific quality that you have to get over for the scenario to be credible and effective.
Our methods were looking at literature, both the scenarios themselves and work describing their impacts for mitigation.
The broader project also took a look at literature and eight associated practice areas.
And then we did 66 semi-structured interviews of California scenario users and developers.
The larger study has additional interviews. Then there was analysis of the transcript, some logging of mitigation impacts that were were attributed to scenarios by interview participants, triangulation interview findings with supporting documents. So who did we interview? We interviewed a range of people from different
technical disciplines, earth science, engineering, public policy, land use planning, emergency management, slightly fewer social scientists and economics as well as people from different backgrounds.
related to their affiliation. Affiliations range from academia to local government, state, federal, tribal agencies.
We interviewed elected officials as well as scenario development organization representatives and consultants, and we also interviewed quite a few people from infrastructure.
We tried to weigh our sample, much more towards the user side to interview more users than developers.
There were also some people who wore both hats meeting with a user and a developer.
In terms of geographic distribution, we interviewed many people in the San Francisco Bay Area.
You might be saying, oh, that's a lot of people.
But if you look on the right hand side you can see that there's a reason for that.
There are a lot of scenarios prepared for the Bay Area, and they are more recent than those for other parts of the State relatively speaking. There are also quite a few scenarios prepared for Los Angeles.
So we interviewed quite a few people there, as well as people in other parts of the State.
So turning now to the results, the most useful features that our interviewees pointed out were first of all that scenarios facilitate stakeholder involvement.
The process aspects of the scenario, getting everyone around the table to work on concerns around earthquake risk can be very powerful.
Scenarios also allow to detail the potential impacts, especially in terms that users are going to be interested in.
Say I am a city employee, I'm worried about housing and my city scenario could specifically look at housing. Scenarios are very accessible to non-experts.
Compared to say probabilistic presentations.
They're just easier to understand. Scenarios
you can also have data visualizations that are helpful for people. That was something
people, found useful as well as identifying targets for action and investment.
To do, actually do something in terms of mitigation.
We also looked at something called a net promoter score, and this is, if you're safe you're shopping online
and you see a little box pop up that says, how likely are you to recommend whatever product or service it is
on a scale from 1 to 10 that's used to calculate a net promoter score, and it is a customer satisfaction metric.
So how these are interpreted are basically anything over 70 is really good.
So you can see for California, both the users and the developers have given scenario scores that are above
70. So people really like using scenarios. And this is just one interesting way of quantifying that.
So turning to some of the research questions and how we answered them.
The results. What are the key features of the scenario development process?
We found collaboration, co-production, and outreach were very important.
This is bringing people together. This is involving stakeholders from the beginning of the project which also brings them along and helps them to understand what the potential consequences are, and why you might really need to do something about the risk problems that the scenarios highlighting.
What contextual factors most affect the use of scenarios for mitigation?
Of course, the prioritization by local political leaders who have the ability to make mitigation decisions.
The impact of recent disasters which pull attention back to earthquakes, for example, from the myriad other issues that cities are facing, or other local jurisdictions are facing.
Of course, media tension can also be helpful socio-cultural and economic considerations.
The socio-cultural considerations were not looked at in the same depth, but everyone recognized that these are important
they really affect what should be time for mitigation. Economic considerations, of course, what the economy is doing to people that have money to do mitigation.
Those are important in what actually gets done. In terms of credibility,
the credentials of the developer were very important, and that's both,
the specific experts that are involved in the scenario and the agency.
Like, for example, a science agency with an excellent reputation that would make a scenario very credible, or also some other more detailed credibility
ingredients, including diverse perspectives, including having multiple disciplines to get at the different aspects of earthquake risk problems and resilience challenges. The relevance to particular end users and the problems that they were facing. The plausibility of the scenario is it
believable and then the quality of the data used to generate it. In terms of the level of scientific quality.
this was generally considered to be highly important, but it would vary a bit by stakeholder.
Some people said, the fact that a particular science agency made the scenario, that's good enough.
I trust them. Others wanted a bit more to see.
Say scientific consensus around something. And then there were also some trade offs that people recognize.
For example, a better building inventory is expensive to obtain.
Do you want to spend the money doing that to get that higher quality.
That's a trade off that would have to be made.
So now, looking at some of the key areas in which scenarios influence mitigation.
First of all, looking at buildings, we have soft story retrofit programs,
nonductile concrete building retrofit programs, URM programs to a lesser extent, and also private schools were all influenced by scenarios. To take a look at how this happens,
we can look at soft story building assessment and retrofit programs.
First in the Bay Area you can see here on the left, the shocks,
this is kind of what's going on in the context in terms of disasters, scenarios,
the mitigation actions, and the contextual factors on the right.
And yeah, in the 1990s, there was not a lot of action happening in terms of mitigation.
There's the focuses more on other mitigation priorities,
but things didn't really start to move around the time of the quake on six scenario, and you can see there's a lot of mitigation actions retrofit ordinances.
But there's also a lot of context that's happening.
Need political support. You have champions being identified and cultivated, you have a new official, you have cities implementing, and then other cities
looking at What the leader cities have done, and saying, oh, we could do that, too.
There's a model to follow. All of these things are contributing to the mitigation that happened.
In Los Angeles, there's a little more compact diagram, but still you can see the ShakeOut scenario.
Then there's the very clear tie to the resilience by design effort, and a lot of other things were happening in the context.
You can see there's a time gap between 2008 and 2014.
The context had to be right for the mitigation actions to come in, you know this included things like a new official being elected, a USGS City of Los Angeles partnership, a SCAG program which then motivated other cities to develop ordinances cultivation of champions a lot of things had to happen
for mitigation to really gain traction on the ground.
Another key area, that scenarios influenced was infrastructure, particularly water system resilience programs and transit system seismic upgrades.
So looking specifically at water, you can see there was an internal scenario at EBMUD used to build support that then led to some major seismic improvement
work and a long program. Similarly, the ShakeOut scenario contributed again to resilience by design
that was water was a focus area. And all of those same contextual factors were in play.
Similarly HayWired, contributed to work in the Bay Area.
So some findings from our work on scenario use for mitigation. First of all, California saw widespread and effective use of scenarios for mitigation, but there was a lot going on in the context
that were complex and interdependent relationships between scenarios and these contextual factors.
So sometimes, it's not a one-to-one
there's a lot going on in the context. That's important.
One thing that we did see frequently was that earthquake professionals would pair up past earthquake damage to show there is a risk,
there is a vulnerability here and then use a scenario to project that forward, and because we know that vulnerability is here, we can then say, this might happen,
if you have this type of earthquake in this location.
That was an effective strategy used over and over. We also saw very clearly that significant, dedicated efforts are needed to get mitigation moving.
You just can't expect a scenario to sort of just have regular dissemination, or put out a report, and for mitigation to automatically happen.
That was very rare to see basic stakeholder engagement in basic, simple dissemination that motivate mitigation usually it took a very focused effort to get mitigation programs going on the ground.
The scenarios that were effective for mitigation had the following characteristics, so you had a robust collaborative development process.
You had multiple disciplines and end users, and you had the stakeholders from the beginning, being brought along, understanding what the risk problems are, understanding that they really needed to do something at scientific and technical credibility possibility and realism of the event, practical applicability to problems that matter to the end users.
And then recommendations that identified specific actions, policies, mitigation measures, and then plans to implement them and do something.
And the most effective programs included clear mechanism for follow-on work
with stakeholders to support implementation. For example, going into the local hazard mitigation planning process or the CAPSS scenario in San Francisco informing the City's earthquake risk mitigation plans.
There was also room for improvement. People mentioned some weaknesses and barriers. For example, overly long reports that were hard to find the most important thing, and this, of course, was not true of all scenarios, but but this was mentioned by some of our interviewees about some
scenarios, so maybe improving the the way the results are communicated.
In some cases there was a focus on regional issues that left out issues of local concern or the results are a little harder to pick up and use for that city.
That local jurisdiction also competing priorities.
That interfered with the use of scenarios and other suggestions for improvement, including just involving more stakeholders and devoting greater attention to cascading disasters
and multiple hazards. So I'd like to thank the USGS and USAID for their support and to my colleagues for just their collaboration.
And I'd like to thank you for your time and attention.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Janise. That was a really great interesting presentation, and there was some good questions in the chat we're now going to go to our next presentation, which is from Janiele Maffei, Chief Mitigation Officer for the California Earthquake Authority. Janiele messaged me that she is
stuck in traffic. I know she is listening on the phone, but she may not be able to respond to questions in the chat, so might recommend waiting on your questions until the Q&A
session. For now we will go on to Janiele's presentation. Thank you.
This is Janiele Maffei. I am a structural engineer, and the Chief Mitigation Officer with the California Earthquake Authority, or CEA.
In that capacity, I am the executive director of the Earthquake Brace and Bolt program,
EBB. EBB provides grants to homeowners who complete a code compliant retrofit on a seismic vulnerability common
in older wood framed single-family dwellings.
The lack of both, anchorage of the house to the foundation and bracing of the walls surrounding the crawl space.
I will use the EBB program to explain why vulnerability-based seismic mitigation can be an effective way to increase resilience in residential structures.
The EBB program is jointly managed by the CEA,
and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services,
Cal OES through a joint Powers agreement. The CEA
is not an agency, it is a unique instrumentality of the State, created as a not-for-profit provider of residential earthquake insurance
after the Northridge earthquake. California has in place a law requirement insurance companies to offer earthquake insurance to their policy holders.
Consequently at the time of the Northridge earthquake, large numbers of California residences were insured for earthquakes with 20 billion dollars in residential damage,
half of which was insured these unprecedented losses prompted insurance companies to stop writing policies in California, and many companies threatened to leave the State. To preserve
the residential insurance market, the California Legislature created the CEA
in 1996, with a mission to educate, mitigate, and insure. In addition to the core mission, to keep residential earthquake insurance available,
mitigation was part of the CEA's charge from the beginning.
CEAs enabling statute requires that 5 percent of investment income up to a maximum of $5 million dollars per year be transferred to the Lost Mitigation Fund for the purposes of encouraging and supporting residential mitigation programs. The loss mitigation fund serves as the seed money for
EBB.
To understand the vulnerability-based approach to mitigation,
I will use this old truck as an example. We are all aware that an older vehicle is vastly different from what would be available in a vehicle
manufactured in 2023. However, this older vehicle has a certain charm, and with maintenance and enhancements can be retrofitted to meet the needs of the owner.
The amount of work to improve this truck depends on the owners
budget, and the intended use of the truck. If it will be used to drive in a Fourth of July parade or haul things around on private property,
the upgrades might be minimal. If the intended use is to drive on public streets or transport the kids to school,
the additional safety features may be necessary. The expectations for utility and performance will drive the amount of work required.
The vulnerability-based approach for seismic retrofits of older residential structures requires an analysis similar to the example used for the truck.
Older houses were designed and constructed before seismic building codes were widely adopted, and do not have the same features as new construction.
Assuming the owner doesn't have unlimited funds and wants to preserve the character of the house
an effective approach is to identify the intended use and the expected performance of the structure on a day-to-day basis, and in the event of an earthquake. The expected earthquake performance of an EBB retrofitted house is life safety at a minimum and an increased likelihood of habitability
after an earthquake. To assist a homeowner in this effort
a few simple identifiers and visual cues can be provided to assist them in understanding
if their house has vulnerabilities that should be addressed
The 1971 Sylmar earthquake in southern California highlighted the damage ability of wood frame single-family dwellings.
All these structures typically didn't result in occupant mortality.
They did cause injuries and substantial financial losses.
Consequently, there were significant improvements made to the seismic provisions for houses in the 1979 uniform building code that served as the foundation for the California State Building Code.
This is why a construction date of 1980 is often used to identify certain seismic vulnerabilities in California
residential construction. Changes are continually made to the building codes following earthquakes,
so age can be used as a proxy for identification of seismic
vulnerabilities. The improvements to the 1979 building code included requirements for elements capable of resisting strong earthquake ground shaking and careful detailing that creates a load path for seismic forces from the roof to the ground essentially holding the house together
and keeping it on its foundation. Pre-1980 houses may lack some of these important elements pre-
1940 houses will lack some of these important elements.
When EBB opened its pilot Retrofit Grant Program in 2013 there were basic code provisions available for the retrofit of certain residential seismic vulnerabilities.
However, there was a need for additional standards, so the CEA
teamed with FEMA to create ATC 110, that was eventually published as FEMA
FEMA-P 1100. This document provides retrofit solutions for known seismic vulnerabilities with the intent of reducing damage and increasing the likelihood of habitability following an earthquake. FEMA-P 1100 identified four vulnerabilities in older
wood frame, single family dwellings that contributed dangerous and costly damage in earthquakes.
These include, the cripple wall house, with inadequate bolting and bracing in the crawl space, the living space over garage house with a soft story created by the large garage area and garage door; the hillside house and unreinforced masonry chimneys.
Volume one of FEMA-P 1100, includes a description of these four vulnerabilities, and a detailed methodology on the analysis and retrofit of these deficiencies. There are three additional volumes, with prescriptive plan sets for the cripple wall
house, the living space of her garage house, and May Street chimneys. Prescriptive plan sets allow a contractor or owner builder to retrofit a house without an engineer design. The retrofits are essentially pre-engineered. The hillside house retrofits will always
require an engineer design, so there are no plan sets for that vulnerability.
These plan sets help to bring down the cost of retrofit projects, while ensuring that proper retrofitting practices are followed.
It was important to note that many houses will have more than one vulnerability.
These can be addressed individually or in one retrofitting project.
An important message for building owners and homeowners regarding seismic retrofitting is that the work does not earthquake proof
a house. The management of expectations is important, particularly for a vulnerability-based retrofit. Bolting embracing a crawl
space will not keep an unreinforced masonry chimney from toppling.
It also will not eliminate the chances that exterior and interior finishes will have damage.
The focus is on keeping the house on its foundation.
The cripple wall house was selected by CEA and Cal OES for the grant program because the damage in an earthquake can be costly, dangerous, and extremely disruptive.
Also there was a clear connection between age of construction and the seismic vulnerability which allows us to estimate that there are over 1 million houses just in areas of high seismicity in California with this vulnerability.
You can find photographs of a damaged cripple wall house from every earthquake documented in California from 1906 to the December 2022 earthquake in Ferndale.
These photos show the significant damage to cripple wall houses observed in the 2014 magnitude 6.0 Napa earthquake.
Earthquake, Brace and Bolt provides up to $3,000 to homeowners with pre-1980 houses that have this cripple wall vulnerability with over 18,000 EBB
projects completed we have data that shows the retrofit averages just over $5,000
Statewide. In
order to assist homeowners registering for the EBB program
we have developed videos, animations, drawings, and texts to assist them in identifying if their house has the cripple wall vulnerability.
Individuals respond differently to information, and we continue to improve our message to meet the needs of a wide variety of Californians.
EBB participants tell us that finding a contractor is the hardest part of the project, so we provide a contractor directory.
The project itself takes about 2 to 3 days, and is all done under the house.
They must do the work with a permit, and upload various documents to their dashboard on our website, including the finalized permit.
We also require that they confirm their water heater is properly braced.
EBB has been able to leverage the Lost Mitigation Fund with some funding from the State of California in 2016 and 2017, but is currently successfully using FEMA HMGP
grants. Our latest registration brought in over 19,000 applications with our current dropout rate this number will easily allow us to complete over 15,000 additional retrofits.
EBB added a supplementary grant for income eligible homeowners in 2022. Registrants with household incomes of $72,080 or less will receive a second grant that in most cases will pay for the complete retrofit
The CEA worked with the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, PEER to calculate the expected savings from an EBB retrofit to enhance messaging and provide meaningful hazard reduction discounts for earthquake insurance. The research showed that stucco clad houses
performed slightly better than those with wood siding. Results, showed that in very scenario earthquakes retrofitting the worst performing house, the wood sided two-story house would decrease damage significantly in a magnitude 7 earthquake in San Francisco the savings
were over $500,000. Note that the $200 replacement cost used in the calculations is significantly less than the actual replacement cost for the San Francisco area.
A new retrofit grant program, Earthquake Soft Story, or ESS will be introduced in 2023, addressing the living space over garage house.
The other vulnerabilities and their retrofits are discussed on our StrengthenMyHouse.com website.
ESS houses that have both the living space of a garage and cripple wall vulnerabilities will be required to retrofit both vulnerabilities.
The total grant pay to the owner will be higher than either
the EBB retrofit, or the ESS retrofit
grant.
The recent Ferndale earthquake knocked houses off of their foundations, or caused significant
leaning in the crawl space or cripple walls leading to red tags and years of assessment, displacement, and repair. The earthquake Brace and Bolt program is now in Humboldt County, and we hope to avoid this kind of damage in the future.
We have seen by example, that retrofitting works. The Blue House in the picture on the right was retrofitted after the 2000 Yountville earthquake.
The 2014 Napa earthquake knocked the yellow house off of its foundation, and the yellow house was not reoccupied
two- and a half years later, after the earthquake. Thank you for this opportunity to describe how vulnerability-based retrofitting can be translated into a proactive retrofit
grant program. Please visit us at EarthquakeBraceBolt.com
Thank you so much. Janiele, I really appreciate it.
Next following talk by Sarah Atkinson.
Thank you very much, Sarah. Her talk called "Let's work together — Unifying earthquake preparedness with regional safety & resilience efforts." Thank you
and over to Sarah.
Hi! Everyone. My name is Sarah Atkinson, and I'm the earthquake Resilience Policy Manager at SPUR,
the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association.
And today I'm going to talk about advancing regional collaboration on earthquake resilience in the Bay Area. SPUR is an urban public policy organization that is over 100 years old.
We began 1910, when a group of San Francisco City leaders came together to improve the quality of housing
after the 1906 earthquake and fire.
And this picture is a view of Market Street from the Ferry Building in April, 1906.
In 1942, SPUR expanded
its focus to take on more regional growth planning as well as transportation, economic revitalization. Our organization has helped shape some of the most important planning issues in the region, including on earthquake resilience. SPUR was initially a volunteer based organization in which our board and members were major
contributors to our policy reports, and in the last 20 years our model has shifted, and more of our work is staff directed, which has been great for our capacity building.
However, we still want and need to have active members and a supportive network to expand the reach and impact of our work.
Today we bring together people from across the political spectrum to develop solutions to the big problems Bay Area cities face.
And we are recognized as a leading civic planning organization through research, education, advocacy.
We work to create an equitable, sustainable, and prosperous region in which all people thrive.
Since 2009 SPUR has led a comprehensive effort to retrofit the buildings and infrastructure that sustained city life, and you may recognize these reports "Safe Enough to Stay," and "On Solid Ground" which are part of our resilient city initiative and "Safety First" was a more
recent report we released in 2020 on a multi-hazard resilience with a strong emphasis on earthquake hazards.
So I joined SPUR this last fall, and since then we have really begun to refocus on earthquake resilience and redefine our policy and planning goals.
So our goal, our vision is to make our buildings and built environment safer while ensuring communities possess the resources and opportunities needed to prepare, adapt, and rebuild in ways that are both community and life affirming. Since the title of this forum is community-based risk
reduction. I think our earthquake resilience version is all aligned with that theme.
So for the first couple of years in this role I will be focused on two initiatives.
The first initiative is advancing regional building safety for both existing and new buildings to minimize displacement as well as stress on vulnerable communities and loss of life
as a result of a major quake, and our second initiative is to prompt the integration of earthquake resilience into community level, city level, and state-level adaptation, resilient and sustainability plans.
Our organization was originally San Francisco focused, but we have now expanded our work to the 9 county region with an emphasis on the major cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose.
We participate in state, local advocacy work to forward our vision across our seven policy areas which includes housing, transportation, economic justice, sustainability, and resilience and a few more.
And I also wanted to highlight that
I was, you know, asked to talk about our work in Oakland, but our work in Oakland, really, you know, is both regional and a local effort, and so I'll be kind of talking about both scales of work and how they impact each other, and I think it's especially interesting and a strategy of ours that
there is a bit of competition between these major cities of the Bay Area.
SPUR played a really important role in forwarding San Francisco's soft story ordinance
and that was adopted in, I believe, 2013. In 2014,
Oakland conducted their soft story inventory, which is shown on this map
here. That was really precipitated by SPURS
work in San Francisco, and then bringing that work into Oakland.
Unfortunately, it took a while for this inventory to become, you know, to move forward and one of the ways that we were able to kind of move this forward into a mandatory ordinance was through contributing to the 2016 Resilient Oakland
Playbook on previous sustainability and resilience.
Director, Laura Tam contributed to work on this playbook, and that really was centered around getting the city to commit to advancing a soft story
ordinance, and utilizing the work that they had done on their inventory.
And so in 2019, Oakland passed their soft story ordinance, and as of today they have retrofitted.
I'm forgetting the number right now, but about 700 residential units.
Not buildings, but residential units, so protecting those units hopefully from the next
earthquake and disruption of those residents, but there's still a lot more buildings that need to be retrofitted, and I think an aspect of the slowing down of this program was obviously the pandemic and kind of the financial struggles of property owners
and tenants during the pandemic, and people just being home and making it harder for retrofits to happen.
And right now a limiting factor is the distribution of the hazard
mitigation grant money, that is going to allow them to move into the second phase of their program.
So you know, as I just mentioned, some barriers in Oakland, I want to, you know, go out regionally and share a little bit about the challenges that we've seen on the regional level.
So within our regional Building Safety initiative, the challenges that we've seen are really around jurisdictions, lacking staff capacity, and lacking funding.
Grant distribution being slow or just not knowing kind of when that funding is going to come.
So that creating kind of breaks in the program and I'm kind of lack of consistency of a program.
And then, obviously, the current housing crisis in the Bay Area and the cost of residential development.
And there's a lot of opportunity here to, you know
be thinking about how to mitigate these issues in moving forward on seismic retrofits or new construction.
And you know, we just had these atmospheric rivers and lots of flooding, and we have had years of wildfires;
we have had a couple big earthquakes around California this year, but not major earthquakes.
And so really, other hazards just seem more pressing at the moment, and so funding and mitigation efforts are really going towards those risks.
And seismic safety is kind of invisible, until it isn't, until we have that major quake
and we see many buildings damage, and we see a lot of people displaced. For integrating earthquake resilience into, you know, broader adaptation and like climate, adaptation efforts, some challenges
we've seen are that many grant applications, both for State level grants and for philanthropic grants, are really thinking about nature-based solutions for adaptation which really limits necessary earthquake resilience or like excludes earthquake resilience efforts
which aren't really nature-based. We have also heard from partners that it's hard to make the cost benefit case for earthquake resilience projects, and I think that this work, and looking at the overlapping hazard like with liquefaction and groundwater
rise, we really start to get into these difficult conversations around potentially face retreat over the long term
and what does that look like for our vulnerable communities that are in these line areas that are really going to be most affected by these hazards?
And how do we make sure that these communities aren't further disrupted by mitigation efforts.
So what kind of projects are we working on? For existing buildings?
Again. We're really thinking about these retrofit inventories and ordinances
and utilizing "Oakland Now" as their program has really gotten off the ground, to start to catalyze efforts.
You know San Jose is working on their inventory and hoping to move forward on ordinance,
soft story ordinance soon. We also are currently working with a group in San Mateo who wants to see ordinances pass in San Mateo County, and they have a partnership with a public policy class at Stanford that's
working on creating some opportunities for soft story inventories to move forward. Also making recommendations and comments on safety elements
and local hazard mitigation plans and making sure that those really integrate earthquake resilience as we have seen once come up, that really don't initially integrate earthquake resilience, despite you know, other city goals that say that earthquake
resilience is a priority. I'm also working on a project right now, reviewing San Francisco's Soft Story Retrofit program with an emphasis on the impact to property owners and renters and really on the potential of you know did displacement happen for renters during
this retrofit. Were rent controlled units lost?
Were there significant increases in rent with these retrofits?
All things that you know there's been lots of technical reports on San Francisco's program, but this is really going to get at the nitty gritty of like what happened to the people who were impacted by this program.
And then for existing buildings, finally, we are really advocating for the protection of this $250 million for the seismic retrofit program for soft story and multifamily housing that could be super beneficial to a lot of our city partners and community organizations
that want to see retrofit programs move forward. Unfortunately, this funding was not maintained in the Governor's draft budget, which was released in early January,
so there's a lot of advocacy that we need to do, to hopefully get at least some of that funding back.
For new construction, we are in the process of launching a program to improve seismic standards for multifamily residential developments through incentives for developers,
so really going be like voluntary compliance route.
There are many people that are working on getting higher seismic standards into the building code, and I think that is a very important effort,
and I think this is an opportunity to kind of get at both ends of the issue of we can get developers on board even before the the building code changes, and then we can start to see changes happening
before you know the building code is part of the compliance, the necessary compliance for developers.
For the second initiative. We are working on a comprehensive, you know, integrating earthquake retrofits into comprehensive building upgrades, particularly with the Alameda County Green & Healthy Homes initiative, which is a Federal or national initiative to
do comprehensive building upgrades which can include like electrification or like energy saving upgrades,
weatherizations; it's also really focused on reducing asthma triggers
in the home, and lead poisoning, lead pipes, replacing old piping, and so, including earthquake retrofits
in this project would be a really great opportunity, and they are working with a lot of people in Oakland and really across the East Bay on these retrofits right now
so there's some great opportunity and it really does get at the vulnerable community members that we are trying to target with our work at SPUR.
And then finally for multi-hazard adaptation
I'm working with my team at SPUR on a Bayshore Hazard Adaptation Community of Practice, which is developing mitigation strategies
related to liquefaction and groundwater risks, and integrating that research with existing planning efforts of you know the BCDC
and some other regional planning groups.
And finally I just wanted to say I titled this as
let's work together, engaging in policy, or I titled this as "let's work together," which was both
let's work together with local cities, with community groups, but also with everyone in this room
researchers and engineers, there's a lot of opportunities to do that.
If your technical research is really thinking about how that technical research can be translated into policy or policy changes, and I'm very happy to work with anyone who wants to kind of think through and strategize, how research can be used for policy sharing expertise with organizations and government entities and that can be through
commenting on safety elements, or commenting on local house and mitigation plans before they're adopted making sure that what you want to see earthquake resilience, retrofit programs are really named in those plans.
So signing on the advocacy letters that we write, and that we write with our partners that our partners write.
And I'm sure many of you are also working on similar projects, and advocacy letters, and we would also be happy to be a part of that process as well.
And yeah, as I just mentioned many times partnerships, we would love to partner if there's any of this work that you are interested in, that you want to partner with us on, or have some ideas how you can contribute, please, reach out.
I would love to connect. Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Sarah, for that presentation. It's really exciting to have SPUR back in the seismic policy space, and with Sarah in this new role.
I'm really looking forward to seeing all of the work that's going to be coming out of SPUR in the future.
So thank you. Next, I want to introduce AJ Faas from San Jose State University, talking about post vulnerability.
Thank you, AJ.
Hello! My name is AJ Faas from the Department of Anthropology
at San Jose State University, and I'm here to talk to you today about our community base,
participatory projects for vulnerability and hazard analyses in the Bay Area.
I'm going to share my screen so I can have some slides to accompany my
short talk here today. Thank you so much for joining us.
Here we go. So. Alongside. Oh forgive me.
Here we go! Get my slides working. Okay. So alongside, geoscientific and engineering advances exemplified by the U.S.
Geological Survey's HayWired Scenario interdisciplinary disaster
social science has for years iterated with the concept of vulnerability as a sort of index of the unequal distribution of capacities to anticipate, prevent, cope with, respond to, and recover from disaster, as it often quoted phrase has it. This is often articulated as
a critique of geoscientific hazard centrism.
An argument for denaturalizing disasters by focusing on
systemic inequalities that prefigure hazard exposure and the distribution of vulnerability.
A recent term in the anthropology of disasters, that my friends and colleagues and I have been sort of central to calls for a synthesis and reframing of both of these approaches that simultaneously decenters vulnerability from people in places that is you
know ostensibly vulnerable people and places are not the sites of the production of vulnerability.
These are the sites where vulnerability is felt and experienced, and instead, we point to opportunities to develop community-based participatory approaches for reciprocal knowledge production about hazards, vulnerability and disasters. That is while a lot of social science has effectively
located disasters beyond hazards by arguing that disasters are not natural but social.
Anthropologists like me are more concerned with how people do think about an experience, a problem than with how anyone feels they ought to do so.
So, our approach is therefore to work with both scientists and diverse communities in the Bay Area that are underrepresented in STEM fields and frequently identified as vulnerable to disasters to identify hazards and vulnerabilities that are salient in their life
experience. Our approach explicitly recognizes local communities as agents of knowledge and not merely targets of study
and intervention.
So, our general strategy is something we're still iterating with.
We're still piling this so that we're getting ready to roll this out a somewhat larger scale.
But at the moment it's broken up into three main phases. In phase 1, we work with a purposes sample of community groups in neighborhoods adjacent to the Hayward fault on the East Bay
in the San Francisco Bay Area to conduct a series of four focus group workshops.
In session one, we discussed community priorities and shared objectives. In session two,
we identify local hazards, their causes, local action
to mitigate or reduce the frequency and severity of hazards, and what community participants would like to see done. In a third session,
we identify patterns and causes of the distribution of capacity
and resources to anticipate or event respond to, and recover from disaster. Again with attention to who in the community is working on this and what participants would like to see done. In our final session, we invite people to participate in the interpretation of findings from the first
sessions, and to reflect on how the findings we came up with together correspond to aline with or diverge from aspects of the HayWired scenario.
In phase 2, we pair participants from each group with SJSU,
San Jose State University,
anthropology, graduate students to design and conduct an ethnographic study based on findings from phase 1, and I will have an example of one of those in just a moment.
For phase 3, we are developing a three-day conference in which participants from each community group plus members of the HayWired Scenario present findings in the research team and presents a meta-analysis of trends from the phase one workshops. The third day of the summit
we hope will include a charette-style program in which participants identify priorities, projects, and insights that emerge from this process.
We've had several partners in this project.
so far, and we've had a number of student teams working on this.
In some of these images you see, here we see some of my students from the San Jose State University organizational studies program, and one of our key partners, members of the Japan Town Prepared Community Emergency Response Team and they've been active in all phases of this work.
And even helped us work with a number of other partners that I'm going to tell you about right now.
So in one of our pilot studies in 2021, we work with the Billy DeFrank LGBTQ+
Community Center in San Jose. Participants here identified
the following hazards as the top five out of a much longer list in their community. Chief among them was Anti-LGBTQ+
aggression and violence, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic violence and abuse within the LGBTQ+ community,
police lack of education with a LGBTQ+ issues and wildfires.
Our discussions of hazards and vulnerability were ultimately organized around two questions that emerged during the workshops and interpretations of the HayWire Scenario data.
The first was, how could we queer disaster knowledge in the HayWired Scenario, and beyond?
LGBTQ+ people especially transgender individuals, have a unique set of experience with hazards such as the anti-LGBTQ+
violence and public safety and humanitarian organizations. Issues
there include heteronormative care, traumatic insensitivity, and deprioritizing essential treatments as elective.
Folks in this community not only experience different disasters in different hazards, they also experience shared ones quite differently.
These live realities and experience don't cluster in place.
That is, LGBTQ+ folks do not primarily live in the same neighborhood like, say, low income or immigrant communities, and even if they did, these data are not available in the census where HayWired and other scenarios and disaster risk reduction programs, often obtain their social
data. So we came out of this asking, can we find practical ways to incorporate LGBTQ+ variables into HayWire and thereby establish a model for reciprocal knowledge exchange with other disaster risk reduction programs.
We currently have one project right now with the ability to Billy DeFrank Center, and one of our graduate students, Jackson Benz, who was working on creating a series of maps accompanied by narratives about the structures and infrastructures that are most important to people in the
LGBTQ+ community in the Bay Area; and by identifying different structures and infrastructures we hope to be able to map them and see where they can align with the impacts of the Haywire Scenario and also initiate another subscript of conversations about hazards
and vulnerabilities, and sort of queer geographies of the Bay Area.
Next, we have a project, which is, how do we queer or queerify disaster
preparedness? Given, the concerns that I've just outlined
how can Billy DeFrank and other LGBTQ+ Community Centers work with public safety and disaster, risk reduction, response and recovery organizations to create meaningful change for LGBTQ+ inclusiveness in major operations?
Now we have a number of interesting projects in this area. One of them is a
Podcast which we've been circulating internally in the community.
As we developed the first few episodes, I think we're up to four right now, but we will be rolling this out publicly soon.
Now we created a SOGIEIT which is sexual orientation, gender, identity and expression. Inclusivity, training that can be used with CERT teams and the training of other emergency response and humanitarian aid personnel.
We've also been developing and piloting queer centric tabletop scenarios for response sheltering and mass care. We're developing one right now and piloting one for sheltering and mass care.
We piloted with some of the community emergency response teams.
We piloted some of the response, and search and rescue operations.
To foster development of more LGBTQ+ inclusivity. The process also resulted in the Billy DeFrank Center identifying how they can prepare for an earthquake, how to enforce members of their own communities, how to provide essential and support services at the Center. They've been
thinking about shelter, essential services, the life saving information for emergency resources and other ways, to train and prepare members of their communities and understand how to interact with the different responding agencies
So, I would just like to leave us with a few takeaways from our experience on this project.
Collaborative community science projects like ours, have a potential to transform science and knowledge about disasters and disaster root causes that lead to disaster risk production actions.
They have the potential to foster the development of shared understandings of hazards, improve communication between community groups and organizations. To establish effective protocols for response evacuation sheltering in mass care and recovery and help communities prepare for hazardous events and
emergencies. Our investigation takes seriously that claims about what is and how to go about classifying phenomena like hazards and vulnerabilities are recursive and co-constituative of situated but nevertheless, objective relations, of humans and environmental
phenomena. In the absence of local knowledge and expertise, products designed for disaster, risk, production, response or recovery are unlikely to succeed.
And frequently wind up, perpetuating varieties of harm.
But our proposed investigation goes beyond just local contextual knowledge, for already, you know, sort of prepackaged programs to invite a diversity of communities to participate in the construction of theory about hazards, vulnerability, and disasters. We facilitate the participatory knowledge production in
hybrid forms through high intensity, participation in knowledge, construction, while inviting a diversity of communities to construct investigate, critique, revise, and communicate their own models of the root causes of disasters.
And with that I like to thank you very much for your time today.
Special thanks to Dr. Anne Wein and Dr. Sarah McBride.
of the U.S. Geological Survey Gabrielle Antolovich and the Billy DeFrank LGBTQ+
Community Center, Rich Saito, Jeffrey, Oldman, and Jim McClure of Japan Town Prepared, and to many students researchers who have contributed to this. This is an ever-growing list and
the many more involved. Thank you so much, and I look forward to discussion.
Thank you so much. I really appreciated that. And I again, I dare echo that I'm looking forward to discussion.
So next up we're gonna hear from Laura Hall, who is the Regional Disaster Preparedness Organization.
So take it away. Thank you so much.
Hello! I'm Laura Hall from the Regional Disaster Preparedness Organization or RDPO.
I'm here to talk about how the Portland Metro Region has been working to create cohesive, consistent, accessible, and trauma-informed disaster messaging through a collaboration of public, private, and community partnerships. The RDPO is housed within the Portland Bureau of
Emergency Management, but we serve the metropolitan area spanning Oregon and Washington States. We are a partnership of government agencies, non-government organizations and private sector stakeholders working to build resilience to all kinds of disasters including the Cascadia Subduction
Zone earthquake. We have about a dozen work groups working on various projects from healthcare to radio, debris management, volunteer training.
You name it, if it has to do with disaster preparedness
we're probably working on it. I am the chair of our disaster messaging work group.
This work group brings together dozens of subject matter experts to create regional messaging and support community-based messaging efforts.
We step back and look globally at how disaster messaging works in our region, and then we lean in to examine and improve specific products and address specific issues.
And we work together on a number of regional projects, and we share our observations and opinions and resources, and after every meeting that we have all of the resources we've collectively stumbled across in the previous month, get compiled and added to our disaster messaging index which people who don't attend our
meetings, including you could find on the RDPO website.
It's full of great stuff. Disaster messaging work group members are mostly local government employees, but also we've got some state emergency management and public health partners and two and one info.
These State-level partnerships are really great, because we get to stay in tune with what they're doing.
So we don't duplicate work, and it allows us to funnel community interest and feedback up to them.
So we get to tell them what we need, and it influence the way they do their work.
Instead of having finished projects handed down to us that don't always serve our needs.
Our work group also includes some members from community-based organizations, colleges, and universities doing disaster-related research and utility companies, and more. Were working to include more voices and represent more communities.
But our biggest challenge there is how to ensure everyone is being reimbursed for their time and expertise.
The government folks get paid to attend. It's part of their job, but some of our most critical community partners would have to volunteer their time in order to participate, that might be okay for some, but it's really not an equitable or feasible situation for many of our community partners and their voices
are really essential. There's this massive body of literature that says, you know, certain communities experience disproportionate impacts from disasters, and that social, vulnerabilities are what lead to that.
Their people, who are physically, culturally, socially, psychologically, economically, in linguistically isolated, which prevents them from receiving many, if not most, government messages and therefore services.
I have a great handout for you that provides more information about social vulnerability, because it's just extremely important.
We use an equity lens in all of our work, we continuously ask ourselves who is at the table to determine disaster
messaging needs and content. How have historical events shaped this situation?
How can we center our work around communities most impacted by disasters?
And how can equity be embedded in our work, and not just an afterthought.
Excuse me. Over the last few years our work group has been paying careful attention to how our most vulnerable communities interact with disaster messaging. In 2021, we launched a project called "Community Engagement Lessons Learned," we gathered about 60 people from about 40 community-based organizations.
representing a very wide variety of communities, and we ask them questions about their experiences with disaster messaging over the past few years
during a number of major events. What they shared is specific to our region.
But I'd wager that many communities in your area feel the same or similar, and I should also note that most of the focus on our of our conversations was on the pandemic, wildfire, extreme heat, and other events that we had recently experienced fortunately earthquake
was not among them, but I think all of this stuff really applies to all disasters.
So here's some of what they said. They said, "there's way too much noise."
People often don't know where to look for accurate, timely, reliable information.
For example, when there's a wildfire, information might be coming from the city or the county or the state communication offices.
It might also be coming from individual offices of emergency management.
Sheriff, police, local fire, fire marshal, if there are road closures, Department of Transportation, public health might be talking about smoke. The water bureau might have water safety messages, or the DEQ
might, if utilities are out, they've got their own messaging, and then sometimes you have all of these different offices sending out messages at the city and the county and the state level, hoof. Government lanes of responsibility are so confusing and they're often uncoordinated not to
mention the many other agencies and organizations that are messaging to the public before, during,
and after disasters. It's not all bad. We do want some redundancy and messages that speak to different audiences, but our communities are saying when it comes to government messaging, we don't care about your jurisdictional or disciplinary lanes.
We want one clear place to go for information, and this is also true before disasters within each branch of government you sometimes have dozens of individual offices, creating preparedness websites, and then you add on the websites of Federal agencies, colleges,
universities, nonprofits, private institutions, and all told, there are hundreds of websites in each date offer preparedness, information.
Some have local content which is awesome because one of the best things we can do is give people information about how to get help if they need it.
But on the whole, all this creates this confusing array of messages that are overwhelming, inconsistent, sometimes conflicting, and our communities struggled to navigate this, and they really want us to work together to simplify things. Here's what else we heard. Messages aren't reaching
vulnerable and isolated communities. They're not accessible.
Most government messaging isn't translated or not to enough languages.
There's not basic disability access ASL videos. These are all things required by law,
mind you. It's not written in plain language. It's not presented in formats that are friendly to Neurodiverse
minds and people with low literacy. Visual materials aren't created using basic user interface design standards which is just a fancy way of saying there's very little attention.
given to the way that people navigate information. Often there's way too much information, overwhelming or
way too little information, insufficient. None of this was terribly shocking to us, but we heard some really interesting things about culture and trauma. In the Pacific Northwest government agencies love to use Bigfoot and wildfire messaging. I want you to look at this campaign and then put yourself
in the shoes of someone who doesn't know what Bigfoot is, how it applies to wildfires, and with the heck
this has to do with footprints. This would be nonsensical and possibly terrifying. I mean, are there, giant hairy creepy creatures in the mountains?
This is an attempt to be light-hearted that has fallen flat in terms of cultural access.
Humor is really tricky in public safety messaging. Now look at this one, and tell me how you would feel if you had lost a loved one to a wildfire, or maybe you lost all of your possessions, or saw the flames bearing down on your home, this would just really spark a whole lot of
anxiety and trauma, and, in my opinion, fear-based messaging was never a good way to go.
And there's data to support that as well. After all that we've collectively been through in the past few years.
It's definitely not appropriate anymore. Our work group has begun using the term trauma-informed disaster.
messaging. This term doesn't exist in the literature, but that does not mean that we should be thinking about it.
Our communities are saying, this stuff is upsetting. When we're creating disaster messages
we should always be asking ourselves, what would I think? How would I feel if I saw or heard this?
And I was, you know, fill in the blank, new to this country, new to this region.
Recent disaster, survivor, person with no money, person with a disability, renter, and a person who is less able to prepare, more likely to experience a disaster less likely to survive one and more likely to experience multiple compounding barriers to recovering from a disaster. Let's keep going because they said a
lot of other things. We heard them say that especially older folks and people in rural areas and people knew to an area, turn to tv and radio by default during a disaster,
but they often don't get what they need. Broadcasters, like to send people to their own websites, where they encourage lots of clicking, but provide insufficient information about how to get help and stay safe and often really important articles are behind paywalls and inaccessible. When it
comes to preparedness messaging local media often send people to "Ready.gov
and I'm sorry Federal partners, there's some good stuff here, but it lacks local information like where to get help, and sometimes it conflicts with local advice like they're telling people to prepare for several days without services, but because of big earthquakes we need to tell them here in Oregon to
aim for 2 weeks or more in some areas. Also, while they're getting better about this ready.gov does not meet our language and disability access standards, and many communities don't see themselves represented in their materials, plus these are the images that they use to explain common hazards.
I think these are terrifying, I think they're not helpful, and they're not motivating to anyone who's like on fence about digesting preparedness information. And if that's the version of the nuclear incident that i'm preparing for I think I'd
rather just spend my money on vacation and enjoy what time I have left.
Our community partners also told us that many, many folks aren't using mainstream communication channels, and many are distrustful of government.
Sometimes for very good reasons. More and more of them are communicating through instant messaging services.
They're especially popular in certain immigrant communities.
For example, a large number of Somali speakers aren't literate in English or their native language, so they communicate with audio, video, and image files through these apps. And the good news is public messaging
does not have to pivot to using all of these tools. We can develop partnerships with the the folks that are working daily with these community members.
They know how to reach them. They're the trusted messengers, and they know a lot more than I ever will about their community's culture and language
and background. Which brings me to my next lesson learned. Community partners really want to help us get life safety information to their communities.
But we need to stop bombarding them. Every office and every branch of government bombarding them with dozens and dozens of requests based on different priorities.
We also must find a way to reimburse them for their time and expertise.
They are busy and like sadly underpaid for the extremely vital services that they're providing every day to vulnerable communities.
You might be saying, my agency can't afford that.
I hear you at most can't. We usually can't, but we really believe that when we communicate and find shared interests and get organized to collaborate that we can collectively find a way to reimburse community partners for their assistance, and we can also advocate for systemic changes
that can help ensure equity. Now, I want to share with you a few of the projects we're working on to address these issues. Instead of [oops
there we go] instead of each city and county creating and marketing their own preparedness website
we have a regional website "PublicAlerts.org" it's our one-stop shop for all things disaster related.
You can sign up for alerts, view current alerts, learn about hazards, learn how to get prepared, get recovery information, and then, during an emergency we update the site with events specific and file like where to go for shelter, etc.
The website has been designed with community input and has a clean, simple look so that it doesn't overwhelm.
But you can really dig deep and get tons of information.
Lots of leaks. It's a real treasure trove, and it highlights cross-cutting disaster themes, like evacuation, shelter in place, power, outage, and individualized preparation for individual needs. It's inclusive, it represents many kinds
of people in many different areas. It's undergone a thorough disability audit. It's written at a sixth grade reading level or lower. Words were chosen very carefully to ensure ease of translation and sensitivity and literacy, it aims to motivate
people, through encouragement and collectivism. We also have a COAD community organizations active in disaster.
This is a group of about 80 CBOS community, organizations that meet monthly to discuss disaster, preparedness and then, during an emergency, they usually meet daily, and sometimes they do coordinated response work.
And we, we have a paid coordinator who provides administrative support, and facilitation for them.
But the work is driven by the community members. After our terrible 2021 heat dome
we heard from them very strong complaints about local and Federal government, messaging complaints about translation, images, government branding, accessibility, and the lack of flexibility of files.
They wanted to customize some further communities, but couldn't
so we launched this critical safety messaging project which I absolutely love, and I urge you to visit our website to learn more about it.
It's a addressing many of the issues that we've laid out today.
And we've we've done extreme heat and winter weather, and we're now working on wildfire and smoke.
And next we're going to do earthquake messaging
Oh, gosh! I'm all over time. We're doing so much other great work.
I want to share it with you, but I'm gonna give a list of projects that we're doing.
and a handout. And since this is an earthquake-specific workshop, I wanted to point out that we're also developing some draft template messaging for regional partners to push out immediately after a Cascadia earthquake through emergency alerting systems
and radio stations, longer messages that are translated.
And we've got a really great team of building safety professionals doing damage assessment, preparation.
And we're helping them to develop public facing communication.
So people can make more informed decisions about entering buildings.
And finally, I just wanted to invite you to contact me.
We're more than happy to share any of the work that we've done, and we really hope to learn from you.
And you know you've got a lot to share with us.
So please do reach out and thank you so much for including me in your workshop. Have a good day.
Well, I just want to say a huge thank you to all of the speakers.
I thought that was genuinely tremendous. So I was really interested to learn a lot of these things and to see all the hard work you've been doing.
I think this has been fantastic. We have half enough of question.
I am very open to whoever wants to start. But, Daniel, if you have anything to to pitch in to start to say, then go ahead, please
Yes, thank you so much. Everyone. Those were all really interesting presentations.
There's been some really interesting questions in the chat as well.
So I think I'd love to continue that discussion. Kind of live.
So, maybe if someone would like to kind of bring those questions into the live discussion, that would be welcome.
So just raise your hand, and Robert or I will call on you.
Is there anyone who would like to start
I can start with a question sort of going back to Denise.
I was wondering, thinking about future scenarios.
If you have thoughts about sort of what kinds of maybe impacts or locations future scenarios might look at and consider.
And I'm also wondering if some of your, the papers, or some of your follow-up work, might think about guidelines or best practices for scenario development and deployment for maximum impact, and especially considering some of the recommendations we heard from some others about considering
vulnerable populations and messaging and sort of how to bring people along.
in these policy recommendations.
Thanks, very much, Danielle, just to avoid errors, propagating
I pronounce my name Janice. So sorry, there's a lot of folks on the call.
But thank you. Those are some great questions, maybe taking the last one first about guidance.
As I alluded to in my presentation, this is part of a broader effort that does intend to develop practice guidance.
It will be not focused on California but a a bit more broadly focused.
We are looking at bringing in advances to both address some of the barriers and challenges, but also some areas where scenario practice has not brought in, say, some of the large body of work from our colleagues in the social sciences and risk communication.
There's been some scenarios are out in front and working in these areas already, but it's maybe not as broadly reflected in the practice.
So, yes, we are going to be working on that in the coming months.
Can you remind me of your first? The first question. There were several
Oh!
Oh, I was just wondering if there was maybe some locations that you felt could use scenarios, or maybe some vulnerable areas of vulnerability
that's future scenarios might focus on.
Oh, sure. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, I think one of the things that is really interesting to us, that we're thinking a lot about how you use scenarios in a multi-hazards.
Context, and how you you might look at them, to perhaps examine different types of hazards, at both sort of cascading and interrelated hazards, and then, in climate impacts, I think those are all areas that are really right for exploration.
We've done a lot of kind of single event scenarios which are great for clear communication.
That there's a risk and something needs to be done in terms of mitigation.
But there's a a lot of complexity in our local hazard environments, and maybe this can help us get at some of those issues around people prioritizing more frequent hazards. So that's something we're looking at a lot right now.
But it it would be very interesting to do more work in that area, and also some things on suites of scenarios, and just looking at a bigger take a group of them, of course, they're practical limits.
So over to you.
Thanks. Is there anyone else who has questions? Go ahead and raise your hand, or maybe any of the speakers who want to expand on some of their responses in the chat.
Oh, Austin, I see your hand. Go ahead.
Sure by venue thanks. Those were a series of really stimulating talks across the board.
There's so much to talk about I don't wanna make this too specific.
But one thing that came up a couple of times was the sort of renter versus owner aspects of hazard and risk and financial risk, and I wonder, I had a very specific question, which is that I noticed on Janiele's slide about the Earthquake Bolt Program that the grants
were only available for owner occupied buildings, and I wonder if the answer to sort of why that is maybe launching point for some of the the issues between renters and owners.
So I wonder if you could explain sort of what this is?
Why that is, and whether it may change in the future, or what the sort of obstacles to expanding that are.
Thanks.
Yeah. Thank, thank you. Austin. It absolutely, definitely will will change.
And the reason I think it, it actually was in, you know, kind of the enabling statute that created our mitigation program, and we think it was because they wanted us to focus giving money, you know, without unlimited funds not to big corporations, like you know, large quality that own lots and
lots of property. So we are absolutely going to try and introduce not owners
[noise]
occupied program soon. It will be a whole different outreach, because now we're doing an outreach for people for whom this is a business.
And, but you know, with 65% of Californians as renters and the majority of are low-income residents living in rental units, we absolutely want to be able to include that soon so it'll be a different program, entirely.
I think that it's mostly return on investment.
Hopefully, there's a little bit of altruism with people who own homes that I hope to be able to report back to you, a successful renter program soon.
Thank you so much, I see, there's a question in the chat from Patricia, and then, if you wanted to bring that up.
Cool. I'll come back.
If not, I had a question. I guess for AJ.
Actually in terms of thinking. I speak from a position of using satellite data a lot.
And I think we fail regularly to think about vulnerability and individuals at play
here. In the images we're observing, and I was wondering if you had a suggestion.
This is to any of the speakers, but really to AJ's
initially suggestion about where to kind of connect with the best connection points between purely kind of observational scientists who are doing a lot of the hazard work, and the scientists, the social scientists like what's best practice there, and if you've found anything that's really
proven to be successful for this this kind of work?
Thank you very much for that question, and I think it is such a good question that I'm inevitably going to stumble in attempting to answer it.
You know, I have in front of me here, a draft of an upcoming new paper on how to think about vulnerability, and it begins with anthropologists sort of critiquing
you know, geoscientists, for you know very hazard-centric ways of thinking about this.
And is it just exposure? And all this sort of stuff?
And then, you know I increasingly sort of chisel away at some of the blind spots in critical social science approaches and you know, I point to the initial conversation that you know brought me here today. Just a few years ago I was invited to give a talk at the
U.S. Geological Survey, and I sort of did that sort of thing. I was like. Ha, ha!
Look U.S. Geological Survey. They only think hazards. Of course they do right.
I think you know, if I look at the HayWired Scenario, there's far better social science in the HayWired scenario
then you'll never find geoscience in my work.
Right. So you know I'm not trying to be the jerk about it right?
But you know, the long story short
it's maybe an unsatisfying answer, because it's you know, as I joked in the chat earlier, it's a bit like measuring the earth 1mm at a time.
But I mean, I think, that this success to doing this, to addressing the blind spots that might exist in the best geoscience, right or the points plus that might exist in some of the best social sciences is through these not just interdisciplinary,
but I think transdisciplinary partnerships, and you know I mean I get frustrated with myself in this sort of work all the time, because again, just measuring.
I'm like, you know, just getting the measurements right for
this 1 mm for weeks and weeks, or month and months, and I really want to expand I want to roll this out to, you know, you know, throughout the Bay Area, or at least the East Bay, for now. It's just a very slow going process.
I think that you know whether we, or whether we're looking at one hazards or multi-hazards, and whether we're looking at this from a primarily social science perspective or a geoscience perspective, I mean, I think that you know one of the things I've said a number of times in
this process is, you know, if I go to let's say you know, I gave the example of the LGBTQ+ Community Center here today.
But there's a number of other partners we'd work with, and we assess their preparedness in terms of like earthquake preparedness.
Then they're going to look, really, you know, underprepared or under engaged.
But when we ask them about the hazards that actually are, you know, sounding it in their everyday experience, then all of a sudden, this focuses us up to the fact that, like, wow, there's all kinds of preparedness.
There's all kinds of activity. There's all kinds of partnerships here and that
sets us up to do some of that work of, you know synthesis and translation like, okay, let's try and build this towards other types of hazards.
And let's try and use their knowledge to inform the other agencies that would like to work with them, and you know that's what's informing, like a lot of our tabletop strategy work and stuff like that.
But yeah, I mean overall trying to address these blind spots, these disciplinary blind spots.
I think it is very slow and cumbersome work.
Thanks. AJ. I think you know this theme of sort of multi-disciplinary and multi-hazard approach has come up through a number of the talks today, and I think it's sort of really exciting opportunity there's a lot of
energy and some of the, you know, climate change, work, mitigation.
Some of the hazard, you know, responding to other types of hazards.
I wanted to just ask Sarah in your new role at SPUR
and you're thinking about sort of the policy landscape of the Bay Area, where do you see opportunities to sort of take this multi-hazard and multidisciplinary approach
in policy development in the Bay Area?
Yeah Danielle, thank you so much for that question.
I really think that groups like THRIVE and getting these like nonprofits to understand the overlaps of these multi-hazards like, where can you find the grant funding, helping them access the grant funding giving them like technical support on finding opportunities for that I think that's
one of the things we really are trying to do in thinking about the overlap of the groundwater rise and liquefaction risk.
And USGS has a great story map, if not, everyone has seen it.
You can take a look at it to kind of understand those had overlapping hazards a little better.
And yeah, I think there's that project is really timely, because there was a groundwater rise report that came out recently from SFEI, the San Francisco Estuary Institute and Pathways on groundwater risk in the Bay Area and it's like one of
the I'm kind of holding onto it because I think it's one of the best opportunities to really like push forward this multi-hazard moment for earthquakes and I'm trying to make sure that in the process of getting this program off the ground and getting people to
understand these hazards that, like the liquefaction aspect of that is really integrated into like how people are thinking about this, and right now, we're like, not totally sure what that's gonna look like.
And what the mitigation is for that on like a big scale.
But I think that that is one of the biggest opportunities, because there's a lot of like momentum around groundwater right now.
So, yeah.
Yes, absolutely the groundwater and expanding liquefaction rest, sea level rise seems like a really sort of obvious intersection that we have here, and something that we're very familiar with in Alameda.
One of the other things that you mentioned Sarah was sort of, you know, while we're also taking this multidisciplinary approach, the need to really secure earthquake specific mitigation funding.
and you mentioned that you know some of the Federal grants are really focusing on nature, based solutions and and sort of a different approach.
Different priorities for mitigation that can be hard to incorporate
earthquake mitigation specifically, which doesn't really as far as I know, have a nature based approach for structural mitigation.
So I yeah, I don't know if you want to expand on that at all.
But I do think that sort of continuing to advocate for earthquake risk
mitigation at the State and Federal level.
To keep that as a priority, I was really surprised, you know, when the hazard mitigation grant guidance came out from the State earthquake
mitigation was not listed as one of their priorities for funding, which seems like a a major oversight.
Yeah, I think I don't have much more to say than that we are really trying to push you know, advocacy around getting that funding.
And I think, SPUR has a lot of resources to be able to put in also to philanthropic funding.
And so another thing that I'm working on it, which you know, isn't quite the expansive funding that we want to get necessarily as like the hazard mitigation grants, but doing some education for philanthropic funders around the need to integrate earthquake hazards
into their kind of like multi-hazard funding. That's that's definitely one of the priorities of mine right now.
Thanks, Sarah, really appreciate it. I'm gonna use this as an opportunity to look back to the chat because there's been some great questions posted there, and I don't know if those people posted them. I'll talk more about this.
Going back a little bit. We had a question from Max Schneider, who says, "thanks for the great talk, Laura, have you approached the topic of how risk visualization can expand on verbal risk communication to reach more communities?
And any suggestions on which ways to visualize earthquake risk could be useful, especially for marginalized communities.
I see Laura's already kind of send me, answered that. But I, as if you have wanted to take an opportunity to get more of a voice to that
Sorry. I'm still recovering from illness, so it's hard to talk.
I'm sorry. Which one was it? Which comment was it? There were a lot.
Yeah, everyone from Max Schneider, who is just saying, how can we expand on the topic of risk visualization and how we can use first, verbal risk communication to reach more communities
Yeah, our "PublicAlerts" website, so we partnered with University of Boise and they've been doing this.
They've done it for Seattle and Portland now, and they've been studying visualization of risk and and mapping in particular.
So you could go to their website and plug in your address and get a visualization of the various types of risks in your area.
And then the way that they've been studying the way that people digest that information, and they've been surveying people.
I feel like we don't yet have super wonderful reports back yet, but those are forthcoming.
But it's been really interesting to work with this team, because that's exactly what they're looking at.
So I would recommend looking at the hazard, ready resources.
No, I'm sorry. But I really appreciate it. Thank you.
I'm sorry, no worries
There was another question from Luciana asked.
I see you're on camera as well. If you wanted to sort that through.
If not, no worries. The question was, can any of the presenters comment on the success or not about providing teaching moments to educate right after the disasters occur?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, it's up in the chat. Hopefully, that made sense.
Or while they're going on. Laura. I don't want you to get it because you've already answered in the chat, but if anyone else is new.
Just very quickly. I was in Humboldt County last week, and we were all already planning up on going to encourage contractors to sign up for our program.
It's always an opportunity to learn. It's a you know,
it's a laboratory, but also you know, there's a heightened interest in earthquakes, and so for the folks who weren't directly impacted, the houses didn't come off the foundation
For example, in Eureka, you know we wanted to encourage them. So absolutely.
you have to take advantage of the windows.
I think if any of the other presenters today want to make a comment on that, or we can move to another question from the chat.
If not, there was a question here from address pledge, talking about retrofitting.
He's saying that, given, I live in a 100 year old house, not unusual in the East Coast.
How many pre-1980 units are estimated to still need retrofitting in California as a fraction of the total residential stock.
I guess the question here is, how heavy is the lift?
We don't know. We do know that there are, you know, over a million houses older than 1940, just in areas of high hazard.
So I always say that, you know that's absolutely a house that needs to be retrofitted.
There are houses between 1940 and 1980, that don't need to be retrofitted.
So some proportions it's impossible to to know, because this information is not in the multiple listing.
It's not in any collected, in any census data.
But we do have 19,000 houses retrofitted, and so we can,
we're starting to generate some data on that issue.
It's very difficult to know.
Could I ask a brief follow up to that, I guess in some places we've seen pushback from homeowners
whose houses or properties have been designated to be, you know, hazardous or potentially in fire risk zones.
And has that been something you've seen in talking to homeowners, who then realized that
premiums may go up, or things like that.
Premiums for fire insurance?
Sorry I was kind of pointing there was an example from the Pacific Northwest, with fire insurance, was the example I was thinking of, but I guess push back from homeowners that suddenly realized that you know, if they need retrofitting. I guess the question is do some people feel that ignorance is
[noise]
bliss rather than the status of, and moving to a more knowledgeable but expensive area.
Exactly. Well, I think you know, all of us know that people deal with stress in different ways in the spectrum goes from yeah.
Ignore it, or be terrified by it. And obviously we want them in that zone of being educated, enabled, and active.
And so there's some good things in that.
The State of California has a law that retrofit work will not increase your tax basis for property taxes.
That's very good. If you could have earthquake insurance, which very few people do mitigating a house will reduce your premium, and I think they're getting
close to that with wildfire and mitigation.
You know that's a much more expensive retrofit.
And really needs to be done on a community basis, I think, which is one of the challenges to it.
I think we've covered many of the questions in the chat.
Luciana, your hands raised. Great.
Yeah, I mean, just because Danielle just brought up something about like community base for earthquakes.
It depends on how buildings are built, but in Napa, if I remember correctly, some structures had been retrofitted, but the neighboring one had not, and they thought they affected the one that had been retrofitted, so is there any incentive to do a collective retrofit or is that something that
is being thought about.
I think, for single family dwellings, it's being done on an individual basis, though, with our program, because we've been fortunate enough to get funding every year and be able to reopen registration that we have what I call social capitalist as people are hearing about it from their friends their
neighbors their colleagues, their relatives, their realtors.
So you're hearing about it from somebody that you trust.
You hear about it from your next door, neighbor? And what we're trying to do is make it part of the culture you know that people know.
This is something that they should do. Look for it when you buy a home, you know, and we've made small in roads.
We've been in Oakland and and Los Angeles now for 10 years, and we see communities where we had, you know four houses with little dots on our map, you know, are now 40 houses, and then they go to you know 50 houses so just in terms
of that, the awareness, it can start to become community based.
Yeah. But in terms of, let's say, like all downtowns of towns where buildings where there's no clearance between structures, you know, that's sort of like straightforward in terms of engineering. Like one can be like a hammer for the others. You know, so.
[noise]
It will, exactly. We saw it in Napa. There were structures that were red tag because of a person who had refused to retrofit their unreinforced masonry.
And you know, that's a difficulty for local jurisdictions.
They have the the unreinforced masonry law in place.
They need to, you know, to have some some kind of punitive action to protect the others, and you know that's difficult to do for some politically.
Keith. Question.
So I'm going back to Dave Applegate's
comment about unrecognized successes. Really. And this is for you, Janielle.
You were in Ferndale and Ferndale is the earthquake capital of California,
really. So, I imagine there are buildings that have been repaired, and retrofitted from prior earthquakes.
Is there someone there looking at the success of those repairs
and retrofits?
You know, Keith, that's a really important thing. I always tell people, you know, particularly, you know, early career people that are doing their first reconnaissance make sure you look at the houses that are not damaged as well as those that are damaged and I have a beautiful picture of the tail of two houses, I call it from Napa.
One next to the other, that's retrofitted, you know.
I just showed it to you all where you know two- and a half years later, hundreds of thousands of dollars. House on the right wasn't done 100% properly, but, boy, it kept it on its foundation.
I saw the same thing in Rio Dell, I saw a house that the guy said, "yeah, I got it, had got under there, and I've done a little bit of work," and then the house on an office foundation to the left.
You know, it's interesting. Some homeowners don't even make that connection with the work they did, and their house performing better.
So we need to continue to find these examples and to publicize them, because it's very important.
We didn't have any retrofitted houses through Earthquake, Brace and Bolt in Rio Dell, but we have now over 19,000, so it's more likely to have an earthquake happen in a community, and we absolutely will have a post event
research project so we can absolutely show that data.
Thanks, Janiele. Ruth, do you want to go ahead.
Yeah, so in the news I keep seeing that a bunch of the hospitals are trying to greatly delay the implementation of seismic retrofits and they're saying that they don't have enough money to do it.
Now we know that hospitals are the most important parts of our community during our disaster, and where the people that are in the worst condition are going to be going.
So I am hoping that the major cities are not hospitals in the major cities.
They're not doing this, but I think I've read that.
It's especially in the rural areas. But maybe also in our major city so I was wondering if anyone could say what's happening with this issue.
Yeah.
And if there's any way that I know, someone or something can be changed so that the hospitals do retrofit.
And that's like one of the big examples of disaster from the I guess the famous cases.
And 1971 Sylmar earthquake that really awoke the building community that we need to make our hospital safe.
So I just wondering what's happening with that. Thank you.
And I really have enjoyed the talks this morning and I've learned so much. Thanks.
Do any of the speakers want to respond? Go ahead, Janiele.
Well, you know I happen to be on the board when the legislation came out to try and delay, and the Structural Engineers Association of California endorsed not letting the delays happen. SB 1953 passed in the 1990s, they were given 30 years.
But in reality, as you said, 1971 was really when the clock started ticking and the Olive View hospital collapsed.
I understand because I've done a lot of work in hospitals.
The tremendous financial burden on particularly small rural hospitals, smaller hospitals.
And so in that case, if we, if we want to make this commitment, we've got folks that are saying they cannot afford it.
Then maybe the State starts to step in and help with financing, because, you know, as I said to a hospital administrator, the idea here is not just that you will be around to provide health care after an event,
but we will not be killing people in their beds during an earthquake.
I mean, this is how serious some of these life safety issues are.
So I think you can hear in my voice and answer that I firmly endorse, not allowing these delays, but looking for opportunities to assist with funding when it's required.
Thanks Janiele, and I'll just add that the the EERI Northern California Public Policy Committee has also been following the legislation seeking extension of these these deadlines.
It looks like this year that legislation did not pass last year.
It looks like it has not yet been reintroduced this year,
so we're hopeful that maybe they've backed off of that request, but agreed that you know the need in rural hospitals is real for funding and so allocating resources, and they can get that done is really important.
Thank you.
We have 5 min left, but I've been told we could take a little bit of time, so I see 2 more questions.
Let's ask those 2 questions, and then I think it will probably be time for us to to wrap up.
So, Lori, please go ahead.
Yeah, this is just sort of a follow up on what Janiele said, that I've actually gotten several reports from people who did do Brace and Bolt in Eureka, because Eureka was one of the earlier communities, and although the ground shaking
wasn't as strong. There certainly was damage in Eureka, and both of those reports were absolutely no problem.
What I also found very interesting is reports of people who did non-structural mitigation in Rio Dell.
You have to remember we had a strong earthquake only the year before to the date, and a number of people took action in Rio Dell and reported a essentially, no damage because of what they had done in their cabinets, and their knickknacks and so forth, so just to sort of
underscore what you've been saying. Thank you.
Thanks, Laurie. Christine?
Yes, thank you for a great session. Everybody. Thank you for the Organizing Committee to front-loading the whole workshop with this, because where we can make a big difference in hazard that we do at the USGS can inform the mitigation measures and all that. The thing i'd like to
know from the panelists, and in the group is, how do we bridge the knowledge we have?
Some people do Hazus this analysis to get a sense of the the full risk? Right?
Because we talk about vulnerabilities, and so on, and inequities and earthquake safety.
But how do we really do that? I mean, it's not just as a research project in academia how do we do that as a community that we make risk informed decisions.
And we target research that addresses the highest risk first.
So that's something I want to know for the Earthquake Science Center and the people who really just focus on the hazard, how do we do that?
And what is the pass forward? And what are your thoughts on that?
What a great closing question, and something that I think each of our panelists could probably answer.
So? Who wants to go first?
Laura. Thank you.
No one's talking. Yeah, no.
Sorry I didn't mean to stump you. This is this is really what we need to do.
So in all of our communications we've been having with community partners over the last few years
I mean this question of like when and how do we talk to certain communities about these really scary topics while they're experiencing just a vast array of struggles.
When is it appropriate? How do we do it?
And it really for me, just keeps coming back to letting the community partners decide and providing them the tools with which to do that education and outreach, because we will never succeed at doing it ourselves, because we have too many different kinds of people and so those conversations with the CBOs and
and really showing them that we value their partnership by paying them for their time, and then providing them with training and resources, and an open door
to say, this worked, this didn't, and us just being in the background, providing them with what they need to get the message across, and being a resource to answer their questions as they arrive. To me, feels like the pass forward in this realm.
I think I'm gonna go ahead and just endorse what
Laura just said, I mean, I couldn't put that better myself. Trying to find I mean, I understand why we want to find the priority or top sort of risks, and address them first, you know, if we're looking at one hazard and we could look
at folks that have consistent exposure to that.
But they're tracking other hazards within their communities, and not just the one that we're asking.
So there's I think it's hard to find, you know, some some sort of view from nowhere, right?
This sort of, you know, universal sort of agreement on what is the priority hazard or risk factor?
It's really difficult. So I'll just endorse what Laura said, which is that we really have to find ways to support and facilitate the participation of CBOs and organizations in this type of work.
Anyone else? Janice did you wanna say.
Yeah, I, I absolutely wanna agree with. But Laura and Aj said, I think this is very, very important.
I also want to go back to a thread that's been coming up.
And this is the idea being prepared ahead of time as a technical community with information, with products.
So you're not trying to scramble and develop it at the last minute, and to have mitigation ideas and programs thought about ahead of time.
Because there is this window of opportunity where people are more receptive.
We see this over and over in our practice. So there's this opportunity to go with information decision makers are more interested in making changes so that this bad thing doesn't happen again.
Or doesn't happen in the same way. So I think that's something just to to keep at it, even if we're not the hazard of the moment or whatever.
But there will be a time when what we can provide is a technical community is critically important, and we need to be ready for that moment.
Thank you.
Alright! Well, I wanna thank our speakers for your excellent talks today, and all of you for your excellent questions.
Robert. Thanks for co-moderating with me, and thank you.
Thank you all so much and enjoy your lunch. No, if there's any other announcements that need to be made before lunch.
No, I just want to thank everyone, including our wonderful moderators, Robert and Danielle, for doing this amazing session.
This was so good. Thank you, everyone.