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A first study of its kind on high-rise buildings in San Francisco on Thursday recommended re-inspection of buildings with a specific type of steel construction, which was found to be problematic after the 1994 Northridge earthquake.
The report on the high-rise building safety strategy, which included 15 other safety recommendations aimed at reducing seismic risk, was commissioned by the late Mayor Ed Lee after the announcement that the Millennium Tower was sinking.
"We want to ensure confidence in the government, trust in our regulators," said city administrator Naomi Kelly. "That's why Mayor Lee asked us to contact academics and engineers," especially those who had not worked on large construction projects in San Francisco and therefore would not have a conflict interest.
"This is one of the first efforts, I think, to really look back and start being proactive to start taking a closer look at evaluating these buildings," said Greg Deierlein, professor of engineering at Stanford University. one of the authors of the study.
"San Francisco has one of the strictest building codes in the country and we are always looking to improve those codes," said Kelly. "What's different now is that we are looking at existing buildings."
Supervisor Aaron Peskin, whose neighborhood includes many high-rise buildings in San Francisco, said that a hearing on the findings of the report would be held before the Government's Audit and Oversight Committee on October 17 – which happens to be the 29th anniversary of Loma. Prieta earthquake.
Peskin said that the completion of the report was "a feat, but that similar efforts had been stranded more than a decade ago, which" I attribute to some of the construction interests in San Francisco ".
Although the report did not attempt to prioritize its 16 recommendations, Peskin stated that it considered its highest priority to recommend re-inspection of buildings that used "welded steel moment frames". These structures use a specific type of welding 1994 It was discovered that the Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles was likely to fracture.
After the Loma Prieta earthquake, the tall buildings in San Francisco were re-inspected, but engineers at the time were not aware of the potential problems that steel moment frames are facing. .
The report created a database to study 156 buildings in San Francisco more than 240 feet in height, mainly located in the northeast of The City.
"Prior to the creation of this database, the city did not have any centralized and searchable repositories containing this information on all high-rise buildings in its territory," the report says. "After the completion of this project, the City will need to develop a mechanism to maintain or expand the database."
The report recommends that the database be extended to all buildings over 75 feet or sites likely to liquefy. The height used by the report was "somewhat arbitrary," he said.
"It's pretty amazing that in the technological age, none of this information existed in one place," Peskin said.
Some of the report's recommendations should be implemented by regulation by the Building Inspection Department, said Peskin, but others could be promulgated by a law through the Council's intermediary. monitoring.
"My job is to keep this in the public mind and to create the political will to do it, because none of this happens overnight," he said. "They take years and decades."
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