Editorials

Berkeley Must Wait for Data from SF's Tall Building Study Before Authorizing Any New Highrises

Becky O'Malley
Friday April 20, 2018 - 03:52:00 PM

“San Francisco lives with the certainty that the Big One will come. But the city is also putting up taller and taller buildings clustered closer and closer together because of the state’s severe housing shortage. Now those competing pressures have prompted an anxious rethinking of building regulations. Experts are sending this message: The building code does not protect cities from earthquakes nearly as much as you might think.”

Talk about your scary nut graf!

For those of you who aren’t news junkies, that’s the paragraph that tells you why you should really, really care about finishing reading this story. The article in question where this appeared was a big front page splash in the New York Times, San Francisco’s Big Seismic Gamble, by Thomas Fuller, Anjali Singhvi and Josh Williams .

It was scary in print, and it’s even scarier online with interactive graphics showing all the Very Tall Buildings which have been built on shaky fill subject to liquefaction when the big one hits.

The picture is frightening for San Francisco, and in light of a just-released study from the United States Geologic Service it might be even worse for Berkeley. We need to act now to avoid catastrophe. 

According to the reporters, the right questions have been being asked only since the Millenium Tower started sinking. It’s now about a foot and a half down, 14 inches lower on one side, possibly because it’s next door to the even bigger Salesforce Tower (known to the literati as the Phallus Building). 

How come no one asked before? 

“The developer and city officials knew of the building’s flaws for years, but kept them confidential until 2016, when news leaked to the public,” says the Times report, 

All in all, “At least 100 buildings taller than 240 feet were built in areas that have a ‘very high’ chance of liquefaction.” 

What? Why? 

Well, you’ll have to read the rest of the NYT story for all the gory details, but the short answer is that the builders of the recent boom buildings in San Francisco have paid scant attention to the gradually accumulating evidence of the very real danger that they’ll collapse in the inevitable major earthquake, or at least become totally unusable. Building codes have failed to deal with the new data. 

Another quote: 

 

 

“In light of the problems with the Millennium Tower, there are now increasing calls in California for a reassessment of earthquake risks, much of it focused on strengthening the building code.  

“Right now the code says a structure must be engineered to have a 90 percent chance of avoiding total collapse. But many experts believe that is not enough. 

“' Ten percent of buildings will collapse,' said Lucy Jones, the former leader of natural hazards research at the United States Geological Survey who is leading a campaign to make building codes in California stronger. 'I don’t understand why that’s acceptable.' ” 

 

 

I’m with her. That’s not acceptable. 

 

 

And let’s be clear: this is a piece mostly about San Francisco, but here in Berkeley it could be even worse. We’re sitting plumb on top of the Hayward Fault. 

On Wednesday the United States Geological Survey (USGS) released a terrifying prediction about what this might mean for us. 

From the NPR account of their findings

 

 

“The U.S. Geological Survey released a report Wednesday predicting that there could be dire consequences if a major earthquake hits the second-largest fault in Northern California.  

“The USGS simulated a 7.0 magnitude earthquake on the Hayward Fault, which runs up and down the East Bay Area through Berkeley, Oakland, Hayward, Fremont and Milpitas. The results show that an earthquake of that scale could kill up to 800 people and cause more than $100 billion in total damage.” 

 

 

And yet, and yet, the City of Berkeley’s Downtown Plan, hustled through adoption by the developer-friendly Bates City Council, provides for building at least five of the kind of tall buildings which are now being viewed with alarm in San Francisco, a city which isn’t even athwart the Hayward Fault, which is probably the next to go. 

 

 

Three such structures are already in the pipeline, all approved, like those in San Francisco, without adequate data regarding earthquake risk. Berkeley’s building code is just as inadequate as San Francisco’s. 

From the NYT article : 

 

 

“Newer high rises across California, which are typically built around a concrete core, are designed using computer modeling.  

“This raises concerns among experts such as Thomas H. Heaton, the director of the Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and perhaps the most prominent skeptic of building high rises in earthquake zones. 

“ ‘It’s kind of like getting in a new airplane that’s only been designed on paper but nobody has ever flown in it,’ he said.” 

 

 

Berkeley’s Harold Way project—an 18 story building fronting on Shattuck—was viewed with alarm by local citizens who were aware of the earthquake risk posed by the stream bed with landfill soil known to be under the site and the adjacent Shattuck Hotel. 

 

 

Nevertheless, both the inadequate EIR and the flawed project were enthusiastically accepted by the bespoke councilmembers who were in office when it was approved. Citizen demands for a better seismic study were ignored. 

This project is now stalled because of financing problems, but the outgoing city planning director gave backers an extension on the time limit for commencing construction under the current entitlements, so it could still be built. The entitlement holders are trying to flip the project to another builder. 

In San Francisco, historically, says the Times, “ the objection to high rises was largely cultural and aesthetic — critics deplored ‘Manhattanization’ and said high rises were not in keeping with the ethos of the city.” 

That’s been true in Berkeley too—perhaps our critical focus on culture and aesthetics, both debatable topics, distracted attention from the inadequate engineering analyses which should have been fact-based but weren’t. 

The “hotel” (plus luxury apartments) development planned for a corner on Shattuck now occupied by the Bank of America seems to be moving toward commencement. It has faced little or no civic opposition on cultural or aesthetic grounds, and again seismic risks were minimized. 

A third big building is now in the approval process, another 18 story luxury apartment development chock-a-block with the Harold Way behemoth and the Shattuck Hotel. This one still needs to come back to the Zoning Adjustment Board for final approval, so this is a good time for city officials both elected and employed to take a fresh look at newly recognized data about both construction standards and earthquake risk before rubber-stamping it. 

After the Millenium Tower started sinking, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee belatedly commissioned an independent safety investigation, the Tall Buildings Study, which will for the first time create a detailed database of that city’s high rises which can be studied for the benefit of other cities. 

From the Times: 

“ Ayse Hortacsu, the structural engineer who is leading the study, has deployed Stanford graduate students to pore over blueprints and records at the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection. 

“It would have been great to do this before this building boom in San Francisco,” Ms. Hortacsu said. “But we are going to seize the moment and make the best out of it.” 

In light of this new study, the Berkeley City Council should immediately rethink the provision in the Downtown Plan that authorizes the construction of up to five high rises there. 

The five extra-tall buildings are optional under Berkeley’s Downtown Plan, not mandatory. And even shorter buildings, six stories and above of all-concrete construction, might be riskier than previously considered. 

Berkeley should seize this moment before our own planned tall building boom takes off to figure out what we should be doing. 

It’s still possible for us to avoid the highrise tsuris that San Francisco is now experiencing, and the even worse grief that will accompany the big quake if we have collapsing buildings downtown. 

Mayor Arreguin and his Berkeley City Council majority, who after all were elected with the support of development doubters, should immediately enact a moratorium on approving tall buildings, at least until San Francisco’s Tall Building Study has been completed. 

Berkeley doesn’t need any more big luxury apartment buildings, not if they come with the risks the Times article describes so vividly.