Disaster Highlights 2007 0709 v2

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Housing and the Hayward Fault Mayors' Meeting with State Officials Friday - June 22, 2007 - Oakland City Hall The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG), in conjunction with the cities of Albany, Berkeley, EI Cerrito, Oakland, San Leandro, and others, is concerned that the Bay Area has the potential to be the next New Orleans mega-disaster. We are particularly concerned about the Hayward fault. Scientists have determined that this fault ruptures an average of once every 140 years. The last of these great earthquakes was 139 years ago. We are at risk. Researchers have shown that over 50% of all damage in disasters occurs either to or inside housing. Damaged housing takes years - ifnot decades - to rebuild as shown by the Kobe earthquake and Hurricane Katrina. For example, 25% of Kobe's housing has still not been rebuilt - and that earthquake was 12 years ago. Several strategies to mitigate housing damage through seismic retrofitting are available to individual cities and counties. However, we believe that there are five key elements of this problem that need State attention. In particular, while the number of home retrofits has been increasing, the percentage of these that have been done properly is still relatively low. In addition, few soft-story multifamily residential buildings have been retrofitted. These soft-story buildings are more vulnerable than single-family homes and will be responsible for most of the uninhabitable housing in future earthquakes. KEY ISSUES 1. CEA Soverehm Immunity - The California Earthquake Authority (CEA) was established by the legislature following the Northridge earthquake because the residential insurance companies were unwilling to offer homeowner insurance in California because oftheir losses. As a quasi-public- private entity, the CEA does not have sovereign immunity. While the CEA is required to spend millions on mitigation, much of this money remains in a special fund because the agency legal staff is concerned that any substantive projects related to structural mitigation would expose the agency to potential lawsuits following an earthquake. Yet these projects are precisely what are needed. Next steps - Draft legislation to give the CEA sovereign immunity for these mitigation activities and/or place the mitigation dollars in a separate subsidiary organization of the CEA with liability exposure being limited to the subsidiary. 2. Permit Inspections - Many seismic retrofits are being conducted without building permits. Some have conjectured that this is because homeowners are concerned about inspectors finding other problems with their older homes. ABAG staff has talked with both retrofit contractors and city building officials about this issue. This is not a major issue in most cities because the inspectors have been told to not go looking for problems, and access to the crawl space is typically from the outside, so the inspector does not even go inside the home. One possible explanation is that homeowners may "assume" aggressive inspections will be an issue before they talk to a contractor about obtaining a permit. It may also be created as a false problem by contractors who do not want their work inspected. Next steps - One possible solution may be a State law that a seismic retrofit permit inspection does not trigger an inspection for other building issues, except for obvious life safety issues. This proposed law may be a problem for CALBO (the California Building Officials organization) unless it 1