Is to look at ways to even if the buildings, we dont go for higher performance of the building per se, what can we do to facilitate through programs, reducing the impeding factor, and the ultimate goal, might not be able to read all the numbers but in the report, being able to reduce those functional recovery times, not changing anything in the building but impeding factors, beyond that is the question of enforcing higher performance standards beyond the basic California Building code forgiven that San Francisco has a lot of Tall Buildings in close proximity that serve important functions both for office and for residential. So a quick kind of run through that, appreciate your attention, i think we will move on now to probably the first panel discussion. Thank you. [applause] ok. Our next panel is a discussion on strengthening building performance. I will be your, the facilitator for this paneling. With us, my first guest is john hooper, who is with the applied technology council, who has been another gentleman who has been right with us from the very beginning, thinking about everything on Tall Buildings. We have angus mccarthy, the president of the building inspection commission. We have Mary Ellen Carroll, the director of the department of Emergency Management, and joel coppel, with the planning commission. Ok. So, im going to ask a very important question and we are just going to go straight down the line, and lets just get straight to it. What do you think is the most important task we can do to strengthen building performance . Now im on. Two areas we could do. I cant do just one. The first one is we could improve the repair time numbers that he showed on the screen earlier, changing how we design Tall Building, affect that by reducing drips and things like that, one piece. But i think the larger effort could be on those impeding factors to reduce that time, where the majority of the down time comes from. Improving the program and things of that nature will facilitate quicker recovery times and getting back in the building. So for me, i think because we at d. M. Are responsible for the Safety Assessment program and the coordination and resourcing for that, my recommendation would be to expand borp as much as we can, well learn more about that, in the panel later on. To be able to accelerate reentry and assessment of your buildings, i am a huge advocate for it. On behalf of the Planning Department staff, director, and president melgar, thank everyone for showing up today and let you know that we are extremely concerned with public safety, the safety of our buildings, all over the city especially downtown, and our commission is deeply committed to maintaining the integrity of our built environment. Obviously i echo the statements made here, i just want to point out we have commissioner clinch here for serious academic questions you may have, he sits on our engineer and commissioner walker who sits at the tenants. So, thank you for coming here this morning and seeing everybody here this morning. I sit on the builder seat, so we have a very lot of round table discussions, particularly in the building community. With escalating costs and as you know, builders, developers, we complain a lot how are we going to build these things and so on. But one thing as somebody who was in the 1989 earthquake, remembers it very clearly, the aftermath and the damage that was done, so, educating the new Development Community on how important it is to come up with really strong policies and how we build our Tall Buildings is probably the most important thing we can do over the next couple of years. Excellent. And so we saw a presentation by professor deerline. Is there anything that really stands out that we should focus on immediately and then maybe in the longterm, and ill just let anyone jump out. The building stock of Tall Buildings and the new building design, separate buckets for me. How do we look at the ones that professor deerline mentioned about the cohorts of buildings from the early 1970s to the 1980s to what we do today, and i can they should be looked at and recommendations are included for both, and its hard to decipher, because we can improve the New Buildings incrementally, a small percentage of what we see in the community, but the existing buildings are out there, and vulnerable buildings were mentioned that should have a look see and see if we cant improve their performance as well. And so todays, and having everyone here today is very important. Existing buildings, a lot we dont know about, and so maybe angus with building inspection and planning, joel, think about what would we have to do to try and, from a city standpoint with New Buildings its easy, we can just set new regulations and build them according to those Building Codes. But walk through some of the process of what we have to go through with existing buildings. Well, i think a lot has happened, the department, d. P. I. Is very committed to safety, thats our primary concern, and 1982 and 1983, back to 2008 was introduced, i think that kind of sent out a strong message, we have been on this quite a while. Lately, s80 and for those geo tech, geo tech people in the audience is a big ask of the Development Community, but we are asking for two forms of geo tech analysis on buildings and so on. So, we are moving as fast as we can. Its kind of on a monthly basis, we seem to come up with new policy and procedures that would be good, obviously it takes time to implement them, but the department of building inspection is doing everything it can to keep on top of changes and involvement on a regular basis, particularly when it comes to Tall Buildings. As far as planning is concerned, we have a pipeline of upcoming Tall Buildings. Recently approving Tall Buildings and whether its a commercial or residential or hotel use we take that into consideration just because there might be different safety requirements, not just as the structure of the building need to be built directly, but also the, the systems within the building need to notify people if there is an accident and coming from we always work handinhand with the Fire Department for our life safety inspections with extra signage, egress routes and emergency lighting to make sure the buildings are safe to be in habited and safe to stand. And mary ellen, in thinking about this from your head of the department of Emergency Management, kind of think about, we, if we have this earthquake, what happens with our down time, down time if the building does not get back up online in a time period, and how does that affect our recovery . I think one of my favorite recommendations in the report, even though one of the most daunting, is the downtown recovery report, or study. That we need to do. And what i think about is our downtown has grown and diversified so much recently, its not just financial and commercial. We have residential, we have more hotels, and so its so critical that we look at all of these issues about the performance and then what we are going to do both kind of in the immediate aftermath and then how we recover. Some buildings may perform well, but are not going to be accessible because buildings around them have not performed well. And so i think that the the other thing is that we have the time frame for potentially getting buildings back online, but i think we need to look a little bit deeper into the, whether those are real or not depending on debris removal that we have to do, lifelines restoration, theres a lot of sort of competing and interdependent factors that go into our recovery. So, this is incredibly important and im not the engineer or the technical person, but we all need to Work Together to make sure that our assessments and our planning are interdependent, that we are looking at the enter dependensies, and we are doing just that. Thank you. And while im asking questions up here, i would ask you to start writing questions to pass forward so you can ask the panel as soon as we finish here with our conversation. And theres a gentleman in the back, bill barnes, and they will pass out cards if you are interested in asking questions of this panel. Other areas that we have been talking about, we have been talking a lot about, especially in downtown San Francisco, is the Geo Technical. We have a lot of Structural Engineers and i think we have that down. We realized in the last couple years the geo tech, the foundation, we live in a city that has different types of soils, just within a few block radius. I know angus you talked about the administrative and the sheets, but maybe talk more about what it means and how we think it through Going Forward and the different processes as a city. That was one of the recommendations that professor deerline showed. The process for improving how we do foundation and Geo Technical engineering is underway. Taken that under their wing, and the first draft is available and scrutinized by the full Geo Technical community, to help raise the bar, if you will, of how Geo Technical engineering is done, to make sure we are well founded in the Geo Technical area here, it can vary greatly on the same city block. And hopefully that will be done and the future of foundation and Geo Technical engineering will be improved by that effort. Any other thoughts about that . Just to conclude, the department is doing very, very good work in that area, and i see my son there, interned here, and ever a job to go after in college is Geo Technical if you move to San Francisco. The biggest challenge i see, we dont have a bigger pool of Geo Technical. Its a real challenge, as somebody who built the first building in south america in the late 1980s, i learned about the Geo Technical and the soft, to create a foundation thats going to work in very difficult. And here we are with the Tall Buildings again and asking the same from the community. I think they are very, very huge part of us getting this whole thing right, and we need more Geo Technical engineers, no question about it. The development world, we have a very small pool to go to, and thats something i think is another part of this equation i would love to see more increase in those professional, thank you. I wanted to just take a second to thank mayor breed and the leadership shes been providing. We have been recently hearing presentations, there are Climate Change issues to make the buildings more Energy Efficient downtown, but at least having the discussions on a public level to help us Gain Knowledge and know more for the future. Excellent. So, some of the questions ive gotten from the audience and we can talk about is where is the u. S. Geological survey in this conversation, and what is being done about the continued areas mission bay, embarcadero. U. S. Geological survey, i know the office of resilience and Capital Planning has regular conversations with them, and part of our conversation, not just here on Tall Buildings, but in the earthquake safety implementation program, and we are very much involved in our retrofit conversations and our we are working with them on a regular basis. As for like our continued areas of liquifaction, downtown is now growing and people now consider mission bay downtown, and so i just, even watching the warriors games, the last game in oakland and moving to downtown San Francisco, im like thats not downtown, thats mission bay. But they now said over and over the last couple of weeks. So, we have had conversations, i know mary ellen was the first one to bring this up. I dont know if you want to have thoughts how we take this work. Do we focus right now, scale it around, scale it to other neighborhoods, what are your thoughts around this . Liquifaction or in general. Both. We have done a lot of great work in planning around our response. The immediate response. But really looking at a recovery discussion and im so happy to say that we are just on the precipice of kicking that off. Also because that discussion goes well beyond the city. We have, and thats why you are all here. We are only 30,000 strong, and we have really got to get everybody involved in this conversation. We want to understand what you need to know from us, what your assumptions and expectations are. It will it will fire us and force us to really dig into, more into some of these discussions. For me, i think the issue of lifelines, and looking at lori johnson and other people here who have done a lot of work on this, really our ability to get in, back into the city and to work is so critical, and so moving through the steps of response and recovery, putting these in some sort of order, because as i mentioned before, you cant do building assessments if you cant get through the streets necessarily, although drones are an option. There are some options. But you cant house hundreds of engineers, Geo Technical, civil or structural if you dont have a place for them to stay and power and water. So, so i think this discussion, its global and we have to look at each section of our city, both as a whole, but separately also. So, those are the things that im thinking about, and really looking forward to that i think we are going to make a lot of progress in this Recovery Plan on. Recently this question came in and we talked about it, there was a recent New York Times article about the use of base isolator, which San Francisco city hall is on base isolators. And japan uses them a lot more, and the New York Times articles that california is not using them as much and should San Francisco be looking into that approach, too. I like to think, since San Francisco city hall is on base eye isolators we are thinking about it here in the city of st. Francis. Any thoughts from the panel . A nice job painting what the issues are, and most engineers on a project will offer that as an option to the owners. Its not all always taken mainly because of the challenge and the cost associated with them, and so thats the impediment here on the west coast thats different than we see in japan, uses it a lot more. Tall building inventory, isolators are not as effective because of the nature of how those buildings perform naturally. Its a better fit for buildings like this that are, you know, robust and strong and stiff, and so thats a better play for that. But certainly we could do more, especially for those buildings that want to be essential facility basis, like hospitals and Emergency Operations centers, etc. , where they are best implemented and get the performance we really need out of those structures. I have some good questions here about even if the Tall Buildings survive, and goes to the interdependency issues, and pointing to lori johnson who did the study, what about the streets. What about the infrastructure around the streets. What about even if my office is open, will i have daycare, what is all the recovery issues, and so we have a lot of thoughts about that. Mary ellen, you want to jump in, angus, all of you, i think a good one to think about how we are all interdependent upon each other, our streets, our roads, the economic recovery, i cant get to work if the train system is down, i cant get to work if i have no place to send my kids and family. So from the beginning, one of the things i think about especially downtown, getting people out of dodge, right . So if it happens during the week and we have hundreds and thousands of visitors and people that work here who need to get across the day or on a plane and to their family, their homes, thats sort of the initial, and thats a huge lift right there. Again, the conversation has to be multidisciplinary. This Tall Building study i think is so unique and innovative, its really diving into the complex technical issues that is pushing these other questions. And again, we have a number of different initiatives, we have our Emergency Response initiative that responses and plans that the department of public d. M. Is responsible for. Like a 400page debris removal plan but then we have life lines and now this, and the connection that i feel that has been missing has been to the broader community, to our residents, to our businesses, to really bring you all into this discussion. We are all going to be affected. We want to keep, we want you to stay in San Francisco or if you have to leave, we want to bring you back as quickly as possible and the late mayor ed lee rings in my head all the time. A year and a half shortly before he passed away we were in a meeting and said this is my legacy, and it is, its all of ours to come together and we are finally there. At such a good time. So, the beginning of discussions and the real work thats going to bring us together to find the solutions we need. And thank you for mentioning the late mayor ed lee. 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