-Good evening, nerds...
[laughter]
Disaster preppers
and civic minded doom enthusiasts.
I hope you've enjoyed our
NiNisqually damage
slide show.
The wispy bangs, the noticeable
lack of cell phones, and the haunting realization
that 2001 was 25 years ago.
A quick show of hands:
How many of you were here
during the Nisqually earthquake?
All right, we got a lot of you.
That's great.
And how many of you have read The New Yorker article,
“The Really Big One”?
Keep your hand up.
If you created a go bag afterwards.
Shame on all of you.
[laughter]
And I just for for myself.
How many of you are here
because I would notice if you weren't?
[laughter]
Thanks, guys.
Thank you.
So when you talk to the public
about earthquakes, people
tend to fall into five different camps:
they were all doomed crowd;
the not in my lifetime crowd;
the I've already built a bunker crowd;
the I survived the last one, and it was fine;
or my personal favorite, we have earthquakes here?
We all love to watch disaster movies.
Personally, ever since “Dante's Peak,”
I have always wanted to snorkel on my car.
I put “Twister” on any time
the windstorm is forecast.
We all love to look at destruction.
Any kind of disaster,
we are scrolling on our phones, right?
Looking at photos of collapsed buildings.
We stare at the wreckage because it's dramatic.
But earthquake destruction isn't content.
It's consequences.
So I'm going to gently spew some facts at you.
First, the earthquake will not kill us all.
But if we don't prepare
the disruption to housing, to small businesses,
and to our regional economy will echo for decades.
Second, the geologic record, or Mother
Nature's receipts,
tells us
that earthquakes have happened here before,
and they will continue to happen again.
And this is not a government scare tactic, as I have
seen in the comments on some local news stations.
This is facts.
The Juan de Fuca plate is subducting
under the North American plate
at the same rate that your fingernails grow.
That energy is accumulating
and has to release at some point.
Third, surviving the last earthquake
tells you virtually nothing about surviving
the next one.
If your car survives a fender bender,
that doesn't make it immortal,
it just means that physics
was feeling generous that day.
We cannot predict
when an earthquake will happen,
but we can predict
the performance of buildings in an earthquake.
The devastation
that you see in disaster movies is not our destiny,
it's policy choices, engineering decisions
and investments or the lack of it.
And that is why we're here tonight.
So before we go further,
I want to acknowledge a few things.
First, the artwork that you see around the room
is from Ryan Mokenkamp's “Fear of Earthquakes” series
and I think his artwork captures that like low-grade
anxiety that we all have about living
in earthquake country
and the way that that fear of the big one
lives in the background.
What if we could remove
that fear? In the field of emergency management,
this is called mitigation.
That word is going to come up a few times tonight.
Mitigation.
Reducing or eliminating things that could
cause death damage or destruction.
The ultimate...
the ultimate win in a disaster is anticlimactic
survival, right? There's no movie deal.
We just all go to work the next day.
The recent flooding that impacted the state
had some excellent mitigation successes.
The town of Mount Vernon had previously invested over
$30 million in a floodwall that protected
the downtown, despite record levels of flooding.
Mitigation works.
It saves lives and protects our economy.
[firetruck siren blares]
I asked them to be there at this time.
So what deaths, damage and destruction
can we mitigate in an earthquake?
In a moment, I'm going to share with you
a roughly three-minute video that was produced
by Nate Wessler, who is standing in the back.
He's a documentary filmmaker
working on an earthquake
documentary about earthquakes and anxiety.
And this video was a call
to action video for our
URM retrofit campaign.
And I want you to repeat that after me.
URM.
-URM [crowd says in unison]
-You are magnificent.
Thank you.
So this video is going to
communicate this far better than I would be able to.
So we're just going to watch this video.
-The state of Washington really is earthquake prone.
Over the next 50 years,
there's likely to be a damaging earthquake.
It's easy
to get wrapped up in the notion that
when an earthquake happens, it will just
flatten everything.
And that's patently not true.
-It is not like, “Oh, what can we do?”
There are so many things that we can do.
-Especially dangerous
are older structures made up brick or stone.
We call them unreinforced masonry buildings: URM.
-Most of the
time they collapse either fully or partially.
You expect them to collapse
like that is the expectation.
-The downtown section of Santa Cruz
is basically gone.
All the old and brick
unreinforced buildings have collapsed.
-During an earthquake,
the exterior walls really start
to pull away and separate from the floors
and then they collapse away from the building and lead
to collapse of the building itself.
-URMs are dangerous to anyone
using adjacent buildings
or people walking in the streets
or even cars in the roadways.
-A disproportionate amount of the damage
in Christchurch came from URMs.
The entire downtown area of Christchurch
was shut for the best part of two years.
The societal and economic impact of this
is profound.
[building shaking]
-Bricks crashed out onto the sidewalks,
missing people by a few feet...
-It’s very, very lucky...
-People here
say it's a miracle no one was walking underneath.
-We are lucky because with all
the historic buildings in this region
that the damage could have been much worse.
-Very fortunate...
-Nothing close to what it could have been
with the earthquake of this magnitude.
-We're very fortunate.
We're very lucky... -And fortunate
because the earthquake
was as deep... -It has been a very hectic day,
but it also could have been much worse.
♪♪
-When an earthquake happens,
there's parts of Seattle
that will completely be devastated.
And those parts of the city are primarily populated
by people of color.
And this is a historical thing,
communities were forced to live in these areas
that are more prone to disaster.
♪♪
-Statewide,
we estimate there are up to 33,000
unreinforced masonry buildings.
And these are not just on the west side of the state,
but the east side of the state
that also has a seismic hazard.
-It's not just a Seattle issue.
It's not just a Tacoma issue.
It's an Washington state issue.
-Retrofitting URMs
is one of the most
important things we can do because it will save lives.
-The benefit is protecting the general public.
It can be people that can be walking by
a building on the sidewalk.
-They're primarily
concentrated in old downtowns
and charming historic neighborhoods.
-All these buildings end up having the character
of their downtown,
of their city,
and that's why they're important
historic places that we want to preserve.
-We cannot predict earthquakes,
but we can predict the performance of URMs
in an earthquake.
-We know these buildings are vulnerable.
We know how to design retrofits to
these buildings.
-There's a big need there for these buildings
to be brought up to modern
standards of earthquake safety.
-Turkey, over 50,000 people died.
We're facing something very similar.
And we have been very lucky, very lucky here
that we haven't had a large earthquake
and we will have one. We don't know when,
but we've been very lucky so far.
So this is our time window to do something about it.
♪♪
-That video was the heart
of our Fix the Bricks campaign,
which was an effort
to raise awareness of both URM vulnerability
as well as the probability of earthquakes in our area,
as well as to advance
House Bill 1810 at the state level.
And this was legislation
that was designed to create financial tools for
URM owners to afford these life saving retrofits.
And we were asking
by the cut off date for $250,000,
and that bill did not pass this session.
This was frustrating and incredibly disappointing.
But this campaign will continue because
policy changes rarely happen in a straight line.
Since 2001, Seattle
has made some real progress in earthquake safety.
But we're not done.
And the work ahead requires coalition building
investment and public will.
Tonight's panel of speakers is designed
to inspire action and not fatalism.
You're going to hear from Dr.
Harold Tobin
with the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.
He's the guy that's on the news
any time there's an earthquake and I
want you to all think of him
tonight as the Neil deGrasse Tyson of earthquakes.
We will then hear from Jon Siu and Jim Mullen.
Tonight,
they are the collective ghosts of earthquakes past,
and they will reflect on the city's emergency response
during the near Nisqually earthquake.
Then you will hear from Kyle Steuck.
For this evening, he is the ghost of
Earthquake Future, who will walk us through
what's at stake if we don't retrofit.
And then you will hear from me, Amanda Hertzfeld,
the self-proclaimed Leslie Knope of Earthquakes.
And I will talk about the city's efforts
to fix the bricks and where we're headed next.
We'll close with a Q&A panel.
I will sit up here.
There are microphones here.
If you don't want to speak or if we don't get to your
questions, there is a little
fishbowl that you can write a question on
and put your contact info and we'll follow up.
So to kick us off tonight,
we are honored to hear from Deputy Mayor Brian Surratt.
He is going to share with us his Nisqually experience
and speak to the city's renewed commitment
for making Seattle safer in an earthquake.
[applause]
-Good evening, everyone.
First, I want to acknowledge my
my colleague, councilmember Bob Kettle. Stand up, stand up!
Stand up, Bob. Wave, wave.
He is your councilmember, this district here.
So this may...I only I got to meet Councilmember
Kettle
only for the first time last month
and it's been a great working partnership
and so it's always great to see you, Councilmember.
I want to thank Amanda for organizing
this this, this commemoration.
And and and commemoration is such a funny word
because it's obviously it's acknowledging the past.
But this room is full of folks who
are not only prepared, but prepared to act.
And so so I appreciate being a part of this,
this conversation.
I also want to also acknowledge
my long time friend, Tina Bika.
And please
give Tina a round of applause like you talk about
someone who has been a advocate for this community
for decades
on decades.
I first met Tina,
and this is part of my Nisqually story.
I've met Tina
I think first, back in 2000 and 2001,
when I was working in the South Downtown
Foundation in Pioneer Square, and and boy, did
Tina have a lot to say about how how the neighborhood
should be cared for.
And so it's been
we joked that
I haven't seen Tina in years
and I've seen more of these past couple of weeks
and then the last last ten.
And so great to see you again, Tina.
25 years ago,
the Nisqually shook Seattle,
changing how we think about safety and preparedness.
And it certainly changed
how I think about safety and preparedness.
And so give you a little context.
So I moved to Seattle in the summer of 1998,
22 years old, from Oklahoma.
I had no idea what an earthquake was.
I grew up in Tornado Alley.
And so there are, there are earthquakes
down in Oklahoma because of fracking.
But that's a whole nother whole nother thing.
But I was working in Pioneer Square,
right on the Occidental and Jackson,
an upper floor and and in a beautiful building
and the earthquake hit and
I did exactly what you were not supposed to do.
You know, first I was looking for a bathtub,
you know, because that's what you did
in Oklahoma. I was like, wait a minute.
This is not tornado. It’s an earthquake.
Right. But I went outside.
I ran outside and I was so lucky that I did not
get hit
with falling bricks; and just chaos all around.
And, you know, as as the video suggests,
you know, and and, you know, Dr.
Tobin is like, we were lucky.
We were lucky then.
And, you know, luck is not a plan.
Hope is not a plan. And so
it changed fundamentally how
I think about this place.
You know, the reason why this place is so dynamic
and beautiful is because of how dynamic and
and volatile our geology has been
over the millions of years.
And so one other side side note, so my
my daughters are first year at U Dub
and she gets on campus in September
and the first thing she texted me was like, “Dad,
is Suzzallo Library closed?
What's going on here?
What's going on here?” I’m like, “What are you
what are you talking about?”
It's like, you know, because, you know,
everyone loves that majestic library.
And I go online and see what was up. They’re
doing some renovations to make sure that the
those beautiful bricks in
that facade is protected during the earthquake.
And so I had to
explain to her, like, “Look, you'll be inconvenienced
for a couple of years,
but this is really, really important work.
And so just go inside the library and study.” So...
But moving forward is, you know, we recognize that
that earthquake damaged buildings and the impacts
extend beyond just cracked walls and
and what's on the outside.
Families are displaced small businesses are impacted.
Neighborhoods lose stability
and the people hit hardest are those
with the least access to resources and power.
Those of whom
recover...who recover is incredibly difficult.
Seattle has taken important steps
to help reduce its
vulnerability to earthquakes,
including the
removal of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which was a serious
collapse hazard.
We were lucky with the viaduct too.
I, I remember watching the World Series.
I can't remember what year
was in the late ‘80s in San Francisco.
And we saw the double decker bridges,
you know, again, like what? What is happening?
This is only only in the movies.
But again, another moment of luck for us.
But we also recognize that earthquakes don't
stop at these arbitrary city boundaries.
That's why we're working with a statewide coalition
to make sure that there's
good partnerships and shared investment
so we can make earthquake
retrofits more affordable and viable economically.
We can be ready for the next earthquake.
The City of Seattle today
recognizes February 28th, 2026, as Nisqually
Earthquake Commemoration Day.
This is more than a remembrance.
It's a renewed commitment to protecting lives,
strengthening, strengthening our neighborhoods,
and identifying pathways for partnerships
across the state, the nation,
and to invest in those
much needed seismic retrofits.
I'm proud of our city's leadership.
I'm committed to building on it.
And because safety should never depend
on your zip code or the age of your building.
So on that, I want to again thank you, Amanda,
and the rest of you all for being here
and helping this entire community prepare and
and be ready for what will happen.
And I can't think of a better city,
a better group of leaders to be with.
Thank you.
-Thank you...very much.
Up next is Dr.
Harold Tobin
with the PNSN. He's the director.
It's the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network.
You may have seen him recently with the Seahawks
and the Beast quake and recording,
making seismic hazards cool.
Harold's work.
I Googled him beforehand.
I've known Harold for years,
but his research is focused on how faults work
and the conditions inside them
that lead to earthquakes.
This man knows everything about earthquakes.
I was serious
about the Neil deGrasse Tyson of earthquakes.
He's also a professor, and I tried to reach him
this summer to chat with him and
his colleagues as,
Harold's out helicoptering around the Olympic Peninsula
right now, installing seismometers.
This dude has the coolest job ever.
So with that, I'm
going to let Harold come up and talk about
why Nisqually happened.
[applause]
-Yeah, thanks.
That was a lot of puffing up, I think.
But I do get to do some interesting things.
But actually, what I was really interested
in was when Amanda
just now asked people to raise their hands
if they were here during Nisqually
and I looked around the room and I
it was between a quarter and a third
of the people in the room.
Definitely felt like less than half.
And I'm looking around the room,
and I don't think it's
because you're
you're too young to remember that
it's quality earthquake in general, maybe some people.
So it's a sign. And you know and cities have turnover
and Seattle's a dynamic place
and so
and I teach undergrads at U-Dub and I teach a 100
level class: natural hazards and disasters.
I hope
your daughter will sign up for that class next autumn.
Yeah.
And you know, if you're teaching 18
to 19 year olds, it's pretty humbling, right?
They were born years after Nisqually.
The ones who were in my class
this fall and talking to them about
it is like talking to me about something
that happened in the Eisenhower
administration, you know, so, so.
So we have to recognize
that people in our area have not experienced strong
shaking in an earthquake and really have no...
no experience of earthquakes.
And now I just remembered
that I should probably put some slides on the screen.
So I want to talk just a little bit
about the earthquake hazard itself
and a little bit of perspective on
Nisqually. I won't dwell on things
that I think people in the room know
and you'll keep me honest on time, right?
Okay, great.
So, well, first of all, we know February 28th, 2001,
kind of mid-morning timeframe.
Somebody said the other day it was the first time
we've had a big earthquake in our region
or it really in the U.S. in modern times
that happened during school hours.
So an interesting feature of that earthquake.
The magnitude was 6.8.
It's a large earthquake.
It's a significant event,
but it has some special characteristics
that I'm going to tell you a little bit about,
that in some ways made it less bad
than it could otherwise be for the magnitude given.
But also in different ways makes it an especially
challenging type of event.
You can see a map over there.
That's what we call a shake map.
That's just
I can't see it
very well
from this angle,
and I really can't see this
pointer, which maybe is not very bright,
but the colors on the map, on the far right, you know,
the one on the left is just showing
where the epicenter is located.
Of course, northeast of Olympia
there, technically underneath Anderson Island
and in the kind of near Nisqually Delta region.
But the shaking really affected
the entire region from essentially Portland
all the way up to at least Everett
or so. The strongest shaking definitely between
Chehalis and Seattle and it's variable. And Centralia.
Did I say Chehalis? Anyway, somewhere in that region.
And we know that big earthquakes
have really variable shaking that depends a lot
on the ground conditions in any particular place.
One earthquake has one magnitude,
but the shaking in any given location is is different.
And we call that intensity.
And the colors on the map
are a map of earthquake shaking intensity,
which got up to
in the range of, you know, very strong shaking.
And that's commensurate with the kind of damage
that we saw. Not comprehensive damage.
We didn't see
total building collapse of many structures,
but we saw a lot of significant damage
and some real danger. Amazingly, no loss of life.
I mean, people there was a medical related
loss of life,
a heart attack during the earthquake,
but nobody died as a result
of their injuries in the earthquake.
I think that's more than just a minor miracle.
It's a major miracle.
Strong shaking of, you know, 50 seconds or so.
I wasn't here. At that time
I lived in New Mexico.
I taught at a place called New Mexico Tech.
So I was aware of this earthquake because of my
my field.
But but I was in Santa Cruz in 1989
and on the campus of UC Santa Cruz,
where I had started graduate school
to study this kind of stuff;
three weeks before the Loma Prieta
earthquake that was just alluded to
and I was right outside our building.
It was a
you know, a typical college campus brutalist building,
like big concrete structure
with these big glass windows
that were vibrating like crazy.
I turned to run away from the building,
couldn't run, stumbled, fell down.
That's how strong the shaking was.
There were a bunch of Redwood trees
in the parking lot right next to me.
And my most vivid memory of that earthquake
is watching the Redwood trees
shaking so hard
that their tops were snapping off
and falling like Christmas trees to the ground.
A whole bunch of them, dozens of them.
And that's
that's a known effect of very strong shaking
only in earthquakes of like magnitude
seven and above kind of thing.
So the shaking was probably not dissimilar
to what people experienced
here, maybe a little a little more violent,
closer to what was like in an Olympia.
But one of the features of this
earthquake is that it was quite deep for for for
compared to a lot of other earthquakes
compared to almost all California
earthquakes, at 35 miles deep.
That means that the source of the earthquake,
the actual fault break is down there.
We call that the hypocenter,
which is directly underneath the epicenter.
Right? Hypo, epi...
But like like
like in your skin, hypodermic and epidermic.
And so the shaking spreads from that point.
And what that means
for this earthquake is that the seismic waves
came up and reached the ground
and they're spreading
as kind of like a sphere,
like a bubble coming out of the earthquake.
And because it was deep, that meant, first of all,
the shaking wasn't as bad as it could have been,
because everybody
was at least 35 miles
from the source of the earthquake.
No one was closer than that
because it was that far down on the ground.
But also it sort of hits
the surface of the earth at almost the same time
everywhere. You can imagine if the location was shallow,
then it's spreading from there.
But here it's spreading from below
and kind of hits us all in the region
at close to the same time.
So the shaking in Seattle came only a little bit later
than in, let's say in Olympia,
maybe ten or 12 seconds.
And we'll see why that's important
a little later in my presentation here.
It meant the shaking wasn't
as bad as it might otherwise be.
Again, for that size event.
Now, I can't not talk about the Seahawks. Right?
And I don't know how many of you saw it,
but we did a kind of a reprise
of the Beast quake type of stuff during the playoff games.
Made a lot of hay out of Rashid Shaheed
and some other good things for us.
It's unbelievable
amount of public engagement. I mean, millions of views
on our posts instead of,
you know, a few hundred
or a few thousand, which we were more used to.
There's the famous Beast quake event.
And, you know,
the seismogram that appeared
from the station that we have across the street.
It's called Katie
K, it's called that because its Kingdome Station.
No Kingdome, but still the station lives on.
But, you know,
one person formerly in my job
recognized that this was kind of cool
and got in touch with The Seattle Times.
And the rest is kind of history for the Beast quake.
But just want to give you a little perspective
on the Beast quake and all the shaking,
which as you hopefully know, is
the shaking
not caused by
Marshawn Lynch himself, although he's
quite a seismic source, I'm sure.
But actually the shaking by the crowd, 68,000
people in the stands
getting fired up, jumping up and down, high fiving.
It's not noise. It's shaking. Okay.
We don't measure the decibels.
We measure the ground shaking.
But there's the Beast quake compared to the Nisqually
on a sort of apples to apples comparison,
the black line is the beast. Quake's shaking.
Okay, the green line is then the Nisqually shaking.
And that's for a station in Seattle.
So the earthquake actually started
from a long ways, way down by Olympia.
So they're completely different level of events.
120 times stronger shaking than a thing
that was right across the street
going on with that with the Beast quake event.
But don't take anything away from Marshawn,
you know, or the Seahawks.
But but the difference
between real earthquakes and this stuff is
is publicity versus real hazard.
Okay.
So of course, we know a
lot about the effects and I won't dwell on them.
And some of the other folks talking about the impacts.
Will.
I do want to just highlight that, you know, we know
about structural damage and some of the pictures
we just saw of the
of the horrendous structural damage
to URMs and other things.
It also triggered
a number of secondary hazard effects like landslides,
certainly like liquefaction, which maybe you've heard
about strong effects in the Port of Seattle
and in Boeing field, places where the ground, you know,
you just can't point with this.
And I'm very used to pointing.
So that's okay.
And so on.
That's the that's the interior
of the air traffic control tower at Sea-Tac.
Okay.
That's the nonstructural hazards.
Think about it.
Wherever you are in an earthquake,
what is going to fly around and fall on you or hit you?
And that's one of the things you can take
as a personal step to prepare yourself
in your immediate environments
for earthquakes. Think about your office.
Is that bookshelf fixed to the wall?
Maybe. Probably not.
Have it in at home, you know.
Do you keep heavy objects,
art pieces on the wall above your bed?
Maybe not the best place for them, things like that,
because you don't want to be sitting
in the middle of this jumble.
And maybe some of you were.
And of course, we already had a mention of,
you know, the vulnerability of the Alaskan Way Viaduct.
It made it through the earthquake
a little stronger,
shaking a little longer shaking,
and it could potentially have
actually come down catastrophically
like the 880 freeway
in Oakland, California did in 1989.
And, you know, we all know the story of that.
And I think we also all know that and recognize that
maybe something that's good for earthquake
resilience also is good for our city,
or at least
I personally think the waterfront's
a lot nicer place than it used to be.
So, you know, we're a lot of things are happening
and retrofit projects are going on
and URMs are getting retrofitted.
Although Amanda just told me
that there's a lot less done than I realized, I think
since 2001 of the thousand or so URM buildings
we have that need it.
So we have a really long way to go, as you all know.
And I'll let other people talk more about that.
Let me talk a little bit about the seismic hazard.
This is the national seismic
hazard model created by the U.S.
Geological Survey team of many experts
put this together and periodically update it.
And the colors are just the chance of damaging shaking
over a period of time over the next hundred years.
I'll also talk about things
stated over the next 50 years.
And you can see, you know,
where the earthquake hazards are concentrated.
Somebody can ask me about the big bull's eye
in the middle of the country if you want to later.
But of course, along the San Andreas
and the system in California.
And then we have a bull's eye
right here in the Puget Sound region, unfortunately.
And we know if you've read the “Really Big One,”
which most of you have, apparently,
that the entire Cascadia Subduction Zone
has the risk
of a large earthquake from northern California
all the way up to Vancouver Island.
So why do we have
a bull's eye right here in the seismic hazard model
for the Puget Sound?
Well, the reason is
Nisqually and earthquakes like it
as well as to some extent the Seattle fault.
But it's dominated by the Nisqually
kinds of earthquakes, because
as you're going to see in a second,
they happen relatively frequently.
And so in terms of
just being likely to experience an earthquake,
we're right up there with anywhere in the Bay
Area or Los Angeles in terms of of the likelihood over
our lifetimes, you know,
of having having an event like that happen.
It's a virtual certainty
in the hundred year time frame, and it's pretty close
to virtual certainty even in the next 50 years.
Okay.
So, you know, trivia nights are popular.
So I thought I'd pause for a second here
and ask you this trivia question.
What was the most damaging in terms of losses, in terms
of cost earthquake in the US in the past 30 years?
Anybody venture a guess
you're not allowed to answer
if you were there on Tuesday? Yeah.
-Northridge. -Northridge.
How long ago was Northridge?
32 years ago.
Yeah.
Anybody else? Yeah.
The Nisqually earthquake was. Yes.
And people.
Good job.
People rarely guessed this.
Yes. This is this is the largest
insured or uninsured losses in the U.S.A.,
in a pretty, you know, the span of life
of an almost middle aged person.
Right. 30 years old.
That's just some more photos of it.
We've seen lots of those.
But there's the insured losses,
according to the iii.org, whatever that is
at $550 million.
But total losses, there's lots of estimates.
Obviously, it's a it's challenging
to estimate the $2 billion or so
and all those ones above it
are a lot more than than 30 years ago.
So we have you know,
we have a real risk here.
Okay.
But Nisqually
is not the end of the story, not even geologically,
but just from the historical record. Right.
We know that there was 1965, in 1949.
We don't know about ones exactly like this before.
And but those were very similar earthquakes
and seismologically,
they were basically repeat events of each other.
They weren't located in
exactly the same spot, but all of them were essentially
the location,
the epicenter, was between Olympia and here.
And the characteristics
of the earthquakes were very, very similar.
So what that leads to then is that we can make sort of
an estimate of the likelihood of another one.
This is not a prediction of when the earthquake
will occur. Exactly,
but just the probability kind of forecasting.
And we have to say that the probability is really high.
We've had three in the span
of less than a hundred years.
They've come every few decades.
It's 25 years now.
So the likelihood of another just based on that alone,
which could be wrong, maybe they come in clusters
of three and then wait a thousand years.
I don't think so.
But, you know,
these are probabilities and these are not certainties.
But we say that the Nisqually
earthquake’s probability, a similar one,
not Nisqually itself,
but a similar one is about 85% over the next 50 years.
It could be a little bit smaller or farther away,
but it could be bigger and closer to us.
There is no guarantee
the next one will be as kind as Nisqually was.
Okay. That's another important thing to say.
What are they geologically?
You just mentioned the Juan to Fuca slab,
so I didn't have to.
But I will [laughs] that we know
that we live in this place called a subduction zone.
The North American plate is running
right over the Pacific Ocean floor. Imagine
looking straight down 40 miles below your feet.
You would be looking at what used to be
the bottom of the ocean a few million years ago,
and it's slid underneath us during that time.
That's this Juan de Fuca plate slab.
Nisqually
and the other ones like it, ‘65 and ’49, happened inside
that former ocean bottom inside that plate that has
subducted down below us.
And that's why they're so deep.
They are not happening in the crust of North America.
They're happening in this what we call the slab.
And and they have certain characteristics.
For some reason, they don't have aftershocks.
Nisqually
had no felt aftershocks whatsoever.
That's very weird for earthquakes.
It's a characteristic somewhat of slab
earthquakes and specifically of ours.
And we don't really know why, to be honest.
That's one type of earthquake.
But unfortunately,
we are blessed with multiple types
of earthquakes here as as folks know. So.
I forgot I was going to talk about this first.
Here's just a cross section.
There's a map of a bunch of earthquakes in our region.
And along that line, if we slice through the earth.
And so the non colored plot
is a slice through the earth with just
a bunch of earthquakes events.
It's an old graphic from around
the time of Nisqually.
And you can actually see that sort of sloping line.
That's the earthquakes in that slab.
That's how we know about the plate tectonics
in 2001 and ‘49 and also a ’99 event are in there.
The other ones up there are the earthquakes
that are up here in the North American crust,
including ones around Mount
St Helens and Mount Rainier and stuff.
So they really separate.
Okay.
So also, we know about the big one, right?
The magnitude
nine potential with tsunami and everything else.
The source of that is the fault line,
that is the where the two plates actually meet.
But the shallower part of where they meet,
where they can get stuck and build up the stress
and the strain until an earthquake happens.
And what we know about that from great geological
sleuthing is that they happen
for our region of the system about every 500 years.
And we know that through a 10,000 year record
of sediment deposits on the seafloor
and also the tree rings,
you've heard some of that story.
I won't repeat it here,
but what that means is just a simple calculation
says there's
about a 15 to 20% chance or so of that happening
in the next 50 years.
So still a significant
probability, but nowhere near as high
as seeing this Nisqually happen to us again.
Okay, big difference.
It's a bad event.
It's a much worse event for the coast than for us.
But the shaking could be 4 minutes, 5 minutes, 6
minutes here in Seattle,
probably not as strong shaking,
but going on for a long time.
And then the third one, and in some ways,
our black swan are really bad potential event,
but fortunately also infrequent
seems to be earthquakes on the Seattle Fault
and its ilk.
The other ones like the Tacoma Fault,
Southern Whidbey Island Fault.
These are faults more kind of like
the San Andreas in a way, in that they're shallow,
they're in the crust right below our feet.
Actually, the Seattle Fault shares,
unfortunately, a lot of characteristics
with what happened in Christchurch.
And you saw some images in the video from Christchurch,
a fault that's right underneath the city,
and that could produce very strong
shaking, very close in for us
and without much warning time, any kind.
So fortunately, we don't really well,
unfortunately, we don't really know a lot
about their geological history,
but it seems to be that those big earthquakes,
maybe sort of thousands of years
in between single events on a single fault.
So we give a 15% probability there as well.
So our problem in our region,
I think compared to California,
is that while we have earthquakes all the time,
that's actually just one year of earthquakes.
Our network detected almost 5000 of them, but
nobody felt 99% of those earthquakes.
We just recorded them on our instruments.
They happen all the time, unlike California,
where they feel them fairly often
if you live in the Bay Area or L.A.,
we just don't feel them very often.
We had a 3.0 a couple of days ago
up around Monroe, Snohomish, and it caused,
you know,
news stories and things,
but kind of
get quickly forgotten and barely felt by people.
So we have a we have a real hazard,
but without many reminders.
And that's, again, because of the types
of earthquakes like the Nisqually and the big one.
They don't produce a lot of earthquakes
in between the bigger earthquakes.
And that's a problem for us.
Okay.
So we can't predict them,
we've said.
And we mean by prediction as seismologist,
we mean something
really specific, more specific
than maybe the just sort of layperson
use of that term is we mean, we can't tell you
with any precision in a short time frame
that an earthquake of a particular size
in a particular region is going to happen.
So if I tell you an earthquake of magnitude
seven is going to happen in the next hundred years,
that's not a prediction from that perspective.
If I say in the next ten days,
we have a heightened risk
that a seven will happen
here in Seattle, that would be a prediction.
We can't do that.
We'd have no method that we've seen
to see a precursor to those earthquakes.
That's the bad news.
The good news is we can forecast them
like we like I just did.
So give you those longer term probabilities.
So that's great for planning.
And secondly, now we can do earthquake
early warning using the Shake Alert system,
which is detecting the earthquake
not before it starts,
but before the shaking gets
to you
and try to give you some warning through that system.
So Shake Alert is the system that uses
the seismic network and through very very rapid,
getting the data from the seismometer
to our computers at the U-Dub,
that could be as little as a few seconds,
2 seconds from the time that seismometer shook
to the time our computers have that data in them.
And that's from hundreds of seismometers
across the region
and then calculate within a couple more seconds
that an earthquake is underway,
and that means we can catch it
while that spread is still small.
And then as it expands like ripples in a pond,
the shaking,
then we can use that time difference
between how fast the Internet is versus
how fast the seismic waves spread,
which is that
just like a couple of miles per second, much,
much slower than the speed of light,
which is more or less how the Internet works.
So earthquake early warning does that.
I just kind of summarize that the sensor network
brings things to a processing center,
creates a warning,
and then that can go out to your mobile phone
as as
something that gives you that warning that says
earthquake is underway or something like that.
So we can come up with
whatever the time allows us for how fast
the seismic waves spread that can be in
just a few seconds and almost nothing.
You just get the warning and the shaking is upon you.
And in fact,
if you're right on top of the earthquake
and shallower than a Nisqually,
maybe no warning at all, up
to as much as a minute for like an offshore
or large earthquake where it takes
a really long time for the shaking to get us.
It doesn't sound like much, but you can do a lot
with a little bit of earthquake warning.
I'll show you a little example here.
It just kind of says if this Nisqually happened today
in a representation of how
well this works, our network of sensors
is actually far denser than this.
[rumbling and pinging sound]
Earthquake near Olympia.
Signal gets to the sensors, so those four lit up,
we determine the epicenter again in a few seconds.
And within
just less than 10 seconds after the earthquake starts,
calculate how strongly it will shake
and decide what area to warn.
All of that happens in the Shake Alert system
so that that can get out to your mobile phone.
Okay.
So the good news is you all have an earthquake early
warning device on your phone probably right now,
if you have an Android phone
or an iOS phone, then they have built in
using the signal from the Shake Alert system
and turning that into a warning
that would either just give you
a little alert screen
for a smaller event or for a really bigger
one would take over
the whole screen and say earthquake.
Here's how far away it is.
Here's the estimated
magnitude drop, cover and hold on or do something.
Take some action.
It also goes out over the WEA system,
the Wireless Emergency Alert.
So that's like the Amber Alert style
just to capture everything and everybody.
You might get both alerts, but we’ll see.
It's been available for five years now almost
this May here in Washington
state, we've had one alerting event so far,
and that was for the Orcas Island earthquake of
this past March.
And the system worked very well.
And we think we think it will work very well.
I'll just say that there are ways
beyond mobile phones
for embedded systems and infrastructure
to take the ShakeAlert message directly
and take automated actions of various kinds, like
potentially stopping trains, warning kids in school,
stopping, you know,
valves and water stations and things like this.
So, yeah, my takeaway message
is this one, you know,
earthquakes are inevitable, right?
But most of the damage is not.
We're going to hear more about that.
Another Nisqually
is more likely than the really big one.
And it's what
we should be thinking about a lot more,
I think, as we do
our preparations
in a way that's good news
because it's not as comprehensive
a damaging event to think about.
And we should always should be increasing resilience,
so let's prepare and not despair. Thanks a lot.
[applause]
-Thank you, Harold.
He's a great presenter, right?
Yeah, he's a wonderful professor.
Up next is Jon Siu.
He is a structural engineer and was the building
official
of the City during the Nisqually earthquake.
Many people don't know what the building official does.
-During an earthquake,
the building official is I
what I'm going to say is the public's
structural guardian.
So he was in charge of making sure that people
were not entering unsafe buildings.
He was making sure that our emergency services
can operate, making sure
that their buildings were safe,
making sure that repairs were done correctly,
and making sure
that recovery doesn't create new problems.
So Jon is going to come up and talk about
what it was like
the day of the earthquake
as the city's building official,
what the damages were and yeah, I'll just
let Jon take over.
[applause]
-Okay. Thank you.
So I'll be telling my story, my Nisqually story
in a short time here.
But just as a little bit of background, I was yes, the
actually my title
was the principal engineer at the time.
I did not
inherit the building
official title until a few years later.
But as part of my responsibilities,
as Amanda said, I was in charge
of the emergency response for our department,
which at that time was called DCLU, the Department
of Design, Construction and Land Use.
We are about three iterations
down the road on department names, but
since then, one of the changes
that's happened in the last 25 years. But I was,
I was a fairly newly minted principal engineer.
I think I'd been in the position
for less than a year when the when the earthquake hit.
But I had been
involved in writing the the response plan.
And so I actually authored quite a bit of it.
And so we kind of knew what to do.
I knew what to do.
Just a little bit more background.
This was not my first earthquake and I was
I'll show my age.
In 1971, I was the ninth grader in Los Angeles
when the San Fernando Earthquake hit,
which was very much similar
to the Northridge Earthquake of 1994.
Very large earthquake, shook things up.
I lived not too far from downtown Los Angeles.
I remember being in bed
and being woken up by pretty intense shaking.
I remember hearing my brother
hit the floor and roll under his bed.
We shared a bedroom. And I was just sitting in bed
thinking “this is cool!”
Right?
Ninth grader, you know. So.
So this was not my first earthquake.
So not too hard
to recognize in some ways, even though it was,
you know, quite a few years in between.
In preparing for this talk here,
you know,
I brought up a lot of memories
and stories, and I had to skip most of them,
I just...for time sake...
But I've included a few. Amanda has already
talked a little bit about this,
but our role in emergency response at the time for DCLU,
and currently for SDCI, the Seattle Department
of Construction and Inspections.
But we conduct building safety assessments.
We have an internationally used
process called ATC 20,
and it's mostly aimed at earthquakes,
but it can be used for other hazards.
We did use something similar, the photo on the top left
there was during the 1996 97 landslides in Seattle.
It’s...but it's basically a snapshot in time.
You go up to a building
and you take 15 to 20 minutes
and you look at it and say, “Okay, is this build...
How bad is this building?”
I don't want to use the word safe because,
well, I'll tell you why down the road here.
But we can say it's something is unsafe.
That's the red tag there.
We can say something is green.
It's what we call in Seattle no apparent hazard.
So we haven't seen anything
that looks too bad.
Okay.
In the red. In the red tag,
nobody's allowed to go in the building.
Sometimes you can get engineers
and, you know, contractors in there to see if they can
shore it up, or in and repair it, make repairs.
It does not necessarily mean
that the building has to be demolished.
It’s that snapshot that says it's not safe
to go in right now.
The green
again, no apparent hazard is what we call it here.
We don't see anything
that prevents people from entering
and using the building as normal.
There may be some broken glass that may be swept up.
There may be some other things that aren't working.
But at least the building can be used for shelter
and other things.
And pretty much be used for business.
Yellow is kind of this gray, big, huge
gray area between the red and the green.
You can...there's a wide range in there of damage,
which we've seen.
We suggest tagging buildings, the yellow,
for instance, that
we're just going to let
a few people in for a short time
recover their belongings, because that's really important.
But other than that, can't
you can't let too many people in do other things
like, well, what
you have here in the bottom left is our poster
child, right? The Cadillac Hotel.
And what's there?
It's just a falling hazard. Right?
You got the the bricks coming off the building.
And so you don't want people under there.
That's also a yellow can be a red tag
or yellow tag depending on what else is going on.
Most often it's used,
the yellow tag is because there's
a portion of the building that's unsafe.
And then, of course,
because this is just a snapshot
in time, aftershocks or temporary repairs
can change the change, how bad the building is,
and you can change the tag.
And the big decision that
the evaluators who are out there have to make in
that 15 to 20 minutes is, is this safe enough
in somewhat.. what is safe enough, right?
Well, okay, so where was I? At 10:54...
Oh, let's see.
The arrow is not showing up there.
Oh, there it is.
Okay.
That's where I was,
approximately on the 40th floor of Key Tower;
as it was called at the time was not the at the
Seattle Municipal Tower.
The DCLU
was in the process of moving from Dexter
Horton on the left here into the Key Tower,
where half half
the department was in Dexter Horton,
the other half was up in Key Tower.
We were having a management all, all department
management meeting on the 40th floor
and a couple of seconds
took a couple of seconds are shaking.
Recognize? Oh yeah, this is an earthquake.
And basically I had to order
everyone under the table, right?
Big conference tables.
So I went over under the table.
Felt like a long time
sitting under the table there and that's so when we do,
I do this trading how to do these tags all the time.
I tell people, if you're under that table, count,
first of all, it gives your mind
something to do so you don't panic.
And second of all, you can kind of guesstimate
what kind of earthquake it is.
If it's that 2 to 4 or five or 6 minutes,
you know, it's the subduction earthquake,
if there's some other things that I tell people.
But it probably would have been good idea
if I'd known that at that time
that I should be counting,
because it felt like a really long time.
I do remember that, you know, the high
rises, high rise buildings are very flexible.
So even after the strong shaking ended,
the building was still swaying slowly
and looking out the way we
I remember we got out from the table,
looked toward Pioneer Square,
kind of, you know, in a haze, mind wise.
And I didn't remember
I remember not seeing any visible damage.
Other folks
say they saw this kind of dust cloud rising up
from the area.
But I don't remember seeing that.
And at that point,
our division director at that time
quietly told me, “Okay, it's time to go go in action,”
because I he knew I was in charge.
I knew I was supposed to be in charge
of our response.
So some of our initial challenges,
as I mentioned,
we were moving from Dixon Horton
and Foster Marshall Building into the Key Tower,
and half of the staff
was, as I said, was in each building.
We, the Dexter Horton building was supposed to get
a seismic retrofit. It had been permitted.
It was ready to go, was ready to build and
a colleague persuaded them to delay it
the the retrofit
because one of the braces
was going to go right through his space.
And he didn't want he figured, okay,
you know, we don't we don't want to do that.
And he didn't want
and he was one of the ones who is still in the Dexter
Horton. Of course, as soon as
the earthquake happened, he knew
there was the building we had issues.
And so he ran out, ran down the stairs, slapped
a yellow tag on the building.
The first thing he did. Now,
that wasn't that was the probably not
inappropriate thing to do.
That was probably okay.
The difficulty we ran into
was that all our earthquake supplies with all our tags
and forearms were in the basement
of the Dexter Horton building.
So, you know, we had we had to persuade.
And by the way, the management company,
I forget the name now, did the exactly right thing.
They got people out of the building
and they would not let people back in.
And our division director had to go down there
and beg them to let him
beg them to let us get in
so we could get our supplies and do our jobs,
which they did eventually.
But but they did the exact right thing.
The other things that were going on
was that we we had had a exercise
that we ran, all departments shut down for a day
in 1995 for the Sound Shake ‘95 training.
I don't know how many people were around for that.
We shut down the whole department.
We had people,
you know,
jump into their rolls and we we simulated an
earthquake and some response.
But since then,
you know, in the six years intervening,
we hadn't had any further training.
We hadn't done any updates to the plan and,
you know, the staff turnover.
But those those roles haven't been filled.
We were very fortunate
that some some of our managers
actually remembered what they had done
six years earlier.
And so they actually jumped into those roles
and started performing them,
which really was a big help.
The other thing is that
we had some issues of coordination
with the departments and and King County in particular.
There's some stories about that.
But the the big thing was that we went to
look at Harborview.
We were told, you know, that's
that's that's in our jurisdiction,
we're supposed to go up there.
We were the third team to arrive.
King County
executive had ordered their building department
to go and look at it despite protests.
They they knew
it wasn't in their jurisdiction,
but King County executive said go do it.
Yes, sir.
So they went and did that.
I don't know who the second team was,
but we were the third team there.
And by the time they got we got there, they they were
quite upset and said, take a hike
when you are not letting us to do this.
So we've we've we've fixed that since then
with a with a memorandum of
understanding with King County.
But you know, these challenges come up
because you're not thinking about them right.
So that was just kind of the
the initial
challenges or some of the initial challenges
ran into there, a whole bunch of other things
I could say I got tons of stories.
But building damage statistics, you know,
there are 29 red tagged buildings.
You can see them in the map
there. They each red dot represents a building.
Most of them are in Pioneer Square and Sodo.
There's a there's a couple of dots outside.
But the vast majority
and I've you know over the years
I've forgotten the exact number of were unreinforced
masonry here our URM buildings right.
We were very fortunate, as
we've said,
that there was a relatively moderate earthquake
and so there were no building collapses.
We had pieces
falling off buildings, but no buildings, actually,
you know, came down so very fortunate in that way.
We had 483, what we call yellow tag buildings.
Right again, with limited entry.
By the way, the the photo on the left
there is of the Seattle Chocolate Factory,
which had had some was red tagged. On the right there,
you could see pieces falling off the building
and landing on the cars below.
And I believe that they also had the collapse ceiling
in the middle.
Yeah, the yellows were mostly
from things like
falling chimneys, like you can see in the.
Sorry, I'm going to need a little bit of light.
Thank you.
Got to read my notes.
Let's see.
So most of the following
here were the yellow tags were falling
hazards from brick chimneys.
And there is this band across
West Seattle and and through Seattle.
You know, the other parts of Seattle
pretty much running east west
of pretty much following the Seattle fault,
where all these these chimneys were failing.
Once you clean up the mess, clean up,
get rid of the falling hazard,
we can change the tag from yellow to green.
And so that's what that plot is there.
It kind of shows the evolution of the green,
yellow, red tag numbers as time went on.
You can see,
as we expect with a earthquake of this size,
that most of the buildings we looked at were green.
That's that map on the far side,
all those green dots there. We ended up between us
and we did hire a consulting engineering company
to help us do all of this.
And also they mentioned why in the set here. But
ended up doing about 2000 buildings.
We do not
did not go out and canvass every neighborhood.
Right.
So we depended on people calling in,
which is kind of another little bit of a
challenge there.
But again, we get most of them ended up green tags
and so we were okay with that.
So let's see.
Oh, okay.
The other thing that we ran into, some other
challenges ran to was, number one, volunteer help.
People
kind of showed up on our doorstep
and we weren't really prepared
to deal with them, right?
So we ended up, we end up getting about 15 architects
to come and help us.
And they went out
and did some of these some of these tagging.
But I also got a, for instance, things like a
neighboring jurisdiction who will remain unnamed,
volunteered to send us people to help.
And said great, I got a lot of single family
houses, you know, with broken
chimneys that need to be looked at.
no, thanks.
I don't think we want to do that.
They want
you know, Seattle's got the big high rises.
We got the big, sexy buildings.
You know they want they want to look at those.
That's not where most of the damage is.
Right.
So that was a bit of a challenge again.
So given that this was
a moderate earthquake and there wasn't that,
you know,
there was as much damage as there might have been.
The other challenge we face was that,
I guess,
you know, if I'm a contractor,
I guess I can still work on my building.
I need inspections.
I guess I can.
You know, I need to get my plans out,
you know, out of the get a permit.
So I can start working on
my my, my house or building or whatever I'm building.
And so we weren't exactly prepared for that either.
Mentally,
our exercise had been everyone's into
in the earthquake mode, right, in emergency mode,
and everybody's doing something related here
to the to the emergency.
Then that doesn't happen that way, right.
Again, given the moderate damage.
So we had to figure out how to split the difference.
We started by splitting
the department in half. And half
the department did did emergency work,
the other half did the regular work.
And that's why we ended up hiring a
engineering firm
who said, okay, we can set up a mini
building department within your department.
We will do all the emergency repair work.
You know,
we'll do the plan review, we'll do the inspections,
we'll go out and do the respond to the
to the people calling in who needed the inspections
and which was the next thing
that came up was that the the
the mayor announced that there were going to be free,
free earthquake inspections.
Now, if you're out in the public
and you don't know what an ATC 20,
you know,
red, yellow, green tag is,
what do you think that means to you?
Right.
And so when we were sending
people out to these free inspections,
they were highly disappointed at the level
of service they got.
They wanted... They expected us to be,
you know
going to the crawl space
and, you know, crawling around in there
and looking at getting
getting a real earthquake inspection.
That's not what we did.
So that that was another challenge that we ran into.
The other thing is that as the
the consultants who came in
did their repair, you know, repair permit work,
they discovered that about 60% of the buildings
that came in for permits, we did not have any tag
record on.
Now, some of that, that's that's not so bad
if the green tag and just cleaning up you know
and doing some things but there were some buildings
that were actually when they
when they looked at the plans
and looked at the damage that
that was being repaired, they said,
you know,
we think this probably should have been
a yellow tagged building and nobody told us about it.
That's also,
again, one of those,
shall I say, miscommunications
with with building owners and including the like
the county.
I'm going to I'm going to tell names on that one.
That one that one under the top
photo is a stairwell in the
in the
the courthouse county courthouse.
Old building, clay tile in the stairways, that’s the exit stair.
Very similar, by the way, damage
to what happened in Dexter Horton
for those of you who were there.
But again, we had no inkling about this
and no wonder why the judges were all up in arms
about how safe is this building, right?
I remember there that that hit the news, right.
They didn't want to go to work because
they were afraid of how the
you know, whether the the building was safe.
But so that that was it.
But that's very typical.
You know, if there's no
incentive to report the damage,
then why would I do that as a building owner?
Right.
Well, you know, you the
the government is just going
to come in and make me do stuff. Right.
So there was a bit a bit of a problem.
And I will say that my experience...
so going back
a little bit, I did go down
to Northridge to help the city of L.A.
We did make some arrangements for us,
for three of us to do that from our department.
Invaluable experience
by the way and helped in
this a lot.
But down there, there were some cities
that had rent control
and the folks who were building owners
who are under rent control
really, really wanted yellow and red tags.
So they get people out,
fix the building and then raise the rents.
Right.
So it was very weird because in some
some places they were arguing, you know,
please don't give me a yellow tag, please.
You know, let me let me have my tenants in here. Right.
And things like that. And in places it was.
Give me that.
All right, let me have that.
So, you know, it is that's something,
you know, we we talk about
this is engineering, but it's also politics.
So and we when we train people,
we we remind them
this is everything you do out there is political
has political implications.
So the other thing that we
ran into
is that we have very limited authority
and tools to actually require people
to make repairs to their buildings.
So what you're seeing there is like a Cadillac hotel.
Some months later,
what you see there is a fence
that was built by Seattle Public Utilities.
It's on street right away.
So it doesn't touch the building,
but it does keep the building
from falling into Jackson
Street, which is on this side.
But on the near side here,
that was a big thing because Jackson Street
was one of the main corridors
into Pioneer Square
and the businesses were suffering
because people didn't want to try to mess with that.
Right. So
there was a lot of pressure to open up this right.
The right of way there.
And eventually this became the solution.
[mumbling] Let's see.
Wow, that time went fast.
Okay.
So we had a few
we have some challenges, similar challenges.
And currently
we got no normal if it's the same earthquake,
if we have another Nisqually,
the SDCI is going to have
that same issue of having to deal with both,
you know, both sides of the business
at the same time.
We expect that public expectations
are going to be a lot higher
from our our response because social media
is out there.
We are hyper aware of issues from Christchurch.
As was mentioned before there.
The central business district was closed
for years,
right, because of that building
there was teetering, it was leading.
But you know, that's that
this hold no entry zone that they had.
So we're hyper aware of how does how does that work.
Green tag: what is safe that we kind of mentioned.
I mentioned that earlier.
The got to remember that Christchurch was two,
two earthquakes.
The earlier one was further away from the city center.
The second one was closer in. The second one
was the one that did all the damage to the city.
But in the first one
there had been a whole bunch of the URMs
that had gotten green tags
because they weren't damaged.
Right. Again, that's a snapshot in time.
And but
the lot of them collapsed or had major damage.
And in the second earthquake and the question
there was a lot of
political fallout from that, from the people saying,
what is this green tag mean? Right.
What is safe? Right.
So that that's that's something we have to
still kind of work with.
That's I,
I cringe a little bit when when we talk about
is this building safe? Right.
Well what is safe, right?
Again,
we expect damage to under retrofitted,
you know URMs in a moderate earthquake.
Similar to Nisqually.
And we do expect that
if you got a really big earthquake,
you have the Seattle fault, or you do get a
Cascadia event,
that some of them are going to collapse.
So there's all will be challenges.
Progress we made...
We've got a new EOC, thank goodness
we moved the EOC out of the basement of a URM.
(laughter)
And then so and we've established the role of OEM,
the Office of Emergency Management
is now really known to need to coordinate departments.
There were some issues
that I don't have time to talk about.
We have the statewide system
now that to train in a role, a dispatch volunteer
building safety evaluators
to help local building officials. It's
I'll just show you that.
That way
we can evenly distribute and share resources
of these volunteers.
We have about 300 something volunteers
signed up who can can be dispatched to
events.
In in SDCI itself,
being a former colleague,
the preparedness is has become much more
of a priority, which is good.
We got a new emergency response plan since then.
I wrote it right afterwards, so it's not so new anymore.
There's regular training going on
for the for the folks doing the tagging.
There's we have actually hired
dedicated staff to organize and collaborate and
and coordinate with other departments,
that is something we did not have
and could have surely could have used.
We have now memorandums of understanding
with other departments
to to assess their own building damage.
It's not just other departments, by the way. It's also
other organizations such as
a Seattle Center and a bunch of others.
The Port of Seattle and the U Dub have...
they can they can tag their own buildings
through under this memorandum of understanding.
We've we've done some risk mitigation...mitigation
not enough but we are still making progress, it's slow
in getting people to retrofit their buildings
retrofit their buildings
through required and voluntary.
What you're seeing on the left is a URM
that's been retrofit.
We brace chimneys now.
And the, what the bottom photo is
of is a strengthening that was done through this
what was called project impact at the time
it's a home retrofit program and plans
and permits are available through through SDCI
and other jurisdictions do the same as well.
Let's see,
what do we
need to do...feature
we well, we need to keep on retrofitting.
We need we need to get there
mandatory retrofit at some point.
But we recognize that there
it's the huge financial burden on the owners.
And so, you know, things like finding tools like,
you know, the legislation that failed
would have been helpful to help some of that get done.
We'd still need to find a way to finance it,
but we still need to get to
to the to the mandatory mandatory part.
We need to eventually if that gets done,
then we can move on to these other
vulnerable buildings.
I want to talk about those
and the new the new latest thing
is called functional recovery,
where you actually have a building who
that is actually functional.
You can actually do your work
in that building after a major earthquake.
So that's kind of where we're headed.
Yeah.
Okay.
(applause)
-Thank you, Jon.
Jon is a legend.
He is retired, but he's doing a very bad job at it.
He's in the office
frequently.
As Jon mentioned,
there's politics at play post-earthquake, right?
It's not just engineering. There's politics, too.
How many of you in the room
are familiar with Jim Mullen?
Okay, a few folks.
Jim Mullen
is the former director of Seattle's
Office of Emergency Management, and then he went on to be
the director of Washington State Emergency Management.
You heard Jim talk about the EOC
that stands for Emergency Operations Center.
And I want you all to think about the movie Apollo 13.
Okay.
When you're up in space,
you're talking to mission control, Right?
And NASA's mission control has Capcom
and mission ops and instrumentation.
Every city has an EOC, an emergency
operations center, that has the director,
Jim Mullen, was essentially Gene Kranz
during the Nisqually, and then he went on to be
the Gene Kranz at the state level.
Jim was unfortunately unable to make it tonight.
He is kicking cancer's ass currently
and did not want to be around a bunch of germs so
we prerecorded his session.
The volume in here is a little bit quiet.
It's a 15 minute video so get up, get snacks
if you need to but just try and be quiet.
It's a little like slower pace,
but Jim says...
Jim gets into the politics and if you listen carefully,
he's spilling some tea.
He he he is he he calls it like it is.
And I am very appreciative of that.
And I will just also say, in addition to being both
former director of Seattle and the state,
he also the
president of the National
Emergency Management Association.
He's in retirement, but still a consultant.
And he has a blog
called Emergency Management Once Removed.
So he's a very, very intelligent man.
He was very appreciative of this opportunity tonight.
He said thank you for
allowing him to be temporarily relevant again.
I think he's still got it.
So I am going to flip to this video
again, 15 minutes and we put in a lot of pictures
and stuff to to keep attention up.
-Good evening. I'm sorry
my medical condition precludes my being with you in person,
but one must not tempt fate.
And actually, fate is something we should be
considering pretty clearly here as we
talk about the Nisqually earthquake and think about
what went on before it and what might come next.
Now, even a relatively moderate quake,
not just the Big One we are all talking about,
but one lasting too long in the wrong place
can result in significant damage.
Geologists have said that Nisqually itself
might have been even more disruptive
with another 12 seconds of ground motion.
As it was, there was considerable damage.
Commercial telephone and cellular services
were disrupted for several hours.
There were electrical outages
and pipe failures affecting water service.
About 160 quake related injuries,
and they were treated
at King County hospitals with one reported fatality.
A total of 29 buildings were red tagged
in Pioneer Square, the International District.
Sodo and Duwamish.
Nearly 500 buildings were yellow tagged, both north
and south of the Ships Canal.
The seawall along downtown Elliot
Bay Waterfront Park sunk two inches at one location,
74 elevator systems were shut down for repairs.
Notable building damage occurred at the King
County Courthouse, the Dexter Horton building,
and the corporate headquarters of Starbucks and Amazon.
The FAA control tower at Sea-Tac had to be evacuated
and closed,
the runway at King County International Airport
was undermined by ground failure,
and there were reports
of damage to other Seattle facilities as well.
There were economic impacts, too.
Some, though, took months to be fully documented.
Now, for most people,
an event like the Nisqually earthquake
begins with a sensation of ground motion.
But that wasn't the case
with my Seattle Emergency Management staff
nor a city government colleagues.
For us, Nisqually was the culmination of years
of preparing for just such an event.
Emergency management in
Seattle has evolved in the years
that preceded the this Nisqually earthquake.
I was named interim director at Seattle Office
of Emergency Management in September 1992.
My appointment became permanent January 1993,
and I was the third person in that role in 11 months.
It's fair to note that my two predecessors
were not treated very respectfully,
but unlike them,
I had been a city employee for 17 years in criminal
planning, the city's budget office
and had directed a neighboring
technical assistance division
in the Department of Community Development.
I knew that in Seattle city government, back then,
what worked was the principle
that authority is 80% assumed
and only 20% conferred.
So we began to develop
our emergency management teams,
starting with an original staff of three,
which had grown to six professionals
and two outstanding administrative staff by 2001.
Now there are four elements in emergency management:
mitigation, community
preparedness, disaster response and recovery.
In 1992, Seattle was woefully unprepared
on all four.
We set out to address
each of these as our budget and staff expertise evolved.
To address disaster response,
my most experienced emergency management
staff member, Steve Martin,
was detailed to write the City's
first Comprehensive Disaster Plan.
It was adopted by the mayor and the city council.
It was also praised by FEMA's
Emergency Management Institute as a model plan
for municipalities like Seattle. And for recovery,
we developed a system
for receiving federal aid from FEMA
after a disaster was declared.
Previously financial losses, mostly from winter storms
and power outages,
had simply been considered
lost revenue by city agencies.
In my tenure,
we had 12 events that rose to the level
of a presidential declared disaster
for which we were eligible to pursue reimbursement
from FEMA for damage to city resources.
By 2001,
our recovery efforts had retrieved
millions of dollars for city agencies
and the FEMA administrative fee
we received for handling the recovery process
also helped outfit our EOC
well beyond what the traditional city
budget process would ever have allowed.
For community preparedness,
in fall of 1993, we hired an expert
in disaster messaging, Dr.
Louanne Jonson,
to launch our community preparedness program called
Seattle Disaster Aid and Response Teams or START.
She organized many city neighborhoods,
usually groups of homes of 20 to 25 residences,
to support each other immediately
after a disaster,
teaching neighbors how to safely
shut off natural gas systems,
organizing neighborhood child care teams,
training neighbors in light search and rescue.
There were literally hundreds
of certified neighborhood disaster teams in place
by the time of the earthquake.
Internal coordination
within city agencies was critical.
Early on, we empowered a Seattle disaster
management committee
comprised of senior leaders from city departments
that met monthly to discuss the range of issues
that the city needed to be prepared
to confront in a disaster.
We earned a reputation
for unsparingly calling ouy mistakes, even our own,
in after action reports from exercises in real events,
gaps and corrections that had to be made
were followed up regularly.
So when Nisqually happened,
we were as ready as those activities can make us.
And we checked most of the boxes,
but still we hadn't accomplished much
for the critical element:
disaster mitigation. Until in 1998,
we were designated by FEMA's James Lee
Witt to be one of seven pilot jurisdictions
for an innovative disaster mitigation
program called Project Impact.
We were funded by a $1 million grant from FEMA.
We hired Ines Pearce away from Safeco Insurance
to manage the program.
Her wisdom and management skills helped guide
our disaster mitigation efforts throughout.
Our projects included adopting and promoting
regionally a residential home
retrofit program already
operating at the Phinney Ridge Neighborhood Center,
we launched a school retrofit program
in conjunction with Seattle Public Schools.
We sponsored an innovative landslide and seismic
hazard mapping program in conjunction with the U.S.
Geological Survey.
And we began an extended development of a disaster
resistant tool kit to assist small
and even larger businesses to mitigate hazards
and also to prepare their employees
to care for themselves,
their families, and their customers.
So the pieces of a comprehensive
emergency management operation
finally were in place
just in time, as it turned out.
On the morning of February 28, 2001,
our public private
project Impact
Steering Committee members were assembling
at the Phinney Neighborhood Center,
preparing to celebrate three years
of successful mitigation efforts.
Before the celebration event had even begun,
the earth started moving.
I recall crouching under a table thinking, “Oh my God,
have we done enough?”
After helping evacuate a daycare center upstairs
in that building,
I went straight to the EOC. My staff
there had immediately activated the facility.
It was rapidly filling up with representatives
from city agencies, Mayor Schell and his senior staff.
Now, as I mentioned, there was significant damage
to some bridges, disruption at Sea-Tac and King County
International Airports, but we averted a major incident.
Traffic was snarled,
but fortunately not as bad as it might have been.
Our school district outreach
had resulted in the district establishing protocols
for keeping kids safe in such instances,
and this was tended to minimize
the need for parents
to clog the roadways to retrieve their children,
which is one thing we definitely did
not want to see happen.
That advance work was essential in minimizing
panicked reactions.
What was it like in the Seattle EOC?
I've been asked to comment.
We were busy
gathering information from around the city
to determine the immediate impact of the quake.
This was challenging because communications
were disrupted for a time
and our initial focus was on life safety issues.
Based on our early assessment
of the extent of damage,
we submitted a request for FEMA assistance
through the State
Emergency Management Division
that was granted within 24 hours
by the new Bush administration,
which was kind of a record.
In retrospect, Seattle EOC’s
response to this event was practically flawless.
In the aftermath of that weekend,
we sponsored a televised
counseling session at the Seattle Center
and retained an experienced trauma counselor
to help people deal with the shock of the quake.
And it also served as a community briefing
for the recovery process that was already underway.
So what had our working preparedness, response,
recovery and mitigation over the years accomplished?
I mentioned the EOC was fully staffed
within an hour of the quake,
briefing the mayor and his team,
we were able to gather reports,
relay instructions to the field and determine
what our immediate priorities were.
In terms of community preparedness,
a post earthquake survey revealed
that 92% of our neighborhood preparedness start teams
did their welfare checks and were checking for damage
on their blocks.
The protocol was for neighborhood leads
to report in through amateur radio
personnel located
in those respective neighborhoods,
usually set up at community centers.
These status reports relayed to amateur radio
operators stationed in the EOC,
that amateur radio system, our after action
report revealed still needed strengthening,
but it worked very well that first time out.
Our recovery staff, Steve Brown and Erica Lund,
had just finished a manual for city agencies
and the public for reporting damages for any disaster.
FEMA was so impressed by our manual
that they tossed
their boilerplate manual aside and used ours.
Pre-disaster mitigation was vindicated.
In one school in particular,
where our mitigation efforts were completed
just a week earlier,
the draining of a hot water tank above a soft ceiling,
over a third grade classroom undoubtedly prevented
serious injury or worse for the 30 kids below.
The cables that secured the tank held,
but the force of the quake ripped the tank open.
Luckily, about a ton of hot water had just been removed.
That was an undeniable benefit derived
from our designation as a pilot City
from the FEMA Project Impact Program.
Seattle Project Impact
was vindicated in my mind that day.
Unbelievably, the Bush administration
chose February 28, 2001,
to declare Project Impact a waste of federal resources
and announce that the national program,
including pilot programs like ours,
and nearly 250 programs nationwide
waiting in the funding pipeline, would be canceled.
Now, overall the Nisqually earthquake
affirmed our nine years of focus
on preparing to manage such an event.
Our neighborhood outreach planning efforts,
internal coordination, all those thoughtful
disaster drills had paid off.
I was pleased with our performance,
but knew there was still a lot more to do.
But within a few days of the quake, the attitude was,
let's fix the damage,
get federal reimbursement where we can, and we did,
and move on to other things.
Ironically, I became somewhat
of a national spokesperson for pre-disaster mitigation.
While locally I received few, if any, questions.
It was good job.
See you next Crisis.
Over the next few months, state and local policy
emphasis seemed to rely heavily
on how to acquire federal resources
to continue to address recovery needs.
The Magnolia Bridge repair stands out in my mind,
but our Seattle Project Impact program
trudged on, receiving continued
support from Mayor Schell’s administration,
but unfortunately much less from the newly
elected mayors team in 2002.
And the national counterterrorism emphasis,
which some might describe
as bordering on hysteria after 9-11,
that same year seemed to extinguish
federal interest and investment in disaster mitigation.
Then Nisqually After Action report was written by me
and our Office
of Emergency Management Staff in collaboration
with the Disaster Management Committee
and was published in June of that year.
If memory serves,
there were at least 98 substantial
and some cosmetic improvements identified.
Over the next year,
the Disaster Management
Committee addressed those improvements
that were within city agency purview.
The two major policy issues were neglected for years,
fixing the viaduct and reinforcing the seawall.
But finally those were addressed.
So how do lessons from Nisqually translate
into today's preparedness and mitigation efforts?
I've noted in my blog, Emergency Management
Once Removed,
as well as in presentations
and even casual conversations in hallways
and a few bars,
mitigation makes preparedness work
better, response a bit easier,
and a more rapid recovery possible.
Because what does not break
does not need to be repaired.
I say all that knowing that it is tricky
to promote mitigation investments
aimed at minimizing a problem
that has yet to manifest itself in a significant way
and where institutional memory
may have dimmed a bit.
But that's what disaster
mitigation is really all about.
25 years later, these lessons
remain with respect to pre-disaster mitigation.
Within any bureaucracy or community,
there are always competing agendas.
But despite the considerable differences
in social and political views
of our Project Impact Steering Committee,
and there were plenty of those differences,
we found that we shared some common values
like the safety of our families,
the continuity of the business environment
and the maintenance of the social equilibrium.
Demonstrating how we could plan and prepare to manage
a future crisis was challenging.
But in Seattle, we got there.
Most important, pre-disaster
mitigation initiatives must be acknowledged
as being a substantial benefit to the community,
or they'll never sell.
Public support is crucial,
but how citizens are advised of risk
and opportunities to mitigate risks
also is crucial.
It's never wise to alarm people
without providing guidance
on how to deal with a potential hazard.
We should bring the
taxpayers along as we plan to spend the resources
and a continuous program as necessary, not a one shot
media event.
Also, government is obligated
to protect life and property and the environment.
Private sector interests include, understandably
making profit,
but that also includes
taking care of one's customer base
as well as one's own workforce.
When public and private
worlds collide,
and they often do, local mitigation advocates
must have developed strong enough
public and private relationships
to engage in the necessary positive discussions.
It's not easy, but it's essential.
There's a current lesson in these days
of FEMA retreating from its obligations.
It's unwise now or at any time to presuppose
that some from the outside, like the feds
or even the state, will be able to address
your vulnerabilities
better than you can at the local level.
Outside help should be the icing on the cake.
But that cake must be baked locally.
Finally, there are proactive steps
that can minimize the negative consequences
of our next earthquake beginning now,
the unreinforced masonry project
is one of them that requires a sense of urgency.
The key:
collaborate with others to achieve the outcomes
you can agree upon unconditionally,
like saving lives
and minimizing negative consequences.
If you start there, you can accomplish anything,
and that is the enduring legacy
of the Nisqually earthquake
and Seattle's Project Impact. Thank you.
-I will share your
applause with Jim over email.
We have two speakers left.
We have Kyle Steuck
and then I will come up and we'll do a Q&A.
Kyle, why don't you go ahead and come up?
Kyle is
a structural engineer with Degenkolb.
They are a structural engineering firm
that really focuses on seismic hazards.
They are also
they're also leading the development
of the tsunami evacuation structures on the coast.
And Kyle is also the president
of the state chapter of the Earthquake
Engineering Research Institute.
And yeah, he says yes to everything.
So thank you, Kyle, for speaking to me.
(applause)
-Thanks, Amanda.
Let me see.
Am I going the right direction here?
There we go.
So I have a confession to make.
I was not here for Nisqually.
I moved to Seattle in 2005.
So I'm one of those
generation of engineers and architects and planners
that haven't experienced that earthquake at home.
Many of my colleagues
in California are in the same boat
with those those major earthquakes in ‘89 and ’94.
But fortunately, I did have the opportunity
to travel to Mexico
after the earthquake there in 27, in 2017.
So that's me taking data in...
outside of Mexico City.
And I thought I was going to Mexico City to see damage.
And I and I did.
I saw,
you know, buildings like
this that had lost column and partially collapsed.
Buildings like this that had lost a full story.
And there used to be an apartment building inside
that gap that you can longer see.
And, you know, that was a real major impact to me.
You know, I think about that
when I work on buildings today.
But I also think about this.
This is a city that was vibrant and modern
and returning to function
three weeks after the earthquake.
There'd be some blocks
you would be down
and have no idea that anything had ever happened
and then turn the corner and see a collapsed building.
And I also saw a lot of images
like this,
signs of a community that felt strong,
connected with its neighbors and ready to rebuild.
And so this is what we want to achieve.
This was a very similar type of earthquake
to Nisqually and in many ways
very similar in the kind of moderate
level of shaking compared to the
very large earthquakes that they could experience.
So bringing this back to Washington,
we've talked about some of that earthquake history
that that has led up to Nisqually.
So in 1949 with the Olympia earthquake,
that was very quickly recognized
into the building codes at the time.
So in 1952, we already had that bull's
eye of the seismicity around Puget Sound
in the seismic hazard maps there on the left.
And then by the time of Nisqually,
we had recognized the Cascadia Subduction Zone.
So that Zone three now extends out to the coast,
indicating some higher shaking out there.
And then since 2001, we've we've updated that
seismic hazard quite a bit.
The subduction zone earthquakes in Indonesia
in 2004, in Chile and Japan,
I mean, this had a huge impact on our awareness
of what subduction zone earthquakes can do,
particularly the cell phone images of that
that Indonesian tsunami
really inspired a lot of awareness
of what could happen in Cascadia.
We've talked about the Christchurch earthquake
a couple of times, the unreinforced
masonry damage
there in a city that has a very similar type
of history of construction to what we have here in
Seattle was also a real eye opener.
And then we had the New Yorker article.
I say the New Yorker article
like they've only ever published one thing,
but this this really did inspire
a lot of public awareness.
We got calls at the office,
more from this article being published
and the awareness that that drove than some
these other earthquakes.
And we've done real science on this too, right?
The M9 project
at the
University of Washington
was a multidisciplinary effort.
And one of the things that it did
is we don't have records from the last Cascadia
Subduction Zone earthquake... that was in 1700.
So this project
simulated 30 magnitude nine earthquakes and looked
at its impacts
varying along the coast
and Seattle and other communities.
And that gets incorporated
into our modern building codes.
So an updated seismic hazard map there on the left
showing, slightly different colors
there, but much higher levels
of shaking than we were even aware of in 2001.
And we will use that and then increase knowledge
of how our buildings respond to
earthquakes, to, you know, so that the new buildings
built to today's codes are very, very safe.
And so that's one message to
take away, is that new buildings
that we are constructing today
really have have taken the lessons
learned over over many,
many earthquakes and incorporated those.
But we do have a lot of work to do.
Part of the awareness
after all of that series of earthquakes,
particularly in the early 2010s,
led to the Resilient Washington State Framework,
which was a statewide effort to look at
where are our goals
in terms of resilience for the state across
a wide variety of different types of systems.
And where are we today and where are those gaps?
And how can policy and technical advancements
try to fill some of those gaps
and some of those gaps
are in our infrastructure, in buildings,
and some of those then are in our systems as well.
We've...
in some of these areas,
we have some really great success stories.
I think the school seismic
retrofit program is one of those.
The state studied
K-12 schools throughout the entire state,
but really focusing
also on the western part of the state
where we have the higher seismic hazard
to identify those, identify the vulnerabilities,
and then the really great with this story
is that now there is money
to go to retrofit and replace those schools.
So there's $50 million a year
roughly in the state budget.
We hope that that funding continues
to make these schools safer.
Utilities
have taken actions to in this case...
This is Seattle City Light,
one of their base isolator transformers.
So base isolating protects transformer from the ground
shaking to allow that movement to happen
without causing damage to the transformer,
meaning that it should be at least a little bit easier
to turn the lights back after the shaking stops.
We talked about inventorying
our most vulnerable buildings.
The City of Seattle did a great job
leading this effort by identifying the
the buildings within city limits,
identifying over 1100 buildings
throughout many neighborhoods,
but concentrated in Chinatown
International District in Pioneer
Square in many of those historic neighborhoods.
The state in 2018 tried to replicate that,
thinking that other cities
might have done the same thing. Turns out they had not.
But even with that effort,
we were able to identify a minimum of 4 to 5000.
And as Amanda mentioned,
those numbers might go much higher.
There are ongoing efforts at the state
using volunteers from SEAW and other organizations
to go through and identify those buildings and survey
them in more detail.
Transportation. The viaduct has come up
a couple of times and the 1989 earthquake is one that,
you know, is
probably one of the reasons I'm a structural engineer
and reading the coverage about that
and the Cypress Way Viaduct collapse in Oakland,
then the Nisqually or
Nisqually earthquake nearly brought down our viaduct
because it was built basically the same way
with the same types of structural details,
had many of the same types of vulnerabilities.
But instead we took it down with a bulldozer
and jackhammers, which is a big success.
Instead of like this,
which is what WashDOT had predicted in 2009
when they ran a simulation and visualization
and of a potential seawall collapse
and viaduct failure.
And as has come up
a couple of times,
this simulation
was really based on the idea that the Nisqually
was just a little bit bigger and a little bit longer.
Like it wasn't a brand
new type of earthquake that we're looking at here.
Tsunami and vertical evacuation.
I think this is another
success area where we have gone in
and identified
the need for many,
many of these vertical
evacuation structures so that people can,
once the shaking stops, get to high ground.
Many of our coastal locations
don't have nearby high ground or it's inaccessible and
so you may have maybe
15 minutes to get to one of these structures.
I believe we have two of them that are completed
and there are many more
that are in design and various phases of
both design and planning.
But we need many, many more to protect
all of the residents of our of our coast.
And I'll mention that that that funding is coming
from both local and state and federal sources.
So so having all of those sources is really important.
I mentioned systems as well.
Emergency management and preparedness.
I think we've made a lot of advancements
in both public awareness and also in those
professional relationships that Jon mentioned,
connecting the different organizations,
How do they talk to each other?
The WA Safe Program
allows cities to deputize architects
and engineers who have been trained
in the ATC 20 program and have signed up for that.
We have the Great
Shakeout event every year to to drive awareness.
Over a million people sign up for that
and we've got a number of other programs.
I think there's a better awareness of that
we need to support ourselves
for maybe two weeks rather than just three days.
And all of those things go to building
that community resilience
that's not just about
an individual building performance
well, but really about our community coming together.
So what do we have left to do?
I'd say there's a lot, but
in terms of some high priority things,
and we've talked about vulnerable buildings
a number of times,
unreinforced masonry buildings
are at the top of that list.
But there are other building
types, particularly older concrete buildings.
We need to develop inventories of those
so that we know
where they are and how much we're dealing with.
That's really important for building political support
as well
as just understanding what the scope of the issue is.
Then developing technical standards
as the city has here, to recognize,
you know,
what is the minimum standard that a URM building
has to go through to be considered retrofit?
And then then those next steps are having incentives
to do voluntary retrofits and then ultimately mandated
mandating retrofits where that's appropriate.
In new buildings, as has come up a couple of times.
What we designed for today really is a life safety code
for a very, very large earthquake.
In a more moderate earthquake,
those buildings will perform better,
but in a very a very large earthquake,
our standard is that the buildings
won't kill people, won't cause casualties.
And so we know that those buildings are safe
in that perspective.
But for the community recover,
we need schools, we need housing,
we need jobs, we need places for, people to go shop
and to put all of those pieces together,
that's where this functional recovery
or resilience idea comes from
and that that effort is being led
both at the national level and at the state level
to understand what that means,
both from a technical standard, but also
for really local communities
to be the ones to identify
what are those critical functions,
what is it that this community needs?
Because it's going to be unique for different places.
Oh, that's giving away to them something. Let me go back
one. Oh, no.
All right, here we go.
So we've seen a couple of seismograms
of Nisqually shaking.
This is a slightly different
representation of that that takes the shaking
and kind of organizes it by frequency.
But that purple line
is Nisqually as measured at a seismogram
just north of the Ship Canal Bridge near
University of Washington.
And this is what we would be designing for today.
So 3 to 4 times more shaking at the peak periods,
we're designing for a much, much larger earthquake.
Nisqually was a smaller
earthquake, a moderate earthquake.
And we know
we need to be prepared for a much, much larger one.
And I'd like to close with this slide.
This is a building in Mexico City.
This killed people.
There are people's belongings hanging out
of those windows.
And this is three weeks after the earthquake.
Those people have not
had a chance to get back into their into their homes.
And this is what we want to avoid in our community.
And we know how to prevent this, we just need to to do
the work, make the investments
and be prepared to do it.
Thank you.
(applause)
-All right.
I'm going to go pretty quickly through my slides.
I think you all are getting the gist.
Aren’t ya?
All right?
Fix the brakes because shift happens.
You've seen how many pictures
of fallen bricks tonight, right?
We know what's going to happen.
1949, 1965, 2001.
The reason that these
buildings collapse
or fall outwards into the street
is because the knee bone's
not connected to the leg bone. All right?
The walls and the floors are not connected.
It's also not connected to the roof.
So any lateral or sideways movement,
which is what earthquakes
do, causes these connections to to fall apart.
I do want to point out
the image on the far right there
is from the Christchurch earthquake,
and that's a city bus that a URM collapsed onto.
There is one survivor from that and I the
the sole survivor has been pretty vocal.
There's a lot of news articles.
It's horrendous listening to her story.
We don't want that to happen here.
Again, going very quickly.
We've talked about red tagging of buildings.
It's not just the occupants
of these buildings that are impacted.
Right.
It's the people on the streets
and it's also the neighboring buildings.
So the images on the bottom there,
the red is Christchurch's central business district.
And for over a year and a half,
that central business district was closed
because there were so many damaged buildings
that needed shoring up or to be demolished.
Again, Christchurch.
That dust cloud that's from collapsing buildings.
When we demolish a building in a blue sky day,
you have to remove the asbestos
and the lead from the building.
An earthquake doesn't give you that.
So when a building collapses,
whatever toxic substances are in
that are then in the air,
and then you have to deal with all of the debris.
So when we talk about retrofitting
buildings, it's not just saving lives thing,
it's saving the economy
and it's also protecting the environment.
All of this
debris in Christchurch had to be stored in landfills.
They had to create two new landfills
and then they had to rebuild everything.
So from a carbon perspective,
not retrofitting these buildings is a
significant increase in carbon emissions.
So let's talk about what Seattle's doing.
We have 1030 unreinforced masonry buildings.
We have 79 of them that have been retrofitted,
more than 350 of our URMs are in our downtown
core and more than half of them
are located in our highest priority equity areas,
which means those that are the most in need
are going to be the most impacted by an earthquake.
But unfortunately, that also means any mandates
that we issue on retrofitting falls
onto their shoulders
because that gets passed down through increased rents
to cover the construction cost.
So we are trying to balance public safety
with affordable housing and historic preservation.
Right now,
retrofitting URMs is voluntary
unless the building owner
is doing some significant work to their building,
or changing like changing the use.
Our long term
goal is to require that.
So what is actual what does retrofitting mean?
We're connecting the kneebone to the leg bone.
We're putting through bolts,
through the walls and the floors,
and we're bracing the parapets.
It's preventing
that outward motion and that reduces the collapse.
In historic structures or historic districts,
there are guidelines about reducing the visible
appearance of retrofits.
And so rather than using through bolts, they use
epoxy or adhesive anchors from the inside
so that you can't see it.
So the building on the far right there,
you can't see any rosettes, but it's been retrofitted.
The building on the left, you can see, is circled.
But the those are called rust rosettes.
So why haven't we mandated this?
It's costs. It's 100% the cost of retrofits.
It's too expensive for most building owners to afford.
After the 1965 earthquake, legislation
was passed to require retrofits
in Pioneer Square,
and that was repealed a few years later
because it was too expensive.
And we've been talking about it ever since.
So we're coming up on 50 years of talking
about URM retrofits in Seattle.
So in 2021, the city passed legislation
that said we will create
a mandatory retrofit program
and we will reduce the financial impacts of that
and we will preserve our historical buildings.
This legislation also created my job
and Derek's job.
So how do we reduce the impact,
the financial impact of retrofits?
Well, let's start with how do we reduce the cost
of retrofitting?
So the city following suit of California
reduced the scope of what's required.
So the far left image here shows building a complete
new lateral support system in the building.
For the non engineers, it's
the one with all the blue on it.
On the right, there's less blue, right?
So it's prime, it's
prioritizing the primary structural deficiencies
with the intent
being doing something is better than nothing.
And the goal here is collapse prevention.
So how do we get people to just
do the bare minimum that prioritizes
life, safety and reducing the risk of collapse.
I will also add...
Can you go back one?
Oh, dear.
K, I got it.
Okay. Okay.
I also want to highlight two things.
In 2024, we adopted through the Seattle
existing building code this standard saying this
reduced scope is the new minimum
standard to be considered recognized
to be recognized as retrofitted in the city.
We also defined what retrofitted means,
and this was a huge milestone in city's
discussion about
URMs
because in the past we hadn't defined
what retrofitted meant.
And so building
owners were like, well, I don't want to do anything
if you're just going to keep moving the goalposts.
So by adopting this, we said, this is the minimum
and this was what it means to be retrofitted.
So how much does it cost?
Right.
This reduced scope of retrofit costs
anywhere from $45 a square foot to $75
once you add on all of the other things.
This is a significant cost savings, the
existing code compliant method,
comprehensive method, if you will, is anywhere
from $156 to $600 a square foot.
So even though we've reduced the scope and, thereby
reduced the cost, building owners still struggle.
But let's talk about the other things
that Seattle has done
to make retrofitting more affordable.
In addition to reducing the scope of work,
we provide free 15 minute coaching for building owners
so that they can make sure
that their plans are going to be compliant,
that they are on the right
path to successfully retrofitting their building.
I'm sure many of you saw the news about Seattle's
permit fees going up.
Not for URMs. URM retrofits
get a 50% reduction on permit fees.
Additionally, we are exploring transfer
of development rights and we are hoping that
this year we will have some rules for transfer
development rights in both the UDistrict and Uptown.
And I don't want to get into what TDR is,
but it's essentially if you are a building
has unused development area up above it often
called air rights,
you could sell
that developable area to another building owner
that could then add on
and then you could use the profit of that
to pay for your retrofit.
The video that we showed earlier
explicitly said this is not just a Seattle issue.
Right. So what is state doing?
What about federal funding?
Let's talk about federal funding first.
The city of Berkeley, California,
has a grant program
funded by FEMA to provide partial reimbursed,
partial reimbursements
to building owners for retrofits.
We're trying to copy that.
We got phase
one of that grant funding, which is like $120,000
to prove to FEMA that it's cost effective,
but that funding has been frozen.
So our phase two of actually getting
funding for reimbursement funds,
where did it go?
It's very uncertain,
despite court
judge orders saying you have to release these funds,
there's been no movement.
We're also waiting on another grant
again, that's been held up
that would allow us to bring insurers and real estate
experts and lenders together
to develop some financial incentives.
But again,
we don't know where that money is.
We don't know if or when we're going to get it.
Let's talk about the state.
So I mentioned
at the beginning the Fix the Bricks campaign.
There were some Fix
the Brick stickers over there
and I still have one that says Support House Bill
1810.
I cut it off of all the others
because House Bill 1810 did not pass.
I will say the Leslie Knope of earthquakes
did cry as she was cutting each individual sticker.
We were asking for a total of $2.4 million,
and that would have funded
the completion of the state's inventory of URM.
So identifying
where are
these URMs all across the state
so that we can retrofit them.
And then also it would develop financial incentives
to make retrofits more affordable,
to try and increase our likelihood of success
getting this bill passed.
We did the Fix the Bricks campaign.
So we went
we went down to Olympia.
We handed out brick
gummy fruit snacks with stickers that said “Fix the Bricks.”
The Bricklayers union partnered
with us and went down in bright
orange sweatshirts that said, “Fix the Bricks.”
We met with multiple legislators
and they were all supportive,
leading leading up to it.
We had a social media
campaign called “Fix the Bricks,”
starting at the end of September last year,
where we released that call to action retrofit video
and we tried to post
something on social media every single week.
How many of you has actually saw one of those posts?
Okay, so my friends. Great.
Great.
So we had some really good ones for Halloween.
We had this scary cost of retrofits,
which I was very excited about.
Raffone Construction did that.
We also had
the Valentine's Day post about loving our URM
buildings.
We had Veterans Day posts about veteran buildings
that were posted.
Man we reached every week
or how do we make this relevant?
And it was really hard.
Our...The city has really strict rules on lobbying
and what you're allowed to say.
Our state counterparts, like career,
career earthquake preparedness experts, right?
They weren't even allowed to acknowledge
that this bill existed,
even though they helped us write it.
SDCI is
in the city's social media,
they were great at posting things.
We had like four likes, though.
I mean, inside
it's been really complicated and challenging
and we had a number of organizations
that were super supportive, but they're like,
we don't have social media or they're like,
we didn't realize we had to get board
approval for this.
And so then and things would fall through.
So the ability and then I will also say
the ability to say
that these buildings are vulnerable.
We had we had some challenges with
we had we had some agencies that are like, we are we
we know that they're vulnerable,
but we don't want to scare people.
And maybe people need to be scared.
You know, we're coming up on 50 years
of talking about URMs
and 25 years post Nisqually.
We need to take action,
we need to make some investments in this.
So let's talk next steps.
You all should get that joke now.
You all know what threw bolt's are.
I will say in past talks with Harold Tobin,
he has told me stopping plate tectonics would create
more problems than it would solve.
So this is probably not a good idea.
The first thing we need to do is figure out
what do we need to do to get this to pass at the state.
And I don't actually know how to figure that out.
Representative Polette has been wonderful
and in meeting with us and advocating for this
and asking for a hearing and his response
was, I don't know why we didn't hear this.
My assumption is it's a bad budget year, but it's been
how many years of bad budget years right?
We need federal funding.
Just period that one.
And then it comes to coalition building.
Right. So we need to make more noise.
We need folks with stronger social media accounts,
we need lobbyists.
We need people to link this with affordable housing
and with climate change
and with economic measures because it fits into
all of them.
So it shouldn't be either or, it should be
and and with that, I will just say
we need coalition building.
And that includes all of you here tonight.
This campaign will continue in some form,
after I take a vacation.
But I really appreciate you all being here tonight.
We are going to open it up to Q&A
and I'll ask my speakers
to come up to this table and just say
again, policy changes don't happen in a straight line.
The risk still exists and so we'll fix the breaks.
(applause)
Any questions?
I think my brother had one.
No, no, he's back now.
And do you want to come to a microphone?
Or you can yell too, if you'd prefer.
-Yeah.
Thanks again for putting this on.
I was here on the Tuesday one at U-Dub and
it was really cool to see.
There is much more of a
emergency management focus at this talk
than the previous talk, although I love hearing
about plate tectonics and everything. I did have
kind of a question and then a comment.
So the question that I have is
are is everybody slide decks available online anywhere
that can be downloaded?
-So the Seattle Channel
is here filming
and they will be posting it in a few days.
-Thank you. Good.
And then I did have a comment.
As so, as mentioned in Jim's video,
I wanted to encourage everybody to find out where
their local emergency communication hub is
in Seattle
and attend one of their
many upcoming meet and greet events.
at hubs in your area of the city;
They don't just need structural engineers.
They need anybody from who have any number of skill
sets from nurses, food service professionals,
bicycle mechanics, anybody who could
help out in that precious,
you know,
24 hours to week long period
it might take FEMA
to roll in and and provide extra services and help.
-I know the answer!
-Thank you.
-I have two questions.
One for the audience, How many of you have taken
ATC 20? 30
Good. Okay.
How many are you in
assigned or signed up with WASE?
About the same number.
Okay, good, good.
So that's one of our points of of the response.
The other question is that crustal movement
that creates the Seattle fault,
kind of a clockwise rotation of the crust,
how much is that moving as compared
to the subduction zone moving, do you know?
-Yeah, we do know
we're getting deep in the tectonics here.
But yes, the
the slip rates for those faults is much less
than the subduction zone.
The subduction zone is really the big kahuna.
So that's, you know, moving at a rate of something like
four centimeters per year
as fast as your fingernails grow.
Just let them go and don't we
if we only had some really giant
finger fingernail clippers. Right.
But but meanwhile, meanwhile, faults
like the Seattle Fault
are moving at a couple of millimeters
per year, so it's ten times slower,
which is why the earthquakes
are less frequent and also smaller.
That's a good thing.
But unfortunately, there is still
damaging earthquakes potentially.
-Okay.
Thank you,
-Kyle.
I have kind of a nerdy question for you,
and that is when you are designing
an earthquake proof structure,
can you talk about the
differences between power and energy
that's released in an earthquake?
Is that too nerdy?
-No, no, I think I can I can touch on that.
I do have to say we don't like the term
earthquake proof.
There's
really very little upper bound in the amount
of shaking that might occur at a site.
And one of the interesting and in some ways
it's good that we know this,
but in some ways it's unfortunate.
It feels like in every earthquake
around the world we learn that
the shaking can just be a little bit harder.
You know, some of the recordings
from Turkey, just a couple years ago,
some really astronomical
horizontal accelerations for some of those buildings.
And so we we know that there can always
be a bigger earthquake.
We do kind of set
a cap of what is reasonable to design for.
That cap is set really in a political sense,
as much as if it is an engineering sense.
We could
we can always add more structure,
but at some point it becomes
economically unfeasible to build anything
and we need to build. So when we design
we're considering
the acceleration, which is kind of that power
discussion that you're talking about.
We also need to consider the duration of the earthquake
because as we've talked about,
an earthquake like Cascadia could maybe have smaller
acceleration, smaller forces on the buildings,
but lasting much, much longer time and deliver
a lot more energy over that longer timeframe.
And the more cycles we get,
the more damage that accumulates,
and particularly for buildings
like the unreinforced masonry buildings, these non
ductile concrete buildings,
sometimes it just takes that one extra cycle
to take a building from looking fine to collapsing.
And so, you know, that amount of total energy
that's delivered to buildings
are also really important. You know, thanks.
-Another engineering question.
So with a very long period of shaking
like you might get
from the Cascadia event or something,
those really tall buildings downtown to me
look to be very close to each other.
Is there a chance they would actually sway so much
they would touch each other and actually
start getting damaged that way?
-They shouldn't as the short answer.
Now, that is for buildings
that are built to modern codes.
There are obviously older buildings that are
sometimes quite close to each other.
Some of the older buildings
are in fact touching each other.
New codes mandate seismic gaps
between them
because those tall buildings
can sway on the order of several feet,
even the fairly stiff ones,
once they get quite tall.
And so we mandate that they that they be separated.
We make an estimate of each building's movement.
And in very large earthquake and then
basically add those two numbers together
and the gap needs to be at least that big.
Some of the buildings you can see downtown
that look like they're touching actually
do have a gap.
It's just covered by a piece of sheet
metal or something like that that will be
damaged in an earthquake.
But if you take that away, there actually is a gap
there between the structures or sometimes
it's a rubber bearing or something like that.
Yeah.
-Let's do one more question.
-I know we talk a lot about URMs
and there's a lot of good ways to retrofit them.
Are there similar programs
for other dangerous buildings like tilt up
buildings or soft story buildings?
And are there good ways to mitigate them?
-There are good ways to mitigate them.
We have not inventoried them yet in Seattle.
We're we're starting with the worst and then
and then proceeding from there.
California is already looking at non ductile
concrete.
They've addressed their tilt up structures.
Their soft story structures were good
30 years behind where California is.
All right.
Well, we are
We're over time. Okay. Last one.
-So a lot of the discussion
has revolved around getting federal funding,
state funding for kind of dictating all of these things.
Can you speak to the
a different approach of
policy changes with building insurance
and kind of coming from the bottom up?
-Yeah, insurance is a big question
and it gets tricky pretty quickly.
So for starters, earthquake insurance is not required
in Washington state. And that's the thing
that California is much better at.
So getting insurers into the like into the conversation
has actually been pretty challenging.
We are hoping to bring insurers
and lenders and real estate
experts to the table to try and figure this out.
I will say there's some precedent out of California
where a brick building collapsed in an earthquake
and it killed two women
and the building owner was sued
and the building owner said, well,
I still had ten years, however many years left
it was to retrofit.
And the courts found that
the building owner had been informed
of the vulnerability of their building
and regardless of the city's compliance
timeline, they had not taken action to retrofit. So
that would be a
bit of a warning to you building owners in Seattle,
if you have been informed and every building owner
that owns a URM was informed in 2016
that just because you don't have earthquake insurance
liability insurance is a thing.
So it's a great question.
The insurance market I will just add
the insurance market is just hemorrhaging money
right now. Right.
All the fires, all the flooding from the hurricanes
and then like the lack car crashes during COVID
because no one was driving
really emptied their coffers.
So I think insurers are supportive of reducing risk.
Right.
So there could be an
opportunity for the insurance industry
to actually profit off of this
in terms of new policies
as well as reduced risk.
But we
you know, we need to bring those experts to the table.
And we're currently waiting on a grant from FEMA
for around $200,000 to try and facilitate that question
or the conversation, rather.
All right.
Well, with that, thank you all so much for coming.
Really appreciate it.