SPUR's San Francisco Resilience Plan

SPUR, the San Francisco Planning & Urban Research Association has come up with a plan to make San Francisco a more disaster, specifically earthquake, resilient city.

SPUR states that currently: 

-"Design and construction requirements for new construction still focus mostly on preventing the loss of life and in most cases ignore the question of building damage and post-earthquake usability".

-"Little is being done to rehabilitate older existing structures, which constitute the majority of buildings and which were built without earthquake-resistant features now required".

-"There is no consistent approach to providing, maintaining, and restoring lifeline systems that are needed to support economic recovery".

SPUR's Goals are to:

1. "Define the concept of "resilience" in the context of disaster planning".

2. "Establish performance goals for the "expected" earthquake that supports our definition of resilience".

3. "Define transparent performance measures that help us reach our performance goals.

4. "Suggest next steps for San Francisco's new buildings, existing buildings and lifelines".

SPUR is striving to minimize the death casualties, household displacement and monetary loss. They do not want to overspend attempting to make every building earthquake-proof, but rather make improvements that "assure a quick recovery". In the case of an earthquake they want to save lives, reduce threats to public health and safety, provide shelter and medical care, restore any facilities essential to community health, safety and welfare, a****s damage, expedite restoration of services, economy and community and to keep the public up informed. Ultimately, SPUR's resilience plan intends to contain the effects of an earthquake during occurrence, carry out recovery activities and to rebuild with the intention of reducing the effects of future earthquakes.

Here is a chart of how a resilient San Francisco would respond to an earthquake:

I think SPUR's resilience plan is innovative and thorough. It seems to have thought of everything would aid the city and people in a disaster. It also stresses that keeping the community informed is vital, a point which I strongly agreed with. This ultimately will cause more people to partake in the process of creating a resilient San Francisco, a city that has already managed to recuperate from other devastating disasters. I am going to ask my aunt who lives in San Francisco about this, and if not, I will inform her. The blog post will be updated in the next couple of days.

Article: http://www.spur.org/publications/library/report/defining-what-san-f...