Inspectors’ Tags Decree Buildings’ Fate

In normal times, people here probably wouldn’t pay much attention to Donald Munakata. He’d be just another guy with a clipboard and a breast pocket full of pens who works somewhere in the Public Works Department at a job that’s kind of technical, one that not many people understand much about.

These are not normal times, however, so to many people in this earthquake-ravaged city these days, a guy like Donald Munakata can seem like God.

Munakata is a city building inspector, one of hundreds of technicians from the city and private industry deputized to make assessments of the safety of battered houses and apartments in the upscale but badly shaken Marina District. The fate of thousands of damaged buildings as well as their occupants may hinge on swift judgments made by men like Munakata.

On Friday, he walked quickly through a large apartment building on Cervantes Street, poking his flashlight into the basement and then into a series of darkened bathrooms, bedrooms and kitchens before ending up in the lobby, which was covered with fallen plaster.

Finally, despite the dust, he pronounced the building safe and slapped a white, mimeographed sticker on the front door. “Inspected,” it read in big print. “No restrictions on use and occupancy.”

“Ninety-nine percent of what we do is visual,” explained Pat Nurisso, another city inspector. “That’s all we can do.”

Inspectors have conducted more than 1,000 such walk-throughs in the Marina area since Tuesday’s earthquake. Their evaluations are funnelled down to a disaster command post at the Marina Middle School and are used to determine not only the fate of structures but also who should get access to them.

Late Friday, Mayor Art Agnos told reporters that it appeared that as many as 20 buildings in the area may eventually have to be razed. Other officials said at least four buildings at the intersection of Divisadero and Jefferson streets are listing at a sharp angle and are in imminent danger of collapse.

Based on the inspector reports, officials at the school have devised a color-coded pass system to determine which residents should be allowed back in their homes and for how long. People who live in structures that are deemed safe are issued green colored slips of paper that allow them to pass through police lines and reinhabit their homes.

Yellow slips, issued to those whose homes have been damaged but not beyond repair, authorize entry for brief periods in the presence of a building inspector to remove possessions. Red slips, on the other hand, indicate that the structure is severely damaged and is considered a candidate for demolition.

In some cases, authorities have allowed bearers of red slips to return home and retrieve possessions, but required them to sign liability waivers before entering their buildings. So far, at least 47 buildings have been tagged red, but city officials have promised that no building will be torn down before owners have the opportunity to have independent safety experts evaluate their conditions. Ultimately, however, the decision whether to demolish is up to the city.

By 8 a.m. Friday, several hundred anxious Marina residents were already lined up in the school parking lot to obtain their access cards and discover the fate of their homes. Waiting patiently well back in the pack was baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio, who has lived in the same Marina-area home since 1937.

“I’m just like anybody else; I’m just waiting in line,” said DiMaggio, who later was handed a yellow tag and then chauffeured to his home by a high-level building department official.

Inside the school, technicians pored over inspection reports, mental health counselors dispensed advice to those left homeless, and red- and yellow-ticketed residents waited in the auditorium for appointments with inspectors who would escort them to their homes.

Every once in a while, an official would step to the front of the stage and announce a list of buildings that had been reevaluated and upgraded from a yellow to green status. “101 Cervantes,” he said once, evoking squeals from the back of the room. “2121 Bay,” he added, bringing applause from the back of the room.

Out in the streets, the scene resembled a giant a swap meet. Residents poured into the area with shopping carts, plastic bags, boxes and even children’s wagons to carry away what possessions they could from damaged homes. Streets and intersections were littered with bureaus, chairs, stereos, televisions and other paraphernalia.

A procession of furniture vans, pickups and station wagons lined Chestnut Street just outside the police cordon.

As inspectors watched, residents raced through their apartments, tossing clothing out windows to the ground and handing larger, bulkier items out lower-story windows to others on the ground.

Madeline Foss and Pat Duff, both accountants, were concentrating on rescuing their big-ticket possessions, including a pair of windsurf boards, a microwave oven and stereo. “It was Yuppie town down here, but now it’s all destroyed,” she said. “The money items get taken first.”

Police said they had set up a special cordon around a block of red-tagged homes that were leaning precariously. They said some residents were ignoring the danger and sneaking in to retrieve belongings.

At one of those buildings in danger of tipping over, an officer said he found a man lugging a wide-screen TV set onto a balcony. Said another policeman: “I saw a guy crawl through the rubble of one building and come out grabbing with a Bruce Springsteen poster. There is nothing except maybe my son that would get me in that building.”

Liz Burrie, 37, just wanted to get back in her home to find Kona Kittie, her cat. But with the help of a building inspector and a policeman, she also managed to haul her cookbooks, lawn chairs, a butcher block table and other possessions down to the street. “It’s rather embarrassing,” she said. “My whole life is on the street for everybody to see.”

The cat, who was still in the house when Burrie arrived, was frightened by all the moving activity and fled out a window.

One woman, helping her daughter remove belongings from a red-tagged building at Beach and Divisadero, paused briefly to pick up a small child’s eraser that she found on the ground. “I wish we could take this and just erase all these problems out of our minds,” she said wistfully.