San Francisco Quake Risk Study Shelved

A study commissioned and then shelved by San Francisco officials found the city would lose nearly 30,000 buildings and suffer hundreds of fatalities if a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck along the San Andreas fault.

The study by Applied Technology Council of Redwood City found that nearly 70% of the destroyed structures would be concentrated in residential areas such as the Richmond, Sunset and Twin Peaks neighborhoods, which have many older homes and apartment buildings.

Tens of thousands of people could be left homeless in such a disaster while losses could reach nearly $14 billion. The study estimates that up to 650 people would be killed or seriously injured.

The report was issued over a year ago, but the San Francisco Building Inspection Department canceled the work before it was completed because officials were unhappy with its quality, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s regional coordinator on earthquake hazards for Northern California, Mary Lou Zoback, defended the report as “the most comprehensive look at a realistic loss estimation for any urban area in the United States.” Zoback was part of an advisory committee that oversaw the report’s preparation.

The findings highlight a potential crisis that has been overlooked in previous analyses of the effects of a large quake on San Francisco, said Patrick Buscovich, a structural engineer who served on a city advisory panel set up to assess the seismic vulnerability of private buildings.

“Until this report, we weren’t even thinking about the residential areas of the Sunset and Richmond districts,” said Buscovich. “We’d never grasped there was going to be a lot of housing losses there.”