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City convenes Tall Building Safety Strategy Summit; ATC report proposes 16 recommendations
Summary
City officials and engineering experts presented a Tall Building Safety Strategy and an inventory of tall buildings; recommendations address new-building performance, retrofit priorities, inspection/assessment processes and a downtown recovery framework.
San Francisco convened a Tall Building Safety Strategy Summit on June 21, at which local officials, academic experts and technical advisers reviewed an inventory of tall buildings and a 16-point strategy for improving seismic performance, inspection and post-disaster recovery.
Greg Dierlein of the Applied Technology Council outlined an inventory focused on buildings taller than 240 feet and described three cohorts of concern: older non-ductile concrete towers, pre-1994 steel moment-frame buildings and newer tall reinforced-concrete residential buildings. He summarized modeling that showed functional recovery times after a design-level earthquake could be several months (three to six months) depending on building type and identified impeding factors — permit delays, engineering and contracting timelines, inspection bottlenecks — that lengthen recovery time.
Panelists and city staff discussed options including higher performance design for new tall buildings, enhanced geotechnical review, broadening the Building Occupancy Resumption Program (BORP), peer review for code exceptions, and a downtown recovery study to tie lifelines, permitting, and economic recovery planning together. City staff emphasized the need to coordinate lifelines (power, water, transportation), prioritize inspection capacity and consider both short- and long-term recovery trade-offs.
Speakers from Seattle and Santa Rosa described recovery-framework work and practical lessons: Seattle emphasized public engagement and recovery support functions that include education and land-use planning; Santa Rosa recounted debris removal and permitting processes after its 2017 fires and the importance of rapid debris clearance for housing recovery.
Next steps: DBI, Planning and DEM staff said they would continue to refine code and administrative practices (including geotechnical guidance and BORP expansion) and pursue stakeholder outreach before recommending regulatory changes to the Board and commissions.
