Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Management

Obviously, as we gather today, many of our communities are under a state of emergency due to the 11th atmospheric river that has resulted in snowed in residents in the Sierras and floods in our valleys and coastal communities. Unfortunately, thousands of residents have been displaced from their homes and face a long recovery.

As I've always said, California is a disaster prone state and we must be prepared to respond to two major disasters at the same time. When it comes to preparing for a major earthquake in California, it's not only a matter of time, if not if we need to be prepared for earthquakes in the midst of other disasters, whether it's floods, fires, or pandemic.

Today's hearing is an opportunity to hear from the leading scientists and engineers focused on mitigating the impacts for earthquakes. There's also an opportunity to hear from our local and state officials on how the state would respond to a catastrophic earthquake in California similar to earthquakes that happened in Syria and Turkey.

First of all, my heart seeing sin for the death toll that continues to rise above 50,000, and my prayers go out to all the families impacted and displaced by this tragic disaster. I'm also proud of California's and LA's willingness to send assistance.

Now I'm looking forward to hearing from LA County Fire Rescue Urban Search Rescue Team's recent deployment California TF1 today's hearing will ask us California's preparedness for major earthquakes and take a deeper dive into the lessons we've learned that we need to do.

But it's clear to me that one of the first things we need to do is adopt a real sense of urgency when it comes to preparing for our communities and infrastructure for a catastrophic earthquake in California. When I look back at my own experiences as a first responder during the 1994 earthquake earthquake, I see deaths, injuries, and multiple collapsed buildings that could have been avoided.

That is why I'm so committed to ensuring that our first responders and communities have the resources they need prepare for disasters. It is also why I'm also persistent in urging the state to do more, encourage seismic retrofits and protect our most valuable populations and infrastructure.

Before I turn over to my vice chairs for the opening statements, let me remind everybody from the public comment may be limited at the end of this hearing due to other business at Assembly and Senate. However, Members of the public are encouraged to visit my committee's website to submit written testimony or to call in at the public's comment line, which is 877-2268-163 with the passcode of 736-2834. With that, I'd like to turn over to Vice Chairs Waldron, or Vice Chair Ashley, if you'd like to say any opening remarks.

Thank you so much. I'm Angelique Ashby. I'm the Senator for Senate District Eight, and I have the good fortune of being the Vice Chair, or the lead for the Senate on this committee. And I want to start by thanking you, Chairperson Rodriguez, for putting together not just this hearing, but a series of hearings on emergency management. I think it's really important, and the Assembly is doing a very good job in leading these discussions.

It's prudent to ask the question, is California prepared for large scale earthquakes to avoid the catastrophic loss akin to what we saw in Turkey and Syria? Those are warning signs to Californians. And while we don't want to live a life of fear, we should certainly live a life of preparedness. While California faces so many emergency issues, and some are on a yearly basis now, like wildfires and floods and mudslides, earthquakes are an existential crisis that we can't ignore just because we're not certain when they will happen. Although we're getting better at figuring that out too, which I'm sure you'll hear more about today.

Since the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria hit last month, the results have been devastating for them: 50,000 deaths, thousands of buildings destroyed or so heavily damaged that those countries will have a difficult time rebuilding and completely wiped out portions of critical infrastructure.

Obviously, California has taken measures prior to this date to mitigate that type of potential loss, to not only life, but property. California programs include the earthquake authority, mitigation programs, earthquake brace and bolt. We've all been around in local government or state government long enough to know what it means to retrofit for California earthquake standards, which is good.

But I think the question being posed today is, is it enough? And the question I want to add to the mix, and I want to thank my Senate colleagues, in particular, for being here today. It's challenging to fit this into their schedules. I know it's challenging for everyone, but the Senate has fewer people, which means running around to more committees. And I thank you for taking some time to stop in here, whatever amount of time you have to give, and to our other colleagues who undoubtedly will come and go from this hearing.

When you have a catastrophic event like an earthquake, it often sets off a chain reaction. So, for example, I was a young person when the Bay Area earthquakes happened, but they certainly set off a chain of events that went far beyond the Bay Area and certainly included the Sacramento region. When you represent, say, a community with 110,000 behind a levee, you worry about the integrity of those levees, not just from earthquakes, but from anything that we could have prevented or thought about or been prepared for.

Some of my colleagues, like Senator Eggman have based an entire Bill package around what to do around flood control and how to protect levees and how to protect at risk communities. And so I appreciate that today while we're focused on earthquakes that we'll also, and I know our experts will do this, have a keen aye on the chain of events that can be set off by things like earthquakes.

We have to plan for concurrent disasters because we know that that's what will happen when you have one large enough that takes out a bridge or when you have one large enough that it triggers chaos inside of one large city, it's always going to set off a series of events in the simultaneous areas as well.

And so today, as we look at earthquakes and we compare California's preparedness to what's happened in other countries, it's my ask that the people of this committee and that the people who are presenting to this committee help us think about the best ways that we can protect the most Californians by making good decisions about how to prepare and plan for these events within reason, ways that we can help people be prepared for what might happen and at the same time, not live a life of fear and instead a life of preparedness. So thank you so much for hosting us and thank you again to my colleagues who I know will be coming and going. I really appreciate your time.

Okay, thank you very much Senator. With that said, any other questions or comments by the committee Members? If not, we'll go ahead and move over to our first panel. With us here today will be Dr. Ross Stein, an earthquake scientist and CEO and co-founder of Temblor. Dr. Stein, you may begin when you're ready.

Lee me just put up a slide here. We have gathered in an auspicious moment just a little bit more than a month since this massive earthquake sequence struck Turkey. The message of this earthquake sequence is it could happen in California. Because California and Turkey bear remarkable similarities.

The main fault system of Turkey, the North Anatolian Fault, is all but the twin of the San Andreas. And by that I mean they have the same slip rate, the same length, and as far as we understand, the same earthquake history. Now what's astonishing however, is that the magnitude 7.8 earthquake followed by a magnitude 7.9 100 kilometers, 60 miles, away 9 hours later did not occur on the major fault system, the North Anatolian Fault. It occurred on a secondary fault, a wannabe fault with one third the slip rate, one third the length, with earthquake magnitudes that we had thought would only be appropriate for the San Andreas.

So this is quite a wake up call for us. And if you want to think about similar faults to the East Anatolian fault in California in Northern California, that's the Hayward and Rogers Creek fault that runs up the East Bay; In Southern California. That's the San Jacinto fault or perhaps the Newport Inglewood fault that runs right through greater Los Angeles; Along the coast it's the San Greorio fault; and in eastern California it's the Owens Valley fault. In other words, we have lots of faults that look just like the one that produced these giant earthquakes.

So we no longer have a reason for saying that that couldn't happen to us here. They're too similar. And if I just superimpose in turquoise here the ruptures that occurred in Turkey on top of the Bay Area's fault systems in red or Southern California's fault systems in red on the right, and just rotate the ruptures so they approximately align with the faults that we have, you can see the enormity of what this calamity would be for us.

Imagine side by side, magnitude 7.8 and 7.5 earthquakes on both sides of the Bay or both sides of Los Angeles. Now, you might ask me, okay, tell us what the consequences of such an event would be in California. And of course, that's very difficult to do. But very roughly, I will tell you that it would cause probably one hundredth of the loss of life in California compared to Turkey, but 100 times the cost.

Let me give you even a better answer to that question. Whatever it is, by funding this legislation, by recognizing that we have collapse risk buildings, that we need to retrofit buildings, we will reduce both: we will reduce both the loss of life and the cost of reconstruction and the time it takes to recover.

So whatever that holds for us and certainly earthquakes like this in our future, we can do better. And the way to do better is to get ahead of the problem, which unfortunately the Turkish government didn't do, and recognize that we have collapsed risk buildings and address them for seismic safety. Thank you.

Thank you. Our next witness is the incoming President, Ryan Kersting of the National Council of Structural Engineers Association. Mr. Kersting, you may begin.

Thank you, chair and Members, for the opportunity to be here today to speak with you, and Assemblymember Rodriguez and Senator Ashby, your hearts and minds are certainly in the right place and convening this hearing is a great first step, and we look forward to working with you on action that can really achieve the mitigation and reduce the risk that we're talking about today.

So, as you said, I'm Ryan Kersting. I am a practicing structural engineer here in Sacramento. I work right in your district, and I believe I'm living in the other district down here with the other Senator, debating on whether you look online with the Redistricting. It's not quite clear anymore, so out in Fair Oaks. So happy to be part of the constituency here today.

I'm speaking on behalf of the Structural Engineers Association of California. You mentioned the National Council. SEOC for Structural Engineers of California is one of those chapters. And I'm also here today representing Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, or EERI.

Together, these organizations have both been active for the last 75 years and represent thousands of experts across the country when it comes to understanding building code requirements for earthquake design, when it comes to understanding the performance of our buildings following an earthquake, when it comes to effective policies for earthquake preparedness; these are the experts you want to be hearing from, and these are the experts you want to be talking to.

On a personal note, I've also been involved at the federal level with many government agencies at the federal level, and I want to highlight some of those activities for you today. Because California should be ready and needs to be ready to implement what the federal government is working on. But there's a role for the California government, to play here. It's not just going to all be taken care of by the federal government.

So, for decades, California has led the world in developing and adopting and enforcing building codes and laws to improve our seismic safety. We should be commended for the work we've done. Part of this process, admittedly, involves learning from earthquakes and learning from earthquakes around the world, like those in Turkey, and also those over the last ten to 15 years from New Zealand, Chile, and Japan.

And these earthquakes need to be reminders for us that even in California, even with the expertise we've had and leadership we had, we need to continue to do our work and we need to continue to do more. And the good news is, we can do more. And we do have solutions and ideas for you to consider as policies to mitigate our risk.

So despite this leadership, we still are at risk of collapsed older buildings and of significant economic and social disruption due to prolonged recovery, even of newer, modern code compliant buildings. SEOC and EERI have identified three priority actions that are critical to improving our safety and our resilience.

First, we must identify and retrofit our existing vulnerable buildings. SEOC and EERI both support the California Residential Mitigation Program that was approved last year, but it needs to be funded and initiated this year to continue to help jurisdictions identify and retrofit our vulnerable housing stock.

Second, we must uphold existing laws and regulations that require our healthcare facilities to be earthquake ready. We all recognize that hospitals play an essential life saving role in post earthquake response and recovery for our communities. And we must continue to support these laws and regulations so that our facilities are retrofitted and can serve our communities when desperately needed.

And finally, and I'm going to take a little bit more detail here on this part, we must adopt building codes that help our communities recover. New buildings are built to current codes, but that does not necessarily mean they're all built to last following an Earthquake. Our current code limits the likelihood that a new building could collapse in an earthquake by providing safe ways to dissipate energy by allowing damage and controlling where it occurs, kind of like the crumple zones in a car protect the occupants when an accident happens.

This approach to safety in our new codes has been shown to be successful and reliable, but we can't earthquake proof everything we have to make sure we understand this right. It still comes with a small probability of collapse. It also means that there might be a chance that your building will be unusable following an earthquake because we want to prioritize safety, and that's what we've been doing for number of years now.

Also keep in mind these new codes, these great ideas that we've been working on for the last 15, 20, 50, 75 years, new codes only apply to new buildings. They don't apply retroactively, and I think people understand that, but it's worth repeating just to make sure we're all clear. So currently, developers, designers, owners, we're not currently required to consider the functional recovery of our buildings in terms of how quickly we can recover function after an earthquake.

So if we want better preparedness and if we want better resilience, we need to design and build for more than just safety. Thankfully, the federal government has been doing its job and others have been working with them for the past five to 15 years to advance engineering science so that we know what we need to quantify this recovery time in terms of what we're getting out of our safety based codes.

Meanwhile, SEOC and EERI have been involved in additional efforts by the federal government more recently to develop and promote these as code provisions, as design approaches and construction practices that will provide this improved post earthquake function recovery of buildings. The first draft of these provisions are being developed right now. It's a committee I'm actually chairing, and are expected to be completed later next year.

So California needs to be prepared to review these proposed changes and these proposed code provisions and consider how we can adopt them here in California for our unique conditions, our unique recovery needs. A recently released federal report that I also helped work on recognizes the need for, and in fact, it encourages state and local governments to take control of their destiny.

We can't rely on the federal government. The federal government doesn't actually control the building codes, but state and local jurisdictions have that authority and responsibility. In 2021, the legislator came very close to requiring California to just start the process of adopting our codes or updating our codes to consider functional recovery, but the Bill, AB.1329, stalled and failed to make it to Governor Newsom's desk.

We must lead again and adopt this as an idea for us to consider. We need to be considering how California can adopt this functional recovery building code to help our communities recover faster. I think all of us will agree we would like to work proactively on this. We want to be addressing this proactively. And we talk about the need to avoid catastrophic loss.

Avoiding catastrophic loss requires proactive and pre-disaster action. First responders are going to do an amazing job. You're going to hear from some of them later. They're going to do an amazing job at rescuing people, at saving lives. But they're also going to have their hands full, particularly for earthquakes in fighting fires following an earthquake. And so we need to recognize we can't just rely on our heroes to save us.

And when it comes to recovery, we need to be thinking about pre-earthquake action we can be taking. So we know future large earthquakes are going to occur. We hear it from the experts. But how we prepare now will impact how we respond and how we recover later. We must take that action now to retrofit older existing buildings and to adopt this new generation of building codes that preserve our communities, our economy, and our future before the next major earthquake hits. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Ryan. I appreciate it. Our last witness on the first panel is Executive Director Evan Reis of the US. Resiliency council. Mr. Reis, you may begin when ready.

Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Evan Reis. I'm a structural engineer and I'm Executive Director of the nonprofit US Resiliency Council. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. The USRC's mission is to improve community resilience by advocating to make buildings more resilient in all natural disasters. Our guiding principle is engineering min the service of equity, the environment, and our economy.

Last year. The USRC sponsored AB 1721, a Bill that was authored by Chairman Rodriguez and Assembly Member Chris Holden. The Bill appropriated $250,000,000 in grant funding towards the seismic retrofit of soft story apartment buildings. The Bill was passed unanimously by the Assembly and eventually was signed by Governor Newsom as part of a budget trailer Bill, Senate Bill 189. Unfortunately, in his January budget, the Governor did not include the appropriated funds.

So on behalf of the more than 50 leading structural engineering companies that are Members of the US resilience Council, I'm here to urge your support for funding of this critical program. You've heard Dr. Stein speak about the similarities between the recent earthquakes in Turkey and the potential for catastrophic events in California.

The USGS's shakeout scenario projects what would follow after a magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Southern California, so the same size as the Turkey earthquake, predicts nearly 1800 deaths, 50,000 injuries, and the potential for more than 250,000 residents to be displaced from their homes.

Many of those impacted will live in soft story apartment buildings exactly like the ones this retrofit program would aim to fix. Many of the building collapses witnessed in Turkey and Syria were buildings that also contained soft stories. A typical soft story building is an apartment building of two or more stories located over a ground level that has large openings either for parking or retail space.

Although we begin to retrofit these soft story buildings, this building type is still amongst the most common and the most collapsed prone in communities throughout California. During the 1994 Northridge earthquake, 16 people perished in the collapse of just one of these apartment complexes that had this type of deficiency.

California has an estimated one hundred thousand soft story apartment buildings that may house upwards of 2.5 million people. Nearly every county in the state has from dozens to potentially thousands of these structures. You just heard Ryan Kersting state that mitigating our most vulnerable existing buildings is one of the key strategies the structural engineering community believes is essential to making California more resilient when the big one strikes us.

And to that end, the organizations he represents, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute and the Structural Engineers Association of California, as well as more than 40 universities and other public institutions across the state, have signed a letter, which is in your packet, supporting this funding for this critical need.

Now, Senator Ashby, you made a really good point in your opening about what can we do to protect the most number of lives with the scarce funds that we have? Well, the good news is these buildings are typically the easiest to seismically retrofit by adding steel frames or wood shear walls at that ground floor.

Retrofit costs range from $5000 to $10,000 per unit. Now compare that to more than $500,000 currently in California that it takes to build one unit of affordable housing. There's simply no more efficient way to protect Californians from seismic risks than to retrofit these soft story buildings. We estimate it could protect the lives of up to a hundred thousand Californians with this funding. So I think that's very efficient.

This retrofit grant program goes to the heart of equity, as so many of these buildings house our most vulnerable populations seniors, lower income families, and those with disabilities. I can think of no other way seismic mitigation funds could be becker targeted towards socially vulnerable communities than through the retrofit of these soft story apartment buildings.

It also has a direct impact on our client, on our climate. The greenest building is the one already built, right. Preserving these structures means less debris and landfills leaching toxic chemicals into our air, water and soil. And it means less carbon put into the atmosphere when replacing destroyed buildings with new ones.

Restoring funding to this retrofit program would protect the workforces of our communities and their small businesses and preserve property tax revenues that cities and counties will desperately need after a major earthquake. And of course, it would create tens of thousands of good engineering and construction jobs across the state min every county.

I would like to note that the US. Resiliency Council assembled a diverse coalition of supporters of this Bill, including local and statewide fair, housing advocates and apartment owners, associations, environmental organizations and chambers of commerce, cities and builders. I think you agree: these are not groups that usually agree on a whole lot, and for them to come together to support this retrofit program is truly unprecedented and reflects the importance of the funding.

I strongly urge the committee to support AB 15 Five and restore funding for the Soft Story Mitigation program and to urge the Governor to restore funding into his budget. It's $250,000,000. It's a lot of money, but chances are it'll take about ten years to spend that kind of funding. So think about that in the long term. The ability to protect 100,000 Californians. In my opinion, it will do more good for our communities and vulnerable populations than just about any seismic legislation in the past 75 years. Thank you again for your time.

Thank you very much for Members of the first panel. So we'll bring it up here for a couple questions or comments by the committee. I just have one quick question here. You answered a lot of the other ones I was going to ask regarding our infrastructure, our gas, water lines, roads, highways. On a scale of one to 10, 10 being the worst, how do you think California fares right now if we have that major earthquake today, whether in Southern California or Northern California, what do you think we would fare in that area?

I think PG&E has done a very good job preparing for earthquakes. Maybe they didn't do as well preparing for wildfires, but I think they've been focused on this for quite a bit of time. As far as water resources, I'm not knowledgeable enough to speak on that.

There are several major water transmission pipes that run across, literally across, the San Andreas vault as they come from the Colorado River. And so there have been numerous studies by LA Department of Water Power, others showing that those are highly vulnerable. So, yes, our water grid in particular is highly vulnerable because these pipes travel a long distance a lot of time. A lot of times it's east to west or north to south across vaults.

Yeah. The federal report that I helped write a couple of years ago was published back in '21, talked a lot about the need to retrofit existing buildings, design new buildings better, but also look at our infrastructure, and it identified that across the country there's real inconsistency about the earthquake design parameters that are being used and the amount of awareness even that communities have about the vulnerabilities. So I think it's something we really need to be looking at in terms of our infrastructure, particularly, like Evan said, the water system.

Thank you. Any other questions? Committee Members? Senator Archuleta. Go ahead.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you for coming forward and I guess making us nervous, and that's a reality, not to scare us, but make us nervous. And I think that nervousness will wake us up. And so my question is, of course, we just heard the chair of the infrastructure, which is vital, whether it be water utilities, our freeway, bridges and so on. So should we be putting, if we had the magic wand, should we be putting the resources on that, or should we be aiding developers and homeowners in their retrofitting programs as partners? Which do you think we ought to do first?

The Federal report talks about doing both. Unfortunately, people that have heard me talk about this in the engineering community hear me talk about a lot about chickens and eggs, carts and horses. We have to work on making progress on both the infrastructure in terms of utilities and buildings at the same time. We can't wait for one or start with one without the other. We need both. And so there is a manageable plan we can accomplish, but we need to start making progress. And that's the first step, is to start making progress on both.

Well, that's an expensive proposition with both at the same time, but I think we've got to help the homeowners with the structure that, as you mentioned, older anything over. And in California we have structures now, single family resident apartment buildings that are 40 and 50 years old that may need more help than those that are being built over the last few years. So would you address that?

I'll let Evan jump in here in a second too, though, because I will reiterate that the most important thing is to have shelter for our citizens and to keep them safe. If we have our citizens in our communities, they are going to need the utilities, but we need to make them safe first. So I would say personally, I would focus on the buildings first, recognizing that we can work around some of the utility constraints. We can bring in water, we can bring in some temporary facilities for that, but we need to have our occupants be safe first.

Yeah, I'll agree with that. I would say that that's sort of one of the reasons the US resiliency Council put the retrofit of these soft story apartment buildings at the top of its list. These are lower income, more vulnerable populations. We've seen these buildings collapse. Even if they don't collapse, they can be so heavily damaged that people can be displaced.

And of course, a lot of these folks have the least ability to find alternative housing should their building not be functional and not be usable for period of time. So sheltering in place by protecting some of these older buildings, older apartment buildings in particular, is a great way to go.

I'd also say that the federal government over the past few years has been making a lot of money available through grants and other types of programs, their Brick grants and their HMGP grants through FEMA. And so there is a lot of federal funding that can be accessed for sort of these larger industrial well, not industrial, but these larger infrastructure type projects like repairing water lines and big utilities. The challenge is applying that money to individual homeowners or renters, where a lot of that money is needed.

Well, it sounds to me like we need a good PR program to get people to apply for these grants.

Yes.

The other thing that I know you're well aware of, the seismic gas shut off valves because when we think about fires during an earthquake, it's because the gas lines and the shaking of the house and the combustion and the seismic gas shut off valve, as you know, it's a mechanism that will shake and turn off the gas automatically. We need to invest and partner with communities PR that at least we can stop those fires and explosions. And that's probably relatively inexpensive. We can do that right away.

And if we can promote that in a grant structure, maybe we can do that here in California and get every single house eventually in that category, but definitely the two to four to six units, we'll go ahead and do that. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Vice Chair Ashby, you had a question?

Yeah, two questions. One is for you, Mr. Reis. 100,000 sounds low, actually to me, for the number of people that would benefit from a $250,000,000 expenditure.

Right. Well, we did a rough approximation of about $5-10,000 per unit per two and a half people, basically, so in the ballpark of about $4,000 per person, right? And so that's sort of where we got the 100,000 for the 250,000,000. But that depends on how the program is structured.

It was always intended this would not be a fully it would not be a 100% grant, that it would be a matching grant of some sort so that money could be extended and could go even further depending on how the grant structure was programmed, was put together and how the choice of the apartment buildings was made. The more units per apartment, the less cost per unit, so that number could be extended.

And then lastly here, Dr. Stein, for the benefit of some of my colleagues, particularly those who are doing their very best to put forward infrastructure funding for flood control, can you draw a correlation here between some of these things we're talking about with earthquakes, Turkey, Syria, what's possible here? And the need to invest also in that flood control infrastructure?

Certainly. As many have pointed out, if we were to have even a moderate earthquake anywhere in the Bay Delta system, we would have massive collapse of the levee system, which was, of course, built 150 years ago. And the consequences for flooding downstream are enormous. Similarly, San Francisco waterfront, the seawall is extremely old and weak, and a large earthquake would cause tremendous losses along what is all fill along the San Francisco waterfront. So there's a lot of places in which earthquakes could exacerbate a problem that we've known about for some time in terms of floods.

Thank you.

Senator Dahle, you had a question.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, as somebody who has experienced full communities, burned down, Butte County, the Camp Fire was part of our district, the Orville Dam spillway broke. We've seen massive infrastructure failures over the past few years. Now we know that water is going to run downhill and we know kind of where it's going to go.

But when we go to earthquakes and we never got to see the Bill in the Senate last year that it didn't get to us. But it basically boils down to for all legislators is the amount of money that we have available and how we're going to actually do it. And we want to go to the high prone areas where we know there's a fault that is subject to something happening.

So have you looked at any other like, I know this, you're experts in your field, but for us it's a matter of looking at the budget. I'm on the budget committee, and figuring out how we're going to fund whatever it is. The budget is our priorities and obviously something that you don't know when it's going to happen tend to not get the kind of scrutiny maybe that it should because when it happens, everybody goes, hey, what happened? Why weren't you guys falling? So we have to manage risk.

At the end of the day, we're trying to figure out what's the best bang for a buck. There are a lot of other tools available to us besides just straight money from the budget. We can do for the owners of those facilities. We can do tax credits if they upgrade those older and that's our lowest, those are our poverty people that are living in these older homes.

Typically when we're trying to focus on those, somebody who has the ability to do it for their own home will do it because it's going to drive down your insurance cost as well when you upgrade your home, which is over time, an advantage. So have you looked at any other options besides just straight general fund appropriations as a tool to get us to where we want to be?

Yeah, I can speak to that. The US Resiliency Council has put a lot of effort into looking at partnerships with banks, lenders, and with insurance companies and also with cities when it comes to things like property tax, permitting, benefits, things like that. The insurance industry, as you know, is like moving the Titanic or the not the, let's not use the word the Titanic, but we use that for the banks. I guess, no, it's like turning an aircraft carrier. It's very slow. It's great when it happens, but it's very slow.

And as you may hear later today from the California Earthquake Authority, there's already a lot of overextension of insurance risk in California. So yes, we've been looking at partnerships with insurers, with lenders to make lending a lot of lenders offer, especially for these lower income apartments, green mortgages through Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. So we've been speaking with them about some sort of resilience mortgage, right, a benefit. And so all of those, I think are part of the equation.

As I mentioned in my comments, there may be as many as 2.5 million people in these apartments. So the problem is much larger than even this one budget request. That said, we believe strongly there's no more efficient way to protect as many people from earthquake risk. 100,000 people potentially from what happened in Northridge Meadows Apartments for this kind of money, because the cost per unit is just so economical.

Compare that to a 40 story older concrete condominium or apartment building where it's incredibly difficult because you have to go in and retrofit every single story of that building, not just the bottom floor. So, yes, so the USRC is committed to trying to find additional ways to get those other 2.4 million Californians protected. But we think this is very efficient.

If I could--

Follow up question is, when you do your homeowners insurance, you have to add the additional for earthquake. It's not considered in your regular package.

That's right.

So if you're someone who is renting, you'd have to get renters insurance for earthquake. And that would be an addition on that because it's not covered in your typical portfolio.

Correct.

I'll just add real quick. SEOC and EERI have also worked with Assemblyman Zarian over the past five years to work on, I think it's called the CalCAP Program, and getting seismic retrofit projects, approval for loans or reduced financing on that. So there are definitely creative ways to do it. I will acknowledge that we lackey the significant progress being made on some of these kind of voluntary incentive and low cost efforts. So it's worth continuing to explore that. But we also have to recognize that there's an economy of scale here. At some point, we're going to have to tackle this with a bigger solution.

Thank you very much. Thank you, gentlemen, for your presentation. And I just kind of wanted to tag on to Senator Ashby's comments about as we're having this talk today about seismic, which is ever so important. We have massive communities under floods right now and dislocated in the ways that we fear with seismic.

Senator Eggman?

So I guess I just wanted to reiterate the point that the same people who are impacted by earthquakes are also impacted by floods and levee failure because it's the poor people who live in unsafe buildings and south of the floodlands most of the time. So I just encourage all my colleagues, as we pay special attention to what's going on right now and its impact with earthquakes, which makes it even more frightening.

And as someone who represents the Bay Delta area, I also get a little squishy when people feels like they use seismic issues to propose larger and larger tunnels as a more safe way to transport water through my district. But we are a huge agricultural area. And certainly while there would be damage south of us, there would also be historic damage to us. So the whole system needs to be looked at and it's all its complexity.

Go ahead.

If I could add a point to that, you're making some very good points, and I think whether the disaster is a flood or a fire back to your points. Or an earthquake, I think we learn from each event. And whether or not the state has money to fund everything is always a good question, and you have to be fiscally responsible.

But I also think we should be looking at ways we design our new buildings. We think about floods and we develop new flood maps and we say we may or may not be able to build in these areas because we know there's high risk. So when it comes to earthquakes, I really do think from a state perspective, the low cost opportunity for the state is to think about how we adopt better building codes for new buildings.

So, yes, absolutely, we have to look at our existing buildings because they are a weakness. But we can start solving the problem right now for new buildings by doing better with our building codes right now. The small, small difference in cost to build buildings for recovery, not just safety.

And it's something we ought to be using AB 1329 and we ought to revive that and think about ways to authorize the Building Standards Commission to tackle this, to bring min all the stakeholders and think about the right way to do that here in California.

Thank you. Senator Cortese, you had a question?

Thank you. I know 90 plus percent of the conversation today will be on building resilience, but I just want to speak up on something that I've been off and on beating the drum on for probably about 20 years, especially at the regional level, at the Cog level, at the MPO level, in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is community resilience in terms of health, in terms of the psychology of resilience.

Talk about floods. Everybody knows the story of Katrina. I'm gonna ballpark it, I'm not a scientist, but about half of the community which was resilient enough to respond to what needed to be done in the immediate aftermath and in terms of saving their own lives in some cases. And about half the community couldn't do that.

We've just seen with the pandemic the tremendous impact it's had on behavioral health and mental health within the community. I think there's still long term effects of that. But I don't necessarily need a response if none of you are experts on that. But I've been in a lot of these discussions where that aspect has not been brought up.

And coming from a county that has the second largest public health system in the state of California, it's striking to me that those who are dealing and working in this space don't seem to be integrating the conversation with the public health systems that are out there in terms of how do you deal with that sort of lockdown situation that you naturally get post an earthquake, particularly? We saw that with Loma Prieta.

I'm very well aware of that, having lived through that. And we don't even have roads, as you've been talking about roads, and emergency access points that are acknowledged in the South Bay area, for example, as points of entry and departure for bringing in blood plasma or anything else, let alone behavioral and psychological kinds of services. So if you could respond to that very quickly, I'd appreciate it. I know that could be a whole subject in and of itself, so I'm not expecting--

Well, I can respond in the ways that I understand from it as an engineer. So there was an article in the LA times a couple of years ago talking about an earthquake drill that the state of Arizona did. Arizona doesn't have big earthquakes. Their drill was what to do with the 250 to 400,000 people that have to leave California after an earthquake.

A lot of them will come to Arizona because, as I said in my comments, a lot of the folks that are in the most vulnerable communities simply just don't have access to alternative housing or alternative jobs. FEMA estimates that 40% of small businesses that close after a natural disaster never reopen.

So there are what are called direct effects and the indirect effects. And the indirect effects are people not having a job, not having a place to live, even if physically they weren't injured. And the trauma that causes them is they have to go find some other place to live.

You mentioned Katrina. It's exactly the same thing that happened in Katrina and a professor who we work with at UCLA has done some studies on what it takes for a neighborhood to become a ghost town. Basically, it doesn't take the whole neighborhood to be destroyed. It just takes enough people to be displaced. The neighborhood is no longer a vibrant place.

And that can be housing, that can be small businesses, that can be your neighborhood grocery store not creating food deserts. So I believe that you're absolutely right. And while I'm certainly no psychologist or mental health expert, I know that the precursors to those kinds of traumas can come from the devastation caused by the damage.

If Dr. Lucy Jones was here, she would remind us that the safety no longer is just getting out of your building alive. Safety is being able to survive the recovery as well. In conversations with her, and I know she works with a vast network of social scientists and community planners and psychological experts. There's a lot about the human psychology that goes into this, and I think that's where we're coming from.

Even for, The federal government has acknowledged when we wrote our report, it wasn't just a bunch of engineers writing this report. It was engineers, it was social scientists, it was economists, it was planners. And we came up with seven recommendations, four of which talked about the built environment.

The other three talked about our communities and the human aspect of things. And so there are definitely aspects of recovery that we should be thinking about as pre disaster, mitigation opportunities, educational aspects, the financial aspects, and actually just empowering people to make decisions in the light of the risk they're facing.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Any other questions? Yes, Senator Archuleta. Go ahead.

Thank you. In comparison, apples to oranges, apples to apples, the structure that we witnessed on TV that just went down in Syria and Turkey, do you see that in our structures with our engineering and everything we've done over the years? Compare one with the other because we've got rebar, we've got different methods. Even some of our tall buildings are on rollers. Give me an idea of a good comparison.

Yeah. So if you allow me to get a little detailed here for a second: the type of damage we've seen in Turkey is the type of damage that can happen here. So I'll be simple with that. The extent of damage we've seen in Turkey is not what we would expect to see here. And we've talked about this coming into this because we were kind of thinking about how to answer this question. And I want to make sure people understand.

Older buildings in California, let's say pre-1970, maybe even pre-1980, use this non-ductal concrete concept of, yes, there is rebar, but it's not built and detailed and tied together the right way that we would do it now. So our new codes don't allow that type of construction. But there are older buildings pre-1980, let's say, in California that can see that same type of collapse that we saw in Turkey.

And I'm not trying to be alarmist. I'm just trying to be very fair. We don't expect that same extent, but we do have those type of buildings here in California. So does that answer your question or you want more?

Yeah, no, that's clear. I mean, the fear is there. It's realistic. And we're absolutely right, as the vice chair mentioned, as chair, we've got to start preparing. And if we don't start knocking on some doors here in the Capitol to wake up that we've got schools, we've got nursing Jones hospitals, we've got the infrastructure, we've got a plan for 5, 10 years ahead, and it could be tomorrow.

But if we don't start, when are we going to do it? And we're talking about 100 million, 500 million, a billion. But whatever it is, think of the lives we would save. 50 million lives. What would we pay for that? To save 50 million lives? Thank you.

Thank you, Senator. Any other questions? Seeing none, we'll go ahead and go on to our next panel, but thank you all three for being here and sharing some very informational info for us. Thank you.

So now, start on our second panel. Our first witness is Deputy Chief Thomas Ewald from the Los Angeles County Fire Department. Thank you, Chief, for taking time to attend with us and thank for department's efforts in Turkey and Syria. So, Deputy Chief, when you're ready.

Good afternoon. My name is Tom Ewald, I'm the Deputy Fire Chief with the County of Los Angeles Fire Department. And on behalf of our recently appointed Fire Chief, Anthony Marrone, I just want to say it's a pleasure to be here and talk about this subject and hopefully be part of the collective solution as we move forward as local communities and as we move forward as a state as a whole. I think it's important when we take a look at our role and our response to the events in Turkey to understand the day job of what most of the people on those teams were doing.

The County of Los Angeles Fire Department represents and protects 60 of the 88 cities in Los Angeles County. We have a responsibility area of about 4000 sq mi, including about 700 miles of open ocean that is state responsible waterways. We operate from about 177 fire stations and we provide a full service of services from EMS to structural firefighting, wild land firefighting, and obviously, urban search and rescue.

So the team that was deployed to Haiti earlier in the month of February is made up of a team of, currently it's below our threshold, but we try to be at a number of about 210 people. Unfortunately, with COVID and all the things that have gone on, our team's depth has taken a bit of a hit. But we are still fully capable of being able to deploy with all the required positions.

So the deployment to Turkey involved a relationship that we have with the federal government. We provide urban search and rescue capability for FEMA, one of 28 nationwide teams that respond to domestic events, from the Oklahoma City bombing to Hurricane Katrina and numerous events in between. We also provide service to the United States Agency for International Development to their Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance, and in this case, in the Turkey deployment, that's who we were working for.

The team deployed 77 personnel, including six canines, I believe four structural specialists, and then personnel from a variety of departments. We had public works engineers, we had doctors from the Department of Health Services in LA County, and then we even had one canine handler from Santa Barbara County Fire Department. So it was a collection of trained professionals from the rank of fairly young firefighters all the way to seasoned assistant fire chiefs.

Interestingly enough, over half of the people on the team, this was their first deployment. So if you can imagine going from the training ground to the intensity of what you were seeing on TV, it was definitely an eye opener for all of them. So I think one of the big takeaways also is understanding, I'm a big fan of the word partnerships because I think when we look at these type of events, nobody has the capacity to handle this individually.

And it really takes that collaborative effort between agencies, between layers of government, between the community and business to be able to ensure that we have successful outcomes. I know it'll be used, the word will be used again in this talk today. But one of the big words I like to talk about is the whole of community. And so you can see a US&R team deployed doing great work, trying to save lives.

But when you think about an event here in California, it really starts with citizens protecting themselves and protecting their neighbors, and it climbs from there to the local government. It could be small communities like Redondo Beach, where you have a small fire department that's providing that initial service, or it could be larger organizations all the way up to our department and then even on to entities like Cal Fire.

But every level of involvement, there's an intertwined importance in the relationship between the local response agency and their community, between the local response agency upward to the region and then to the state. And then in the case of a large event here in California, obviously, that relationship with our federal partners at FEMA and other federal family partners.

And it's weird because we don't stop there. The international community plays a large role in disaster response in the Turkey response, the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, they helped coordinate the inbound support of both urban search and rescue teams and other humanitarian assistance agencies from around the globe.

One of the reports that I read indicated that there were more than 80 urban search and rescue teams from around the globe that were coordinated under a body called INSARAG, which is the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group that provides international standards for deploying teams. So saying all that, it lends its ability, it lends an understanding of the organization and the relationships that we work in.

Specifically, when I talked to the folks when they got back, you asked the question, 'What did you see and how can you overlay that on our communities?' And the big takeaway, I mean, we've heard it already with the first panel. Building codes matter. And so in Turkey, the damage that was done there was a very clear distinction between modern buildings, buildings built after 1998, and the buildings that were older that had poor construction, limited rebar, if any, poor concrete, and things of that nature.

So as we look here in California understanding the importance at the community and state level to ensure that our building codes are we've invested the money into the research and into the retrofitting to make our buildings as safe as they can be. Some of the other takeaways had to do with critical infrastructure. We talk about that here in California.

We operate on a day to day basis where we're able to provide wildfire response, very large scale across the state. We were able to support teams such as right now, the swiftwater rescue teams that are doing work throughout central California. But ultimately, in times of disaster, the reduction of critical resources, simple things like aviation fuel will be burned through at a rate three to four times what we would burn on a normal day.

And so being able to ensure that we've made plans and we have contingencies to ensure adequate logistical support to keep the army engaged. So those are a couple of things that stand out. But I go back to coordination. It all comes down to coordination. You can have well trained people, you can have well trained support systems and great infrastructure, but if you're not coordinating, if you're not building plans that go from the local community through the state to the national level.

And even as I spoke of incorporating international considerations, your plans probably have room for improvement. So with that, I'll let my other panelists here speak. But I think it's important to understand that the investment in technical teams like urban search and rescue teams, it saves lives. It costs money up front, but it does save lives.

Our folks, they didn't actually participate in any live rescues, but they were coordinating about 20 teams in their area of responsibility. And there was an accounting of over 20 live rescues that were made as part of that coordination. So with that, I just want to pass on a thank you to the panel for us, for the LA County Fire Department and the County of Los Angeles to be a part of this, and to say that we stand ready to be partners as we move forward. Thank you.

Thank you, Deputy Chief. Our next witness is Director Kevin McGowan from Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management. He's joining us remotely. Director McGowan, you may begin. I believe you are there. Go Ahead.

Good afternoon, Chair Rodriguez, Vice Chair Waldron, and honorable members of the committee. My name is Kevin McGowan. I serve as the Director of Los Angeles County's Office of Emergency Management. Thank you very much today for the opportunity to speak to you about LA County's catastrophic earthquake preparedness efforts, our activities and our partnerships with the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, and many other organizations to include the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Together, we continue to build emergency management capabilities and capacity with the goal of making LA County more resilient. As many of you know LA County is the most population, is the largest county in the nation, by population. We have about 10 million residents. We're comprised of 88 cities, including the second largest city in the nation. And just by virtue of our size and complexity, Los Angeles County faces numerous challenges during all types of disasters.

In 2020, the National Risk Index, FEMA, identified Los Angeles County as having the highest risk index of all of the counties in the nation with a score of 100 out of 100. This just underscores the critical importance of Los Angeles County to continue to build accessible, culturally competent, and equity based emergency management capabilities that have capacity to mitigate the risk of natural, technological, and human caused disasters.

LA County's Office of Emergency Management is an all hazards emergency management program that coordinates and supports preparedness, planning, response, and recovery mitigation functions. The Office of Emergency Management, we maintain, manage, and operate a 24/7 watch center, the County's Emergency Operations Center, and we assemble a unified coordination group when responding to, recovering from, and mitigating against emergencies and disasters, all of which are essential in the contribution to achieving our countywide unity of effort.

Our unity of effort with our state and federal community partners is the cornerstone during all phases of our disaster lifecycle. In LA County, it truly is a whole of community approach to our emergency management program. The County's emergency management mission requires this of us, and it is ever present with our strong partnerships to include those partnerships with Cal OES and our federal organizations.

LA County's approach to preparing for catastrophic earthquakes is multifaceted, it's comprehensive, and it's very complicated. It includes layers of public education, preparedness, planning, training, and exercise. Currently, the county is going through an update to our Emergency Operations Plan. This revision focuses on establishing key emergency support functions, recovery functions, emergency workflow processes, and the establishment of key authorities for the county's emergency organization.

This is all built on the concepts of accessible and cultural competency, equity, and the key information provided by the Southern California Catastrophic Response Plan, the National Risk Index, and our local threat and hazard identification and risk assessment. Along with many of our recent experiences from other emergencies that range from wildfires, COVID, civil unrest, and active mass violence incidents.

The county recently conducted a functional exercise based on a catastrophic earthquake that included three modules that focused on establishing and maintaining critical communications, a strategic transportation movement of critical decision making personnel to the county's Emergency Operations Center, and lastly, conducting a Unified Coordination Group meeting that went through three iterations of emergency operations decision making processes.

The county also maintains a public education program in partnership with community organizations that focuses on individuals, families, businesses, and communities. This includes sharing critical preparedness information through the production and distribution of County's Emergency Survival Guide, the County's ready website, and the Community Emergency Response Team program.

These resources are available in accessible, culturally competent, and multilingual formats and provide critical information on how we can be prepared. These examples, along with the leadership from our county Board of Supervisors and our Chief Executive Officer prioritize programs and initiatives that build resilience and strategic investments in communication systems and operations like the Los Angeles Regional Interoperable Communication System, LARICS, tactical and operation units, like our Urban Search and Rescue Team, which Deputy T. Ewald just spoke about, and other capabilities that expand the county's capacity and ability to respond to and recover from catastrophic earthquakes effectively and efficiently. In closing, LA County appreciates our partnership with Cal OES. We're thankful for you having us here to present today.

We also are thankful for our community partners and our hopes to continue to identify ways to improve effectiveness and efficiency in our ways to prepare for catastrophic earthquakes. In particular, I recommend us exploring ways for more integration with Cal OES response capabilities and resources at the local level, streamlining administrative processes for our emergency management and homeland security grants, continued advocacy for the state for increasing federal investments in local governments through the Emergency Management Performance Grant and the building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Grant, and the state's continued investment in public education and resources.

In earthquake preparedness, the shake alert app, the Southern California catastrophic plan, these are all great investments that the state has made, and the continued education to our communities is important. Again, thank you for the opportunity to appear before the Committee today, and I look forward to any questions you may have.

Thank you very much, Director. Now move on to our next witness, Chief Executive Officer Glenn Pomeroy and Chief Mitigation Officer Janiele Maffei of the California Earthquake Authority. Mr. Pomeroy, you may begin.

Mr. Chairman, Committee members, thank you very much for the opportunity. And thank you for taking on this very important issue. The California Earthquake Authority is basically the state's not for profit insurance company formed in the wake of the Northridge earthquake back in 1994 as a means of providing earthquake insurance available to Californians who wish to buy it on a not for profit basis.

Now, 25 years later we insure about a million homes with no public funding. It's all funded through policyholder premium. And we've grown over time, we're about the largest in the world, certainly largest in the United States. And in California, we write more than the next nine earthquake insurance writers combined.

So it's big and complex, but it's a success story, thanks to the foresight of the Legislature some quarter of a century ago. Secondly, we've developed a mitigation program for homes, single family homes, to retrofit against the earthquake risk. My colleague will describe that in more detail. And thirdly, not too long ago, the Legislature assigned the CEA the task of administering the California Wildfire Fund, established in 2019, to provide financial protection for investor and utilities for the fires that their equipment causes, provided conduct themselves with prudence in the management of the safety of their equipment.

But it's a mitigation program that I think is of greatest interest today, the Earthquake Brace and Bolt Program. The Legislature, when they established us, directed that we take 5% of our investment income, up to $5 million a year, and place it into a separate account, not to pay claims with, but to encourage people to retrofit. It was a brilliant move back then, and with those dollars that have accumulated, leveraged against additional dollars from the federal government, Janiele Maffei, our Chief Mitigation Officer, has developed a program that has retrofitted close to 20,000 homes so far, and we're just getting started. So I'd like to turn over now to Janiele, describe the program in more detail.

Thank you.

Thank you. And she's going to set us up with some slides here. Thank you so much. It is a pleasure to be here. And I am a structural engineer and also the chief mitigation officer at the California Earthquake Authority. And in that capacity, I'm the executive director of the California Residential Mitigation Program. We call it CRMP. Thank you.

And that program is the program that manages the Earthquake Brace and Bolt program. And in my capacity, I do a great deal of public speaking to encourage people to retrofit. And so there's a little bit of fear in that. And it resonated with me when you said, 'Are we here to scare?' And it is frightening. But I always like to say as well that I bring solutions. And the great thing is to be able to bring structural solutions as well as financial solutions.

So I want to tell you about three programs. One that we are currently managing, one that will be rolling out in late April, and then, of course, one that's a glint in our eye, we could call it, multi-family soft-story. So Earthquake Brace and Bolt is a vulnerability based program that's going after the vulnerability that was created when these older houses were built and constructed before codes adopted the stringent standards for anchoring them to the foundation and putting stiff materials around the crawl space, and that's plywood.

So unbolted, unbraced crawl space is Earthquake Brace and Bolt. The program that's rolling out in late April is called ESS, Earthquake Soft-Story, for single family soft-story. So you're saying to yourself, okay, so it's a similar vulnerability to that multi-family soft story, the invention of the automobile. You see beautiful historic Victorian houses in San Francisco that went through the 1906 earthquake that would not do as well today because, of course, they went in and they took out all the walls on the first floor and put in a giant garage door.

And that is what that essentially what that living space over garage or earthquake soft-story single family house is. So you've taken out all the elements that resist earthquake forces. And then multi-family is, of course, the expanded version of that. It's the multi-family where you have that tuck under parking below. So Earthquake Brace and Bolt, currently up and running, ESS opening in April, multi-family soft-story.

The legislation last year, and thank you very much for the consideration of that, specifically stated that we'd not spend any policyholder funds on that. However, before even you introduced the bill, we had put in an application for FEMA BRIC funding to do a multi-family soft-story incentive program. It's only 20 million and it's in limited areas. It's just in a couple of counties because with 20 million, of course, we didn't have a lot of opportunity there.

It is currently under review by Cal OES, and we believe that we have a very good chance of getting that and could stand that program up. So that program, whichever funding were to come to us first and stand up that program, we believe that, like our EBB program and ESS, can in fact be ready to take additional funding. So let's spend just a tiny bit of time on Earthquake Brace and Bolt.

These are pictures of the houses not retrofitted in Napa, and I want to draw attention to the bottom right. Fire following earthquake is a significant problem. Our residential construction predominantly wood framed. The Earthquake Brace and Bolt program is reducing the likelihood of fire following earthquake in a particular house by bracing it to the foundation so that it doesn't rupture the gas line and we require they brace the water heater.

So the two top reasons that a house is going to catch on fire. But we all know that fire is a community issue, and so obviously, we have a long way to go. Very important to note that if you do complete our Earthquake Brace Bolt program, you do qualify at the CEA for as much as a 25% discount on your earthquake insurance. And I believe that other carriers of residential earthquake insurance provide discounts as well.

As Glenn mentioned, we're actually closing in on 20,000. The grant is $3,000, up to $3,000. We are in most of the zip codes of high hazard in California. It's about a $5,200 retrofit statewide, more expensive in the Bay Area. But very important to note that with over 19,000 retrofits now, we've seen a lot. We've got data to understand, and we've found that our program actually is very successful.

And what we're very excited about is that Professor Henry Burton at UCLA did a study and determined that when EBB opened in 2013, they saw an uptick in retrofits in areas with large representations of Black, Hispanic, and low income residents, which was very exciting to us. But, we had designed for that as well, because we went after the oldest, the areas with the highest seismic risk and the oldest houses.

So we're very excited. But that was even before we introduced what is a supplementary grant above that $3,000. That for the recipients, this is for low to moderate income houses in those EBB zip codes, for recipients, in many cases, will provide them with the full retrofit amount. So that was Professor Henry Burton's study did not even include the supplementary grant. So we expect this to make tremendous inroads as well into those communities.

We know that retrofitting works. We saw it. Glenn and I were there in Napa the morning of the earthquake. House on the right, identical to the one on the left. The one on the left came off its foundation. That fence obviously went up a couple of days later. Homeowner on the right described to me the morning of the earthquake, they had done some retrofitting, not even a full code compliant retrofit.

Now, that house had damage, they had to pay to do quite a bit of fixing up, but they never had to move out. House on the left, two and a half years later, not yet reoccupied. Sadly, saw the same thing in Ferndale. Went up there a few weeks ago, house on the right had done a little bit of retrofitting, house on the left had not. And there we are with a house that's red tagged on the left.

Family has moved out. No presidential declaration. They're looking for funding assistance. The good news is both of these folks had signed up for our Earthquake Brace and Bolt program. I wish we had been there years ago. But so we're hoping to be able to come in after they do some minor repairs to be able to retrofit these houses. Earthquake soft-story, once again, there's pictures from every earthquake since the 1971.

Catastrophic, partial, or full collapses, in fact, can be very dangerous damage. We're going to be providing more funding for these houses. The retrofits are more in the 14,000 to 27,000 range. Our current funding will allow us to do about 300. And this is where we've gotten our funding. So Glenn mentioned the loss mitigation funding is our seed funding.

For two years in 2016 and 2017, each year we received $3 million from the state budget. We're now leveraging our loss mitigation funds, predominantly with FEMA funds. Hazard Mitigation Grant program. That's a competitive grant program. We apply to Cal OES and then of course, they submit our application to FEMA. As you can see with those gold bars, we've been very successful. However, we'll continue to have to compete.

Obviously, this latest disaster we're experiencing right now will generate additional grant funding to California. We will apply for that as well. We will continue to apply. We are a scalable program for as long as our funding will keep us alive. We are scalable. We have proven that our web based interface with the public works and can be scalable for all three of those vulnerabilities.

We look forward to continuing to work on behalf of California. The first owner whose house we retrofitted unprompted said 'I sleep better at night.' And that's as they would say in commercials, that's what we're going for. As I mentioned, two and a half years later, people are not yet back in their houses after the Napa earthquake. That is the kind of displacement, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage. That is the kind of financial disaster that it is to these individual homeowners. Thank you very much. And of course, we'd love to answer questions.

Thank you very much. One more. Our last final witness is Deputy Director Lori Nezhura of the California Office of Emergency Services. Deputy Director, you may begin.

Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair and Vice Chairs and members of the committee. It's been wonderful testimony today, so I'll try to just sum up what I can of the state response. Before I do, I do want to make one clarification from the Executive Director Maffei, the BRIC application for the 20 million has been submitted to FEMA, so it's actually under review by FEMA.

Thank you.

Thank you. Preparedness and planning go a long way to mitigating the impact on an earthquake can have on the population and infrastructure of our state. So, Cal OES develops and maintains the all hazard State of California Emergency Plan and the Catastrophic Incident Based Plan, which is a concept of operations. These have been alluded to, as well as three earthquake specific catastrophic plans, the Cascadia subduction zone, earthquake and tsunami response plan, the Bay Area Earthquake Plan, and the Southern California Catastrophic Earthquake Plan.

The Bay Area Earthquake Plan addresses a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the Northern San Andreas Fault and a magnitude seven on the Hayward Fault across the bay, covering 16 counties with a total population of 10 million. And I believe this was discussed a bit on the first panel. The Southern California Catastrophic Earthquake Plan addresses a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the Southern San Andreas Fault.

The So Cal plan was last updated last year in 2022, and covers twelve counties and a population of 24 million. It also involved the collaboration of over 1500 subject matter experts from private sector nongovernmental organizations and local, state, tribal, and federal partners. And I might add that the Bay Area Emergency Managers were also part of that meeting, so it had statewide ramifications.

Over the years, our planning efforts have matured through the creation of all hazard capability specific concepts with the intent to prove overall state response. You heard Director McGowan talk about the all hazards effort, and some examples include emergency fuels capability, state staging sites, multimodal commodity transportation and distribution, regional and federal coordination, and mass sheltering.

We also exercise to validate and test our planning factors in response to recovery constructs. For example, over the last 18 months, Cal OES Disaster Logistics has been exercising commodity distribution to and from the ports of Hueneme and Los Angeles, along with the US Coast Guard and several other public and private partners.

In addition to planning, training, and exercising, Cal OES joins many local and state agencies and activities, just as you have just heard, to mitigate the impacts of seismic events. Cal OES maintains the state Hazard Mitigation Plan, which is currently being updated. It reviews local hazard mitigation plans and works with local jurisdictions on strengthening their resiliency planning efforts.

You've already heard about the Brace and Bolt program, of which that JPA Cal OES is a part, which has now made 19,000 older California homes more resilient to earthquake damage, with about that many more in the pipeline. In the last ten years, Cal OES has administered over $576,000, $576,000,000 of federal hazard mitigation funding for about 200 various seismic retrofit, seismic risk assessments, and earthquake early warning projects.

I have a couple of examples for you. That would be the Humboldt Bay Municipal Water District Pipeline Retrofit Project, the City of San Jose Mobile Home Retrofit Project, LAUSD's Gardenia Senior High School Seismic Retrofit Project, Cedars-Sinai Hospital Earthquake Early Warning Project to provide audio and visual warnings to staff and patients and to put equipment into safe state, and the City of Oakland's Safer Housing for Oakland Soft-story Retrofit Program for 1300 soft-story apartment buildings at risk of collapse in a major earthquake.

And there are 16 other projects in process that are outfitting fire stations, hospitals, health centers, and critical infrastructure such as water pump stations and waste treatment facilities with backup generators. Hazard mitigation efforts are a proven method for reducing the consequences of a disaster, as you have heard. Now, I'd like to paint a picture for you of our response strategies for earthquake events by describing how we recently responded to the smaller scale Ferndale earthquake.

The State Operations center was activated that very morning, and many of us were woken up at 2:34 in the morning with the MyShake app that went off on our phones. Initial on scene response by Cal OES included Fire and Rescue, Special Operations, Law Enforcement Coordinating Officers, Regional Emergency Services Coordinators, Tribal Affairs Coordinator, and the Deputy Director of Response himself went up to Humboldt.

We stood up mutual aid systems and got aircraft up fairly quickly to survey the damage. All the while, our local fire departments responded to a number of natural gas leaks and several structural fires in addition to a number of medical emergencies. The county had no capacity to do the building assessments of the buildings themselves, so Cal OES coordinated the deployment of personnel trained through the Safety Assessment Program, or SAP, to assist the county to evaluate the safety of the buildings.

SAP Program is a training credentialing and coordinating program that utilizes eligible volunteers to conduct rapid assessments of structures in the disaster area. In this case, we sent trained state agency personnel from Department of General Services and Caltrans, along with a Cal OES Fire and Rescue Team lead. The two earthquakes up in Humboldt resulted in over 250 restricted use or yellow tagged buildings, over 90 unsafe or red tagged structures, and over 100 households were displaced there in––

Humboldt County Kawas prepositioned shelter resources should they be needed. However, the county and city handled the sheltering and there ended up being no unmet needs in this area except for emergency bottled water, which we mainly provided to Rio Del where the water system was temporarily impacted.

Fortunately, neither the main shock earthquake or the large aftershock resulted in the collapse of structures with people trapped inside, however, in the catastrophic earthquakes modeled in our plans, there would be, and cheif elwald talked you through the federal USAR teams.

We have eight of them here in California. We also have have 10 regional Task force that can deploy here within the state. And then I would remind everyone, and of course we wouldn't depend upon it, but the full scale of the National Response wood be available to California and that includes 18 more Federal USAR teams.

This deep well of competence, professionalism experience and multi tiered response capability kind of sets California apart and it's indicative of the level of state support that over the decades, you as a Legislature have helped create, train and improve our readiness through your investments in CalOES investments in other state agency response partners. One thing that we haven't discussed a little bit, it was on your agenda was the fire following earthquake.

The scenarios likely to confront our firefighters in the aftermath of a catastrophic earthquake in urban California would potentially include the eruption of many simultaneous structure fires, even fires in petroleum refineries and other industrial facilities resulting from electrical shorts, gas leaks, rupture of fuel and other hazardous material containment vessels and piping, among other causes.

So under these extreme conditions, the California Fire Service will be utilizing all available means to determine and monitor the scope of growing fires and will ensure scarce ground based and aerial firefighting. Resources are assigned first to those fires with the most potential for exposure to occupied buildings, including those that are collapsed and damaged, but with trapped occupants.

In such an event, California is prepared to engage the robust California Fire and Rescue Services, which includes all public and private entities part of the California Fire and Rescue Mutual Aid System managed by CalOES. State rate agent resources are overwhelmed. As I mentioned before, CalOES would request interstate mutual aid through appropriate Interstate compacts and through the Emergency Management Assistant Compact.

That's the National Compact. This will ensure maximum deployment of available assets to the affected area and then in the most extreme conditions. California will be prepared to consider requesting international assistance to help support not only the firefighting resources attempting to control the fires, but search and rescue and any other area that we might need assistance.

I mentioned the aircraft that we can put up. This is under our FIRTIS capability. That's the Fire integrated real time intelligence system. Kind of a misnomer. It really is an all hazard system.

The aircraft include cutting edge sensors that provide enhanced incident awareness, real time fire perimeter maps, high definition color and infrared video and photos, among much, many more capabilities. And again, I want to thank the Legislature in recent budget actions for support of that fire system.

Finally, in conclusion, CalOES remains committed to ensure that we serve the public through effective collaboration in preparing, for, protecting, against, responding and recovering from and mitigating the impacts of all hazards and threats, including simultaneous events.

As the Vice Chair mentioned earlier, we cannot control the earthquakes that hit us and all the other disasters, but we constantly seek ways to improve our planning, mitigation, response, and resiliency efforts. Thank you for the chance to speak with you here today, and I remain available if you have any questions. Thank you.

Thank you.

Lori, I think. Senator Archuleta, do you have a question? I'd

like to just begin with a comment.

Deputy Chief, thank you and all of you for being here, but you in particular, Deputy Chief, because I know perhaps over your course of your career, you may have stopped in the city of Pico Rivera, where we have what I call the Fighting Jones hundred and three.

And the Fire Station 103 is the one that has deployed some of its men and women to Haiti, some of its men and women to mountain rescue, and to these crazy fires that develop all over California. And it's stationed in Peak Rivera, and they are the most capable unit that we have in LA county, I understand, with all the equipment that you can possibly need. So hats out to them.

And I enjoy having breakfast with them every so often. And the other thing on the question to our engineers, the cost of retrofitting, and I saw some of the pictures that you had there and I saw a structure, looked like a stucco house, maybe. 12-1500 Square Feet have that retrofitted. And how is that done? With a skeleton frame and then you restucco it. How is that done? At a reasonable cost? That's

the beauty of the vulnerability based retrofit is that we're not going in and completely upgrading the entire house. What we're doing is going after the vulnerability that causes that house to slide or topple off of its foundation. Work is all done in the crawl space.

So nobody padding through your house with little booties on. All done under the crawl space. New anchor bolts drilling and grouting into the existing concrete, new plywood on those short stud walls around the crawl space, and then these hardware pieces around the top. And as I mentioned, about $5,200 statewide is the median cost of that retrofit.

And people don't realize that a lot of the old, old houses aren't even bolted down exactly. They're just sitting on a foundation.

And I can see where the retrofit would bolt them down.

Yes.

That's right.

But that's about $5,500, I heard.

Yeah. In Southern California in some areas, the houses are modestly sized and they only need bolting can be as little as $35 to $4,000. Kind of depends.

Now let me finish up with this. So how can we help that homeowner? Is that with the program that we have here in the state or we have it with the county? Where would a grant come in and how could they apply?

Well, our program is intended for the state. We're in the areas of highest hazard. There are though cities who haney gone after FEMA funding and have stood up their own brace and bolt programs. Hayward did it, Oakland's done it. Berkeley has this work goes through a transfer tax process.

So wherever there's funding, you can stand up one of these programs. And of course, as I mentioned, our program is scalable as well. And we currently have a large grant from FEMA that's going to allow us to double the number of houses that we've retrofitted.

Great, thank you.

Thank you.

It's here.

Any other questions? Members? I have a couple.

First call. Once again, deputy chief. Thank you for being here. I'm like Senator Archuleta, it's great to have him in your city and Pico Rivera, but I want to take one step further. I've actually worked with some of those guys on calls when I worked private sector EMS, in Alley County. It was always a blessing to hear we got user 103 and route to come to some of our issues we had in San Gabriel Valley.

Right. So it's good to hear what we're doing in LA county because I said I've worked those individuals, I've seen the capabilities, what they're able to do firsthand being with the search and rescue. What you do chief, do you think there's anything that we can do to make it better strengthen our USAR teams in California.

We always can find room for improvement. And so any comments about improvement are really not designed to be criticisms, but they're just really designed to statements of improvement. I look at it almost like a sports team. If you had a ten and two season, you know what, you left two victories on the field.

And so for us, I think the takeaway is it goes back to what I said before. It's about partnerships. It's about ensuring that the elements of the community, from the people all the way to the highest levels of government, there's a connection and there's a commitment and investment.

The one thing I'm really proud of, and as you speak of 103s in Pico, I speak personally of the entire USAR program. I ran the program as a program manager back in 2006 to 2009 when we were first getting into the international arena. And we go to disasters nationally and internationally for two reasons.

One, we do it because we are ambassadors for the State of California, for our Department, and for the for the US when we travel internationally. But we also do it for a very important reason, and that is we're building our own capacity, we're building our own lessons learned. We're building a skill set among our people and some of that skill set is tactical and some of that skill set is strategic.

And so for the people that are first time deployment folks that went to Turkey, they were tactical. They weber learning how to do the tasks that they normally do up at our Santa Clarita del Valle training facility. They normally do it in a training environment. They were doing it now in a real world, real hazard.

If the building next to you comes down, it may have a direct impact on you or your teammates. The takeaway here is that investment, that partnership. And I really go back to right now when I look at the state of the eight California teams that are part of the national system, there's not a lot of state money to support those teams.

Most of that money is coming from either the local government or it's coming from the federal government. And so I believe there's a gap there that could be filled. And I think that gap strengthens our ability to provide services outside of our home communities. So that would be one example of where additional support could be used.

I know it's a zero sum game. There's only so much money. But I think for the amount of money invested in the long term reward, it makes a lot of sense to strengthen those teams, to strengthen other parts of our emergency agencies to ensure that they can respond outside of their home communities.

Thank you, Chief. And something just comes to mind right now. You're talking about the relationships not only here in California, throughout the state and internationally.

A few years ago, I was able to travel to Japan. I went to Japan and on some other issues. But I was there with Tokyo Fire Department, their search and rescue team, who very speaks highly of folks here in California, particularly LA County.

And they told me, Freddie, God forbid you have that major earthquake, but we're ready to respond to come to California and help with our resources. It's very eye opening to hear that and share what they do as well in a different scale. Right? Next question for Lori there with the OES. Had a question.

I look at California as a disaster prone state, right? We have the fires, we have the floods and that earthquake that's just looming over our head, it can happen anytime that we need to be prepared to respond to two major disasters, right? Whether it's that major earthquake on the San Andreas and we got fires raging, whether in Southern or Northern California. Do we have the resources necessary to respond to two major disasters simultaneously? Great

question. Chair Rodriguez and I would say in a catastrophic disaster such as we've posed through, say, our SoCal Cap plan, all of the resources do not exist solely in California as part of that plan. That's a FEMA California plan.

So it does rely on national resources coming in. But I would say to reassure you, to reassure our listeners here that we have we have dealt with major disasters simultaneously here in the state of California, especially within the last five or six years. We've had catastrophic fires going on in the north part of the state and in the south part of the state.

We've done COVID-19 response at the same time that we're doing wildfire response. And we've learned a lot and our catastrophic planning is a living document. And our constructs are constantly evolving depending upon those lessons that we've learned from these opportunities to simultaneously fight major disasters.

So I would say yes and no with a caveat that we would definitely be relying upon not only national, but even potentially international support.

Yes Thank you. I hear that, Laurie. But my thing is we need to prepare for that major earthquake, right? Because you can look at the Pandemics. The fires, they're different.

Responding to a major earthquake on the San Andreas Hayward fault or the other fault throughout the state, I think it's going to require different types of resources, infrastructure going down, gas lines, water lines across the board. Right.

So I don't know if we really are preparing ourselves that way for that major disaster with that major fire. Like I said, I don't think we've been tested to that degree, and hopefully you never will. But if we are that we are in a better place to respond.

Lessons learned from the previous incidents that have occurred in the state. I know we talked about the earthquake in Napa and obviously the one min northridge, but those are northridge. A little bit bigger than Napa, a little bit different areas.

But the fact that if we have that major earthquake, right, because Pandemics is one thing, the floods are another, but you throw that major earthquake in between one of those other things, it's really going to put us in a different aspect.

That I just want to make sure that we talk about California being the leader, in moving things forward, that we need to be the leader in disaster response and preparedness when we have two major disasters right here in our backyard in California.

Well, said and our catastrophic planning is just that. It takes us to the very extreme so that we can make sure that we're ready for anything of a lesser nature. So the planning factors that we use for the catastrophic plan aye extreme.

Okay. No other questions.

We have a question. Assembly Member Schiavo so my district covers northridge, and I very much appreciate the warnings that you're giving today.

When I was searching for a home there, I passed on a number of places that had earthquake damage and pulled out of one that had some pretty serious earthquake damage. That made me feel very uncomfortable.

So I understand how important it is to make sure that retrofits happened and it happened in my community in a big way. And so I wonder if there you know, I heard you mention a number of different programs that people can participate in.

How is that information getting out to people? Are there other ways that we can help get that information out to folks to make sure they know about those programs? Because I just feel like a lot of folks don't even know these programs are available to them.

Right. Without unlimited funding, obviously, we can't have registration open all year round. We'd run out of money very quickly. I also never wanted to have so many people on a waiting list.

There's no better way to dissuade people from participation than have them on waiting lists for years on end. So we're open for about 30 days. Of course, we have a huge press media push for that.

What we're finding, though, is that people are hearing about it from their friends, their neighbors, their colleagues, and their real estate agents, their insurance agents. Another professor, Professor Keith Porter, did a study and found that in California, houses that are retrofitted are going for about 17% more.

So we are starting to see some social capital and some kind of knowledge across the board. I think it's more prevalent in some demographics than others. We have a strength my house website that is up all the time with all of the information for those vulnerabilities.

I personally, of course, try and do as much public speaking and outreach as we possibly can, but it is something that we really do need to make sure is always top of mind when someone is looking Flora house, selling a house, doing a renovation, that this is something that they should be looking for at a minimum.

Thank you. And I hope in advance of that 30 day application period that you can send information to all of us so we can share it with our constituents and make sure they know about it.

Absolutely. Thank you.

Thank you.

With that said, any other questions? If not, I want to thank everybody for being here today on this very important topic. And thank you for all the first responders and everybody that everything you do to keep California safe in a better place. So with that, we'll go ahead and open it for public comment here in the room.

We have limited time, so is there any Members of the public would like to say a few words for public comment?

Is it open? Mr. Chairman, Members of the committee, I'm Jim Holly. I'm with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. And I'll be quick. I just want to let you know that investments by the US. Department of Energy are providing California with an important new tool to characterize the earthquake risks along our major faults and to prepare our infrastructure to survive.

An understanding of the ground motions associated with the earthquake is critical to the design of resilient infrastructure for many regions at high risk in our state. However, historical data from ground motions does not exist, so modeling is needed. The Department of Energy's new class of supercomputers gives us the capability to understand ground motions and potential damage with unprecedented fidelity.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is using our supercomputer to model the Hayward Fault. And our deliverable is a robust series of detailed ground motion models to help government agencies, utilities, building owners and operators and others better understand what parts of the Bay Area are most at risk so that we can better prepare.

We are collaborating with a Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center to make these modeled ground motions available for free to the public through an open access website. There is potential to expand use of these National Laboratory capabilities and tools. for now, we just want you to be aware of this work and to offer ourselves as a resource and as partners so we can help all Californians. Thank you. Thank you.

Is there somebody else? Lee no other folks for public comment. We'll go ahead and switch it to our folks that may be calling on via phone. The number once again is 877-2268 with a passcode of 736-2834. Operator I'm not sure if you're there, but do we have anyone on the line?

We do not currently mr. Chair.

Okay, so I just wanted to check on that. So with that, this meeting is adjourned.

I want to thank everybody for participating this afternoon. Thank you. Meeting is over.