Advertisement 1

Vancouver hires former San Fran planner to reduce seismic risk of private buildings

Article content

The City of Vancouver has hired a seismic manager, nine months after it first said it would, to establish a plan to reduce the earthquake risk to privately owned buildings.

The person hired for the position — officially called project lead of seismic mitigation for high-risk buildings — is Micah Hilt, previously an urban planner with the City of San Francisco.

Advertisement 2
Story continues below
Article content

Hilt, who helped develop a mandatory retrofit program for wood-frame buildings at risk in earthquakes for San Francisco, started work in Vancouver this month.

Article content

The city’s decision to hire a “dedicated” seismic manager followed an investigation by The Vancouver Sun and Province newspapers published last year that revealed the city had failed to create a proactive plan to reduce the seismic hazard of the city’s older private buildings, numbering in the thousands, despite identifying a need to do so more than two decades ago.

The city first developed a plan more than 20 years ago because scientific knowledge was increasing about the risks of an earthquake, including of the so-called Big One, a slippage of tectonic plates off the coast of Vancouver Island. Scientists peg the probability of a major quake in a populated area in B.C. at 30 per cent within the next 50 years.

Hilt has been hired for a two-year term, said Paul Mochrie, the City of Vancouver’s deputy city manager, who oversees the emergency management department.

The first order of business is to get a better understanding of soil conditions and to determine which buildings don’t meet modern seismic standards.

Advertisement 3
Story continues below
Article content

The city will also create a technical committee, first promised six years ago, to advise it how to reduce the risk of private buildings from collapsing or being badly damaged in an earthquake.

Hilt’s job will also include reviewing how other jurisdictions have reduced seismic risk in private buildings.

“That’s a big benefit of attracting Micah here — his expertise,” said Mochrie.

California — unlike B.C., Washington State and Oregon — has a decades-long history of tackling seismic risk in buildings, including using tax and fee incentives and requiring mandatory seismic retrofits.

However, Mochrie cautioned he does not believe municipalities have the financial capacity to make huge incentives for seismic retrofits and that other levels of government would need to play a role.

The City of Vancouver developed plans to reduce the seismic risk of older buildings in 1994, 2000 and again in 2011, but never followed through.

For example, in the 1994 initiative, the city considered mandatory seismic assessments, deadlines for mandatory upgrades, public disclosure of the seismic risk of buildings and possibly even requiring signs on buildings that weren’t upgraded. Also considered at the time were incentives for seismic upgrades, such as waving building-permit fees, property-tax relief and low-interest loans. These strategies — none of which have been adopted here — have been used in California since at least the 1980s.

There is no law in Vancouver or any other B.C. municipality that requires older buildings to meet modern seismic safety standards. Some buildings in Vancouver have received seismic upgrades when changes-of-use or major renovations have triggered bylaw requirements.

But of the more than 1,100 buildings included in a seismic-risk assessment by the city in 1994, hundreds appear to have had no seismic upgrades, The Sun and Province’s probe discovered.

ghoekstra@postmedia.com

twitter.com/gordon_hoekstra

Article content
Comments
You must be logged in to join the discussion or read more comments.
Join the Conversation

Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion. Please keep comments relevant and respectful. Comments may take up to an hour to appear on the site. You will receive an email if there is a reply to your comment, an update to a thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information.

Latest National Stories
    This Week in Flyers