Forrest Lanning

Making El Cerrito More Resilient

A resident brought up a great question about my plan for making El Cerrito more resilient, and I thought it was worth sharing my thoughts more broadly.

I would like to bring a greater focus on disaster resilience to City Council, not just how we respond after a disaster, but what we can do beforehand to reduce the damage. We can spend years building up the City's financial reserves, only to see much of that progress wiped out by the cost of repairing and rebuilding after a major disaster. Resilience is also fiscal responsibility.

We should start with our critical lifelines: power, water and wastewater. El Cerrito doesn't own most of these systems, so we need to work closely with the utilities that do. The Palisades Fire demonstrated why this matters, when enormous demand contributed to falling water pressure and dry hydrants. We should be asking EBMUD now: Does our system have sufficient capacity and redundancy during a major fire? What happens if an earthquake breaks water mains when firefighters need that water?

We also need to focus on what the City controls. Storm drains should be proactively inspected and maintained rather than waiting for residents to report flooding. Every capital project should also be viewed through a resilience lens. If we're already renovating a City building, that's the time to make it more resilient. Incorporating improvements during renovation is much less expensive than coming back later.

As a structural engineer, I think of designing only to minimum building-code requirements as getting a D, you passed, but barely. Minimum code is primarily about life safety. It doesn't necessarily mean a building will be usable after a major earthquake. And an older building may have been designed to codes that are very different from today's requirements or no code at all. Critical facilities are held to higher standards for a reason. I think El Cerrito should take a similar approach when investing in its City buildings.

Our biggest challenge may be our homes. Much of El Cerrito's housing stock predates major advances in seismic design of the 1970s through 90s, including plywood shear walls (especially for two-story homes), connections and cripple-wall reinforcement (in the crawl space). Because these homes are privately owned, the City's ability to improve them is limited. We can educate homeowners about seismic retrofits and earthquake insurance, but ultimately those decisions belong to individual homeowners.

That's also why CERT is so important. A major earthquake could damage many homes simultaneously and quickly overwhelm professional emergency services. Expanding CERT means having trained residents already in our neighborhoods who can help during those critical first hours.

Wildfire resilience requires the same preventative thinking and many of this is already happening, mainly due to the reminder we get every summer/fall, vegetation and fuel management near open spaces, maintaining evacuation routes, and coordinating with our fire and water agencies before an emergency.

There isn't one project that will make El Cerrito resilient. It requires layers: resilient infrastructure, stronger City facilities, utility coordination, wildfire mitigation, better-prepared homes, public education and trained neighbors.

When we haven't experienced a major disaster in a long time, preparedness can easily fall down the priority list. That's especially true with earthquakes. The Hayward Fault runs directly through our city, yet the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake was about 50 miles away and did not produce the level of shaking we could experience from a major earthquake on the Hayward Fault. That's where leadership matters. City leaders need to think about resilience before disaster strikes, because once the earthquake or wildfire happens, it's too late to start preparing.