US: San Francisco earthquake safety questioned as report lists nearly 3,000 potentially dangerous buildings
A Department of Building Inspection special report published in the San Francisco Public Press lists about 3,000 seismically unfit buildings in the city - homes of 58,000 people. The "soft-story" buildings on the list have weak ground floors, thus, they may be similar to those that suffered the most damage in the 1989 earthquake in the region.
In 2011 voters rejected the plans to fund soft-story retrofits on the city's lower price housing. But the most vulnerable buildings will be retrofitted by 2017 and the remaining ones will be finished by 2020.
"A major quake, of course, can strike San Francisco at any time. There is roughly a 28 percent chance that an earthquake of at least magnitude 6.7 will hit the Bay Area within 10 years," warned Edward Field, chairman of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Working Group on California Earthquake Probabilities.