Institute of Urban and Regional Development

In the nearly three years since Chancellor Berdahl announced the creation of the Seismic Action plan for Facilities Enhancement and Renewal (SAFER), the UC Berkeley campus has intensified its attention to seismic safety issues. SAFER Program initiatives have changed the organizational structure, altered the landscape, and increased our understanding of the complex operational needs of the campus. This Strategic Risk Management Plan grows out of the SAFER Program, and advances its twin goals of safety for the campus community and sustained operations in the event of a major earthquake.

This plan provides for increasing the ability of UC Berkeley to withstand future disasters without harm to people, excessive losses to property, or interruptions to our mission. Identified in the plan are actions that will contribute to prevention of life loss and injury from structural, nonstructural, or utility failures in an earthquake, flood or fire. Of nearly equal importance are the efforts that will support sustained operations following a disaster; in the plan are procedures for developing an institutional capacity to resume operations within 30 days of a damaging earthquake. The plan offers a blueprint for maintaining UC Berkeley as a pre-eminent university, even after a damaging earthquake.

The costs of strengthening the built environment are large, as the SAFER Program has shown, but the campus has responded to the challenges in creative ways, and its commitment will not waver over the 20 or 30 years necessary to improve our structures and infrastructure. Reducing nonstructural, or content, hazards will have some costs, but huge benefits. Ensuring the safety of contents will not only cut UC Berkeley's losses substantially, but will be critical to sustaining research, teaching, and business operations in the wake of an earthquake. Small, incremental additions to normal operations and maintenance budgets will fund much of the nonstructural mitigation and planning activities called for in this plan.

The strategies put forward in this plan involve a change in organizational culture at UC Berkeley. Seismic safety is a top priority here, but there is a prevalent notion that achieving it remains the responsibility of a few people, scattered in obvious units around campus. In fact, SAFER Program goals and those of this plan can be met only by involving every control unit, every college, every department, and every Organized Research Unit. To increase UC Berkeley's safety and sustainability, the Chancellor and Vice Chancellors, deans and department chairs, and unit heads and office directors must do their part. Faculty, staff and students have roles as well. Enumerated herein are steps appropriate to every level.

To support these initiatives, the responsible parties must understand them. To that end, this plan calls for a comprehensive information and education program for both the campus community and for interested parties in the City of Berkeley, the greater Bay Area, and the State of California. We must inform them about the hazards UC Berkeley faces, our vulnerabilities, steps we are taking to decrease them, and how they can help us in our efforts. When we point out both our potential losses and the implications of those losses, a clearer vision will emerge: one in which we work together to preserve and enhance the foundations of UC Berkeley's excellence.