Recommendation to receive and file a report from the City Manager on earthquake preparedness in Long Beach, including but not limited to the Alert Long Beach system, seismic studies of buildings in the city, and general readiness for natural disasters.
Item 28. Item 21. Okay. Now we're going to move back to item 28. That would be. She please. Item to item item 28 Communication for Mayor Garcia Recommendation to receive and file a report from the City Manager on earthquake preparedness in Long Beach. Right to have a report on that week. Mr. Vice Mayor, members of the city council. This was an item that the mayor has put on to really educate the community about what the city does in during an earthquake. So we obviously had those two right on the fourth and the 5th of July. Rest assured. Ah, we were responding. We were. Everything was working the way that it should. And we'd like to really take this chance to hear from Reggie Harrison on behalf of our departments about what it is that we do during an earthquake, what we recommend to the public on how they can help. And also talk a little bit about seismic resiliency hearing from development services. So with that, I will turn it over to Reggie Harrison, our director of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Communications. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor, and members of City Council for this opportunity to present this update to you. Seismologists have for years been predicting a strong earthquake to impact this area. City staff has taken those predictions seriously at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of fiscal year in October. The city hosted a Homeland Security Executive seminar attended by our management team, all department heads, including the Port and Water Department. We were joined by 60 other participants, including including the L.A. and Orange County Sheriffs, the L.A. City Police and Fire, the FBI, National Guard and others. We brainstormed around a catastrophic event that would require all of our collective efforts, like an earthquake. We put it we put into practice the lessons learned from that seminar that day. To be clear, earthquakes cannot be predicted, not even by the famed Southern California seismologist, Dr. Lucy Jones. What we do know is that we live in an area prone to earthquakes, and we need to be prepared to survive as individuals, as a family and as a city. So on July 4th, a 6.4 magnitude earthquake rattled. Southern California was the largest earthquake that we had experienced in the last 20 years. The quake struck near the city of Ridgecrest and in Kern County, which is about 160 miles northeast of Los Angeles. People, however, felt the effects of that earthquake from Las Vegas to Phenix to Ensign out of Mexico. Then one day later, on July 5th, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck the exact same area. That the second earthquake was larger, higher in magnitude, and the first was alarming even to seismologists and of course, to many residents. There is no doubt had either one of those earthquakes hit closer to the metropolitan Los Angeles area, there would have been injuries. Compare this to the 1994 Northridge 6.9 magnitude earthquake, which killed 57 people and caused billions of dollars in damages. In Long Beach. We train our staff and work with our residents to be prepared for all hazards. Of course, we live on the Pacific Rim and with that comes the rest of us tsunami or sea level rise. We are responsibility for securing the twin ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. And with that comes terrorist threats and natural and man made disasters, as well as we're responsible for the Los Angeles and Long Beach airports . Again, terrorist attacks and natural disasters are major concerns there. Now, an earthquake is the most probable disaster that we face in this area because of the many earthquake fault lines that crisscross the region. Many fault lines are near Long Beach, including the Newport-Inglewood, Palos Verdes and Cabrillo Fault Lines. And you see some of those fault lines depicted there in that picture. The city has many disaster preparedness and response plans that comport with the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA's national standards. All of our plans have been approved by FEMA. The fact that we have plans that have been approved by FEMA allows us to be able to apply for additional grants as well as for disaster response reimbursement. Community outreach is one of our major priorities, and we take a whole community approach to disaster preparedness and train our staff and residents to be prepared for all hazards, whether preparing for an earthquake or tsunami. Having a family emergency plan is one of the most important things we can do. The plan should include where to meet if the family is separated, and a communications plan for contacting a relative who lives outside of the impacted area. And we also encourage residents to think about their pets as well. What are the needs of pets? We've we've seen across the country that people tend not to evacuate from their homes. And unless they're sheltered in us, their pets can also travel with them. We encourage residents to become members of certain, to be trained in areas to promote self-sufficiency. Residents should take disaster related first aid classes from the Red Cross and other providers. The really Long Beach, the the very Long Beach Disaster Preparedness and Resource Fair is one of the largest of its kind in California. Last year, we attracted over 3000 attendees for this event, the fire department said. And the Department of Disaster Preparedness. Our primary organizers for the event were representatives from across Southern California attend this event. The Red Cross. Los Angeles County Resources. The National Guard. SoCal, Edison and other utilities are there. We have events that include first aid demonstrations, emergency vehicle displays and preparedness booth for various vendors. This is a much sought after event. Representatives from Cal Lewis often come down to this event to just experience how large of an event this is. This year's event will be held on September the 28th at Cal State University, Lombardi's campus. Earthquake preparedness, in particular before an earthquake. And I talked about some of these already before the shaking begins. We should have family plans, go kits in place, and especially for an earthquake, secure, breakable items and large items that tend to fall over and of course, take first aid classes during an earthquake. I think we all know the drill. We practice that the last couple of weeks I believe now since the earthquakes to drop, cover and hold on drop to the floor and cover your neck and head and hands and get under a table and just hold on until the shaking stops. Running out of a building is not recommended. It's not a good idea as objects attached to buildings tend to fall off. In fact, the only people that got killed in the Paso Robles earthquake back in 1992 were people who ran out of the store and got hit by falling debris from the store after an earthquake . As a time to check for injuries to your family and neighbors, turn off gas only if you smell leaking gas and listen for updates from the city and be prepared for aftershocks. One of the programs that we are really promoting with neighborhoods and a number of you council members have seen me make presentations on this program, which is really your Long Beach neighborhood. Recent events across the country have shown that the new first responders in the immediate aftermath of a disaster are fellow neighbors. Neighbors helping neighbors is the basis of the map. Your Long Beach neighborhood program that we are encouraging residents to participate. And through this program, we teach residents to understand and identify the risks in their neighborhood. Who are the elderly, the mobility impaired, the residents that are dependent on electrical medical equipment, and then to also identify the resources that they have in their community, who other residents that have plumbing skills, electrical skills, who's that neighbor that has every gadget in his or her garage that you can imagine? Who are the retired nurses and teachers? And so through this approach. Neighbors develop a plan for how they will help each other until a police and fire personnel arrive. They identify a meeting place who is going to check on the elderly, the children who are home alone, who will make rounds to determine if gas lines are busted. I place at each of your chair a backpack that we intend to be able to distribute a few to the neighborhoods that successfully go through this program, where this does take work on the part of our neighbors where we have staff that's available to assist with that. Alert. Long Beach is the city's emergency mass notification system. And you'll recall during the power outage in 2015, system did not service our community well. We have a new system in place that we implemented shortly after the 2015 power outage. This is a system by which we would notify our residents what has happened. What first responders are doing and what actions our residents should take to protect themselves. Residents do have to sign up for alert based to be able to receive voice, text or email messages. During the Ridgecrest earthquake, we sent out three messages through this system and one of them for the first time ever, we sent a message to the entire database in the city of Long Beach, 197,000 phone numbers. We had a 45% rate reach and we gained 6000 new contacts either text voice or email contacts to the system. We have made signing up even easier for residents. You can easily sign up for alert lobbies by simply texting alert L.B. to 99411 and a sign up link will be sent to you. It's as simple as that to be able to receive these emergency notifications. Shakealert. L.A. is a relatively new app that has just come out. It was in effect prior to the Ridgecrest earthquake. Our residents need to download this app to be able to provide a warning of a pending earthquake. Lambie's beta tested the technology behind this app for the previous four years. We have confidence in it that it works. The public facing app test that has been released is set at a 5.0 and above earthquake. Hence, we did not receive an earthquake warning through the system for the Earth for the Ridgecrest earthquake. However, the city of Los Angeles has reset that threshold now, so it's a much lower threshold so that the notice would be sent out. The system provides information and English and Spanish is available on for iPhones or Android. You have to download that app and the city and the county and the city of Long Beach. Disaster preparedness will continue to work to perfect this notification system. We recently completed the development of a crisis communication plan, working with a consultant and a city manager's peer and peers from across the city. This plan provides guidance for the coordination of communications during during a crisis. The plan considers all communication platforms, including social media, media and press releases. The plan is also sensitive to the needs of our non-English speaking residents and those with other disabled access and functional needs. This slide provides an outline for how incident manager incident response flow works from the street level up to the federal government. The slide also depicts the scalability of this federal system. Every incident, regardless of the size, utilizes the incident management system. Every department has staff that has been trained in the system. Police and fire have personnel that have received advanced training and all has an incident management system. Often are all hands. Teams are requested to go out to assist other jurisdictions outside of the city of Palm Beach. Our fire department plays a critical role in in the event of an earthquake. A priority for them is to ensure the safety of their equipment or apparatus that it is not so that they're not stuck in firehouses. They're responsible for making critical facilities checks. And as you can see from the previous slides, fires do erupt during an earthquake. And so they all have a primary role of controlling those fires. Similarly, the police department, the police are our eyes and ears out on the street. They provide us with situational awareness in terms of what's going on across the city. The police would coordinate evacuations if necessary. Police would also enforce any curfews that may be established by the city council and much, much more responsibilities. Public Works has a responsibility to ensure the free flow of traffic by removing debris that might hamper first responder police, fire, emergency medical personnel. They also have a responsibility to check critical facilities. I hope the Human Resources Department is responsible for coordinating mass care and sheltering sites if necessary. The city health officer would issue orders regarding air quality or boil water any of those issues related to health. Our city health officer would have that responsibility. And with that, I'm going to turn this presentation over to Linda Tatum. Thank you, Reggie. I will be covering some of the proactive activities and a little bit of the history regarding the city's efforts regarding seismic activity. And the first is a just a piece of trivia in history regarding the 1933 Long Beach earthquake. It was that earthquake that where there were over 100 deaths caused and and more than $40 million in damage. And interestingly enough, the the deaths were caused by people leaving the buildings and being hit by falling debris. But as a result of that earthquake, the good that came out of it were two really critical pieces of seismic legislation. The first was the Field Act. And what that did was establish or was the basis for the city's office creation of the state's Office of State Architecture. And that's the entity at the state level that actually permits and approves all of the state facilities, as well as critical care facilities, things like hospitals and schools, again, public schools and hospitals. The second provision in the legislation was the Riley Act, and that was the legislation that required all cities and counties to regulate building construction. So it was a very early days of the California building code. So the very first and most vulnerable buildings that occur during that are that are damaged during seismic activity are what we call the unreinforced masonry building. So essentially buildings that are the brick buildings. And back in 1971, the city did an inventory of all of its masonry buildings, and it was a voluntary program for the property owners to actually seismically reinforce those buildings. And it was amended in 1976 to make that a mandatory requirement for owners of those buildings to upgrade those buildings with retrofits. And from this program, the city did an inventory, and of the 936 buildings identified, the vast majority were actually repaired, but a significant number, over 300 were actually demolished. And the very last building that was completed under this program, which took a number of years, was the Masonic Temple that's located on Locust Avenue, one of the city's historic buildings in the downtown, and that was retrofitted as recently as 2007. So I talked a little bit about the soft story buildings. That's the I'm sorry, I talked about the unreinforced masonry. Another very vulnerable building that we have to deal with here in the city are what we call soft story buildings. And those are essentially buildings that where there is no attachment to the foundation. And this photograph here that shows the tuck under parking, that's essentially what the type of construction that we mean when we talk about soft story building. As you recall, during the the 1994 Northridge earthquake, that's when the city first implemented a voluntary program for other types of vulnerable building construction. And the slide here shows a list of those buildings. But of course, they include single family residential buildings that were not at the time they were constructed many years ago under the building codes . They were not required to be attached to the foundation. So that's one of the major categories. And then I talked about the soft story buildings. Again, this is an example of those were the the building the wall of the building is not attached to the building foundation. And there are a couple of other types of vulnerable construction types. And after the Northridge earthquake, that's when the city required these buildings to be seismically retrofitted. I'm sorry, a voluntary program for these buildings to be retrofitted. So what I'd like to talk about here is one of the city's efforts starting in the late 1990s, which was an assessment district. It was the city's first attempt to try to establish a funding source for buildings that were damaged or buildings that were built under former building codes that were not seismically anticipated to withstand substantial earthquake activity. They created an assessment district and that covered about over 500 residential structures. And this was, again, some of the older, more vulnerable buildings built under older building codes, essentially pre 1934 buildings. And after the initial assessment, we added additional 65 units to this assessment district. So the results of the assessment district were mixed because of some of the extensive work that needed to be done to some of these buildings. There were definitely some some issues with the buildings. Some of the property owners were able to complete the seismic retrofits without any issues. But there were a number of problem areas where the scope of the retrofits were more substantial than the property owners could handle. That resulted in some some cases where a few property owners actually lost their properties. And this effort actually continued until I'm going to say about the mid-term, early to mid 2000s. But that program and that assessment district is is no longer active. So that's kind of a lesson learned for the city, because as we go forward, we'll be looking to make sure that any future program that the city structures will take into account the kind of the potential funding sources. And we'll be looking for ways to incentivize for property owners to be able to complete the the necessary retrofit. So this next slide just gives you a list of some of the buildings throughout the state of California that have actually undertaken a number of different approaches in terms of how they've addressed having their building inventory, in terms of a number of different approaches and how they funded, whether they provide incentives. So there is a lot of good information in some of the cities that have started programs. And as we go to the next step and try to and start to craft our program, we'll be looking carefully at each of these programs and making sure that we establish best practices from among the cities that do have active programs. And I think as anything, we'll just need to be aware that there is no magic bullet. There is no one city that has a perfect program. I think, like most of our other efforts, will need to look carefully at the city of Long Beach. We're different from many other cities in the state. We have an older building stock and our income levels aren't necessarily what some of the other cities that have more aggressive programs. So we'll be looking at all of those factors. So again, the next steps for us, once we get direction from council, we will be looking at picking up a program, an effort we started initially back in 2018, which is a scope of work that brings on board a consultant to take a look at the inventory of these buildings so that we have a comprehensive inventory of the vulnerable buildings. We would then look to expand that scope of work to include having someone take a look at possible funding options again so that we can provide an incentive to property owners to support their retrofit activity. And we've had a very last year's effort. There was a preliminary price tag to do this work at 1.1 million. But again, we'll be going back to relook at that scope, seeing if there are some ways to make sure we get a very complete list of that scope of work with the added benefit of having them look at funding sources and hopefully try to get a better value on that. But we'll be doing that through an RFP process. So we'll be again looking at that and looking at other cities programs to make sure that we establish a program that that works very specifically for the city of Long Beach. And again, just to close out here to talk about some statewide legislation that was previously considered, this was the AB 2681 that was proposed to require local and state reporting of the inventory program for for building. And that's the type of program we're going to be taking a look at. That bill was vetoed by the governor. So it's not a requirement. But again, we think it's best practice isn't something that the city should be moving forward on. And again, there are other proposed legislation regarding seismic resiliency. And we, through our city manager's office, will be continuing to track those bills. I'll turn it over now to Craig back to complete the presentation. Thank you, Linda. I think we have seen that the outline this evening is really focused on all the opportunities that exist relative to preparing and preparing one's residents to be safe. But we just wanted to spend a brief moment highlighting some of the critical infrastructure that we have in Long Beach and what we're doing to make sure that it's safe for continued use. So we know right now that there is over 200 facilities in the city that we would consider a critical facility. So these are our fire stations, our police headquarters, our pump stations, our water and energy resource utilities. Certainly our city hall and other important government buildings. And then we we know we've identified some weaknesses, in particular some of our bridges. It's surprising to think, but we have over over 100 bridges in this in Long Beach, 131 that are owned by the city. So we need to start being diligent in analyzing those bridges and making sure that they're safe so we can provide access if we were to have a major event in the city. We want to make sure public safety can can get to those. But recently, as detailed, there's new building methods that really focus on the resiliency of a city facility. And I think the first city facility that really employed a lot of this was our echo. So there was actual rockers put within the building foundation. So it can kind of move independent from any motion that might happen in that was typical in an earthquake. Certainly our public safety building retrofit addressed many of those things, shoring up that structure and making it much more earthquake resilient. Our new passenger concourse at the airport is another example of where we strengthen the facilities and really build them from a place where we're understanding what earthquake motion does to a building and what improvements you can do in a building to help. You can never prevent 100%, but you make it much more resilient and much more likely to survive a major event. I really wanted to spend just a moment highlighting our City Hall and our main library. I know this council in the council before this this seated council really weighed heavy on this question about how safe is the current city hall. And we know we have some seismic challenges in this building. And so when we took on the the project to build a new civic center and in particular a new city hall, seismic resiliency was one of the key issues that we looked at and that we really put within the entire RFP process. And when we we selected and finalized the layout of the building, it's really a matte foundation designed. So both the Port Tower and the City Hall Tower function together. And as far as resiliency, it was imperative that we are able to re-occupy the building in no more than five days of a major event, and that we would be operational to the public. No, no more than 30 days from a major event. So that is built in and built into our contract with plenary. The project company in charge of the facility. And if for some reason they aren't able to meet those standards and they need to provide alternate space for us to look at them . So we take this all very seriously as we design any new project, any new facility, earthquake strengthening and resiliency is important to the project components. And just wanted to convey to not only the council but the community listening this evening that we are making our new facility stronger and any retrofit of an existing facility is done with earthquakes in mind. I'll pass it back over to you. So I've got the, the last line for presentation as a summary slide. The recent earthquakes really did crack our California cool over the 4th of July weekend. They motivated a lot of residents to get prepared. We saw an uptick in the number of residents who signed up for alert Long Beach. We saw an uptick in the number of residents visiting our website, looking for information. And then just anecdotal, just being out at department stores, hardware stores and others. You saw residents there getting fire extinguishers, water, gloves. It's never too late to get prepared. City department plans continue to evolve. The newly developed crisis communication plan allows us to quickly and effectively get messages out to our residents. Our first responders work as part of a regional response network to ensure we have resources necessary to manage an incident. And we take a ground up approach to disaster preparedness, starting with individual and family preparedness and working our way up through our neighborhoods and the city. We have to accept that we live in an area that is prone to earthquakes and we have to do our part to be prepared for it. Being prepared mentally and physically for whatever may come is what it's all about. We need to be ready to help ourselves and then each other. That concludes staff report. Various representatives from various departments are available to answer questions. Thank you very much. I want to thank the entire team. I think that was a very extensive and good report and a great update on our emergency disaster preparedness response, particularly to Mr. Harrison and your team. And also, of course, the entire public safety network that we have through public works and planning. And so are really, really important for us to always get updates on this. Just a few, a few comments. So I had asked Mr. West to kind of bring this back and to prepare a presentation, because I think it's important to put it out there and continue to put that information out there. We had a pretty, I think, you know, serious scare recently with with the quakes. And I think that it certainly got people's attention. It's certainly got my attention. And I was reminded as I had conversations with the chief and Mr. West and others in the minutes following both of the quakes, that that this information is really important to review and to practice and to continue to review and to keep going through our our our our our preparedness consistently. A few things I want to note. I do. We made an effort the next day to increase our alert Long Beach sign ups and we doubled them or doubled more than doubled them, which I think is really important. I want to encourage residents to please sign up for alert Long Beach, and I want to encourage staff to continue at every possible event to continue to to do that. I want to ask Mr. West also, we need to make a personal appeal to our city employees there, 6500 of them. They should all be on alert. Long Beach. And the fact that we have how many folks signed up already to have 10,000 folks signed up, maybe on alert. Long Beach, is that right, Mr. Harrison? On the cell phone. Of course, we can we can call, I think, over 150 or 160,000 or whatever the number is. But we need to I would expect that that all of our city employees would be interested in being on that system. And so there needs to be an internal effort to do that. And so I would hope we would do that. I'll also just add, I think that our our cert operation teams and the fact that ready Long Beach and those groups are out so consistently in the community I think is really great to see. I see them in all the events in the community functions, so I think that obviously should continue. It. We continue to promote those that work. I wanted to just note. I'm not sure. Maybe, Mr. Modica, you could you can answer this. You and I talked about this some. So our our resiliency program, I just want to make sure that I know that that that issue has been before the council, before we discussed it. We want to I want to make sure that the timeline I know we still have it may be possible to your timeline to complete that work. And I really would like to see that moved up if possible. I know it's a lot of work. I know it's not easy, but I think that that that's just a little bit longer than that I think most of us would like. And so maybe you can get back to us on an expedited timeline and what that would look like. But I think we need to cut that, you know, cut that in half, hopefully, and and get something in front of this body as to what the next phase of this is. In addition to that, I will say that I want to commend the city, because we the first thing that we have done is kind of taking care of our own buildings and facilities. And so the fact that in two weeks we are moving out, we're moving out all of the employees in this building, which is a structurally unsound facility into a facility that is to the latest standards on earthquake preparedness, I think is really important. And I'm glad that we're making repairs across the city on so many public buildings to to continue that work. But I do I do think that whether it's, you know, the Los Angeles program or or the Santa monica program , there are other programs that are out there. And I just want to I want to make sure that we adopt a program. I think it's that's that is important. And I know that funding is always a concern on the on the private side for for for property owners. And we certainly don't ever want to overburden property owners. We also don't want to. We also want to make sure we do everything we can to to ensure safety and the continuation of of of every person and life. And so don't want to repeat the disasters that we've had in the past as well. And so the last thing I'll say is I have been so impressed with our emergency response when we've had these incidents that have not in most cases been major. But what what happens in the way the PD and the fire department and public works and everyone kind of rolls out these plans is really impressive. Has been impressive for me to see as mayor and and to follow. And so I just want to commend the team. And and I think we just got to redouble our efforts and really focus on this. I know that, you know, interest in this sometimes wanes from from from from time to time because there may not be the emergency in front of us, but we just got to be vigilant constantly on this issue. And so I want to thank the staff. I'm sure Mr. Murdoch could want to add anything to that, but I think you guys are pretty on top of it. And there's a good comments and we agree on the study. So, yes, it does take some time to do an inventory of everything as we go back out and relook at the scope of work would be happy to look at what we can do in different chunks and we also want to really focus on that. How do we get those economic solutions? Because that's something that we heard last time that we didn't quite have worked out. And maybe and maybe maybe it's done in those chunks. Right. And so we can get to some of the, the, the the lower hanging fruit and quicker. We'd be happy to look at phasing that so that we can do something a little bit different. Thank you, Councilmember Erika. Thank you, Mary. And I certainly have to agree with the last point you made in regards to the response of police and fire and this last event that we had, the updates that were given to us in regards to their checkpoints and to going to public facilities, ensuring that they were secure and no damage had been caused by the quake that that happened at Ridgecrest. One of the most important things about this report here, and I really want to commend staff for putting this together. It's very thorough. It covered practically all points that you would want to hear, including that as you were going through the report. I think we should probably get a little historical perspective on Long Beach and where we were back in 1933 to the present. And you did that. And I think that was important because it's always is that, you know, would you learn from from from your moment in history? One of the points that I see here also, although we may be encouraging, of course, our residents to send up to emergency to the emergency alert system. I think it's important that we have this kind of report yearly, maybe even twice a year, because of the you never know what a disaster is going to hit. And just being at the forefront of our minds is always important. So, I mean, I hope that we can maybe not as extensively, maybe once every two years, but I think every year we should have some kind of preparedness report such as this. I know we do it at our events that we're going to be having that the Cal State, Long Beach. But, you know, not everyone attends that and not everybody is is aware of what we might have available for them. So I think that having this kind of report to seek answers is important. But more importantly than that, I think we need to engage our media in regards to getting them to also post some of these recommendations for public safety. Also getting the alert system published through a PSA or event or through other kinds of media that we could use for them to alert the residents that there is this system available for them where they can get this kind of information. And, of course, the the extended resources that we have with Facebook and everything else that we use. I think as we move into our into the technical era that we are in using all these different mediums and platforms to expand the information, to make people more aware of the issues that are out there in terms of public safety and disasters, both natural and manmade, that we keep them aware and abreast of what's going on in our in our system. So, again, I want to just commend staff for a very thorough report. And I know when you look at police affairs, they're always conducting exercises and sometimes they seem redundant and they seem like boring. But that's how we get to do the bit. That's how we get to be the best we are. It's practice and it's practice all the time. And while it may be look routine, you never know when that practice is going to become a reality. So thank again. Yes. Thank you very much, Councilmember Pierce. I yes, I want to thank you, Mayor, for agenda raising this so quickly. It was definitely something that we had talked about a ton in my district. Doctor, disaster preparedness has been a key issue for the second district. We have the coastline, we have our downtown. We have many senior homes, high rise buildings in our district. So I want to thank you guys for this. We're constantly having this conversation. And right after the quake, we had our third roundtable of senior residents that were meeting about how we can improve their lives. And one of the biggest issues that they all hooked on to was the fact that most of them lived in a high rise building and none of them had been through a drill in their building. And so I know I quickly grabbed your ear a minute ago, but could you walk through for us, are there requirements for residential, high rise buildings to have any kind of drills? No. There are currently no city regulations nor state regulations that we're aware of that would make that a requirement on building owners. So that is something that, you know, I know it's not in your report. I think it's your report. Fantastic. I really echo the comments about trying to get a quick timeline to have an assessment of those buildings. But in the meantime, we know that what they said with this last quake is it could be five years of having, you know, the ripple effect from that. And so what are we doing to make sure that our residents, not only at our neighborhood meetings, because there's a population that's engaged and there's a population that works two and three jobs or they're elderly and they don't get out of their building. And so I have a real concern that, you know, say that the next big one is here, that we have a lot of people that maybe they went out and bought their kit, but they've never done it. I mean, how many people sat there during the quake and just looked at everybody and didn't get under a table and didn't do the things that we know we're supposed to do? And so I, I will come back, and I hope that we can work together on trying to explore what options we have, particularly for our downtown, where we have senior high rise buildings and older buildings. And what we are doing to really whether it's annually, whether it's whenever new people move into a condo, what can we do as a city to really make sure that we're engaging with our constituents and that they're practicing their plan? Because I think if we really understood how many people have gone through a drill, know where the exits are, we would be pretty disappointed just because our lives are so busy from the from just a quick search at the Internet, looking at all the studies. Residential high rises are the least prepared. And so whatever we can do to make sure that we address that would be fantastic. I had another question on the right of your neighborhood, which, mind you, is all our downtown picture. So just making sure. What does it take for a community to get one of these presentations? How long does that take? How long does it take to set one up? I'm glad you ask that question, Councilmember. We have staff that has been trained and and are going through a training process to be able to conduct these meetings. The meetings actually take place in the neighborhood. Lead resident will invite their neighbors over to their house, living room, garage, lawn, wherever that might be. And the discussion would take place that I described in regards to identifying the resources and the rest and who's going to do. What. After a disaster. So the map here, Long Beach neighborhood is patterned off of a longstanding map, your neighborhood program that's been in existence for a while. We have the city of Long Beach has teamed up with the city of Los Angeles and the county of Los Angeles to roll this program out countywide so a neighborhood can be whatever it is. So we can map your high rise. Right. We can map your apartment building. So certainly the people, residents in your district that we have a tool available for them. I would also just and with your prior questions, encourage residents to also participate in the Great California shakeout. And maybe that's something that we can promote more so that we can get to residents, so that they do practice that drill on a on an annual basis with which we can set up a competition among the districts and see how many people can sign up for it. You've done Facebook stuff with us in the past, and we're certainly willing to do those. And again. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, we've definitely we try to. My goal is to do a disaster preparedness video every quarter. But again, we get so busy that we let the disaster just kind of sit in the background. So I like those ideas. I would want to make sure that we have benchmarks that we're meeting. And so for me, I mean, my number one goal is as soon as you guys are ready that every one of my neighborhood associations and my business improvement district, I have 16 different groups that identify themselves that way in my district would get that done as soon as possible. So my team is always here to help. But whatever we can also do to reach those buildings that are hard to get into, that have ways that don't. I mean, most of these senior buildings, we had a large conversation about it because they have a management company that's in there providing them those services . Even when we've had the city go in, they haven't allowed us to do presentations and things like that. So for some of those troubled buildings, we need to figure out how we make that a requirement, particularly, I think, for our senior building. That so many of those people in those communities are most vulnerable and might have disabilities or mental health challenges and are just our most vulnerable. So whatever we can do to to have that discussion in the future, I welcome that. So thank you, guys. Again, this was a thorough presentation. Look forward to keeping disaster preparedness as a priority. Thank you, Councilman Austin. Thank you, Councilmember Supernova. Thank you. This is going to be very specific, probably not the best venue for it, but I didn't think about it until this item came up tonight. But I it brought back my memories. So the night of the earthquake, I think the alert went out at 10:41 p.m. that police and fire personnel were going to be assessing damage in the city. And I'm one just philosophically, I want more information, not less. That's my idea. But I question that when at I think it was. 12:36 a.m. an alert went out with the same intensity of any emergency that public safety officials have completed. The infrastructure checks, no reported damages have been received and in the city of Long Beach, unless new information becomes available. This will be the last update. So that's essentially an all clear update, but it comes in the wee hours of the morning with that same kind of intensity. So I don't know if I assume protocols are established about how these things go up, but that's that's some input I'd be willing to meet on a committee or whatever, like how will we want to lay this out? And for an all clear message, I'd be willing to wait till the morning. I think Mayor Garcia sent out a comforting message about 9:30 a.m. That was that was a good timing. Thank you. Make it, councilmember. Councilman Mongo. Thank you. I enjoyed the presentation. I appreciate the increase in uptick in the enrollment. I was at concert in the park at the time with approximately five other 5000 other residents, and I thought that it was a great opportunity to talk with neighbors about being prepared. I think one of the things that we often forget until we have a power outage or any of those things, is that you need to be able to provide food and water and save yourself for many days. And I think that your group is doing a great job, especially our CERT teams, in getting out and communicating that to the community, in going into the details of the presentation and talking about bringing back some guidelines to help get the city infrastructure, the infrastructure within the city at a high level of preparedness in case of an emergency. I had read some things that I'm not clear on, but maybe you could help that. Many of the roofs in the region are all flat, so helicopters could land on them for rescues. But that in actuality, I'm internationally when these incidents occur, they don't actually use those helicopter pads for those things at all. And some cities, including Los Angeles, have actually changed the requirements and allowed for variances. And so. We might want to look at making those adjustments at this time if we have policies in place that are based on misinformation, I'll give an example. We don't stand in doorways anymore when there's an earthquake. That's not the protocol. And yet there are still people and teachers out there who haven't gotten the new updates to know that now you want to be underneath the desk or adjacent to a desk so that if something falls, you can be protected. So for that, I would also say that if there are any other earthquake guidelines in the city, that we could look at them and see if there are any that aren't fact based that we could erase them from from the. The ordinance or codes or whatever, so that the city can again, if safe, resume our economy and resume and increase our iconic skyline. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yes, thank you, Mayor. Mrs. Tatum, Mr. Beck and Mr. Harris, after the report in which I just heard, I think all of us can go home and sleep very. Safely tonight because that was a fantastic report and more information. I know A people hear that and they adhere to that. I know they will be able to get to any other quick that we have. Thank you, individuals, for giving us that fantastic report. Thank you again. Thank you. Just a quick note, just on behalf of the planning staff, I was talking to Councilman Mongo. I know that we a few years ago changed our our codes at the city and to align with some of what other downtowns are doing. These are relate to construction of roofs and giving the ability for for design that are not just, you know, flat helicopter pads. And so that's been changed. And that is why you are now seeing building designs with pointy roofs and spires and other things that are coming to the downtown. It was a big pet peeve. Councilwoman, go. That's great to hear. Maybe, perhaps we can also allow the places you already have, the flat roofs with helicopter pads defensively, put outdoor furniture and start utilizing that space more effectively. Because as I look out the windows of the new city hall next week or two weeks from now, and as I look at any other tall building in the city, there's a bunch of numbers on the tops of buildings with no furniture and no enjoyment. And I know there's a limited amount of downtown outdoor space. Let's start giving them the ability to use that space effectively. Thank you. Is there any public comment on the side of city seeing none or is that public comment? Please come forward. No. They had to do a lot of work up there. That's right. It could happen, but only after. Good evening. Tiffany Davie, resident of the fourth District. I want to thank you all for a very comprehensive report. I was looking forward to this. I actually started training with the California Specialized Training Institute the beginning of this year and with L.A. City EMT. So when we had this opportunity during this emergency to kind of see the language system in place, I received reports of 1041. I know. Was a little bit late, but the all clear going through felt like any time for that news was great. I look forward to the community partnership meeting that I believe was scheduled for the 18th and just in case, I didn't see that in the report, but it's now the 25th. Okay. And that's from 1 to 3 p.m.. Okay. As well as perhaps more engagement for Stop the Bleed trainings. And there's also a mass. Mass casualty exercises in August. I learned of that at the Met Court kickoff of the year. So I just wanted to know if that could be updated on the website as well and just look forward to being able to find the crisis communications plan as well as an updated hazard mitigation plan that reflects the new development that's taking place over the past five years. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Dave Shukla, Sun File, thank you very much for the presentation. So very informative. A couple of brief comments. First, an inventory of seismically vulnerable buildings in Long Beach is crucial, even if that doesn't move on state or county levels. It's important to know what here could potentially be affected. Bridge collapse. Also in disaster scenario planning is very instructive for traffic flow, but it's not the only impact. In my neighborhood, we're right by the Newport-Inglewood fault line and there's a lot of critical infrastructure that could severely limit ingress and egress out of the county. And it's important to kind of think through and these are exercises, you know, just look at a map. Cross some lines of what would we do? They're pretty easy to think through, but harder to actually implement in the way of practice. Councilwoman Pierce's point about requiring multifamily property owners to drill for seismic or other disasters is pretty intriguing. I would like to see a way that that that could actually be made amended, but not just for. For Senior living, but also for a lot of the high rises we have downtown and some of the workplaces as well that are in some of these taller buildings. Lastly, a ground up approach or actually not. Lastly, sorry, one other point that a councilmember your group made was that we need to kind of wideband all the technologies that we get information out. One that we didn't hear that much about, especially older folks, still turn to handy dandy AM FM radio and being able to get information out across a variety of platforms is important. It's also important to recognize that. What your neighbors tell you is more likely than not going to be what sticks in your head. And so that brings me to the last point, which is the grownup approach is to be commended. And that's why it's absolutely crucial that we continue to support our program. Thank you. Thank you. Our last speaker. Hello. Good evening. My name is Johnny Wallace. I'm a resident of the seventh District and I am actually a graduate of the CERT program with Long Beach Cert. And although I was not here for the first earthquake and I got a lot of, you know, a lot of people asking me if I was I was actually studying abroad when the first earthquake happened and I was talking with someone and they were like, oh, I'm glad you are here, because, you know, it could have been bad with that. And I was really like, I want it to be here, you know, to help if, you know, if I mean, luckily there wasn't any structural damage or anything like that that was too major. Um, but I would have liked to be here to help. Um, after I. Completed the CERT program. I actually went back to my neighborhood. It's actually right next to the Goldstar Manor. It's for veterans and a lot of elderly people live there as well as in my my neighborhood as well. But I actually went back to my neighborhood and did a presentation with the help of firemen from. You know that helped that help with the cert program by the name of JC Heflin. And they came by and gave them some first aid kits. But after the presentation, I, you know, gave my residents, the residents of my neighborhood survival kits. And that's all great. But I wanted to know, are there any plans on setting up neighborhood preparedness officers and are there any plans to establish new leadership roles within the communities , people that actually know the community outside of cert? Are there any opportunities to learn how to do better presentations and inform the community? Um, you know, all throughout Long Beach, I wanted to just know how to. You know, touch up on that because I was actually kind of in that California cool. You know, even though I wasn't here, I was still in that California cool because nothing had happened for some time. But as we know, you know, seismologists are predicting that artists are anticipating a greater threat from earthquakes in the coming years. So, you know, we're definitely trying to get ready, going to get ready for that. But, yeah, I want to keep my keep my neighborhood alert before a disaster like this. And. Yeah, thank you. First of all, thank you for doing it for us and for your interest. I think it's great to have folks that are out there volunteering and doing that work. So I just want to thank you also. I I'll make sure that we get get back to you in, Councilman. I think if you're not connected already, maybe someone from your team can go over there or someone from staff so that we can connect. These are some good ideas and some areas we're going to kind of close the loop on, I think, with certain fire and some other folks. And so maybe we'll do that. Councilman, we will connect with you in just in just a minute. Yeah. I want to thank you for stepping up also with a third program. One of the things that we're trying to emphasize more nowadays is that, you know, although neighborhood watch programs have gone away, that would have been a good resource for people to get information about such things. We are now encouraging more and more to our police department, community watch, neighborhood watch programs where you could get your neighbors, get updates on what's going around in your neighborhood in terms of public safety. But it's also a good avenue to talk about earthquake preparedness or disaster preparedness as a whole. So let me get your information and I will get back to you in them. And we have in the West Long Beach area, we had the West Long Beach Association. I would recommend that you attend one of those meetings. Our police officer and our neighborhood watch and our community watch person is always there to talk about what's going on in the neighborhood, in the area and give updates. So that would be I would strongly encourage you do that as well and we'll give you those dates when the West Palm Beach Association meets. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. That concludes we're going to take a roll call vote. Councilman Pierce. I'm sorry, district two. District three for. I. Okay. That's three, four. Five, six, seven, I eight and nine. Okay. That motion carries for the seat in front of the report. Thank you very much. We're going to item 36 now.