The destruction caused by the major earthquakes in Turkey is raising questions about quake retrofit efforts in the Bay Area.
About a million homes in California need some kind of quake retrofit, according to the California Earthquake Authoritiy, and only 10% of California homeowners have earthquake insurance.
Janiel Maffei, chief mitigation officer with the California Earthquake Authority, said the age of many homes in the Bay Area puts them at a heightened risk if the region were to have quakes similar to the sizes of the ones that rocked Turkey and Syria. "A lot of our construction happened around the World Wars," Maffei said."That was before we had readily adopted seismic provisions for our residential construction."Howard Cook, owner of Bay Area Retrofit, has completed thousands of retrofits over the past two decades. He said retrofitting is unfortunately not a high priority for homeowners until it's too late.
"People literally have to be shaken up," Cook said."If they’re not shaken up, they become apathetic."
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