SF’s Embarcadero needs up to $2.5B to keep it safe from major quake

San Francisco’s Embarcadero, the city’s east-facing waterfront, could need more than $2 billion in upgrades to protect it from a major earthquake, well beyond the bond funds previously approved to reinforce it that the city has at its disposal, a new report says.

The document is a prelude to the Port of San Francisco’s presentation to its governing body next month in which it will recommend about 20 “early projects” to begin readying the Embarcadero for a major earthquake, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. They could collectively cost up to $2.5 billion, port officials told the Chronicle.

“Strengthening the seawall and the shoreline will be very expensive work,” Brad Benson, overseer of the port’s Waterfront Resilience program, told the Chronicle. The agency is looking to advance all those planned upgrades to the Embarcadero over the next decade, Benson said.

The report, dated Friday and prepared by Benson, also revealed that the city would need to raise portions of the Embarcadero as much as seven feet in the coming decades to protect its downtown from future flood risk. That’s because of rising sea levels: Through the year 2100, California’s Ocean Protection Council projects a “likely” sea-level rise of 3.5 feet in San Francisco Bay, according to the Chronicle. That would be enough to regularly flood the present-day Embarcadero during extra-high tides.

If no action is taken to mitigate the area’s earthquake and flood risks, the east-facing portion of the city’s waterfront could have as much as $30 billion in present-value damages by 2100, the report said.

The city will look to use different funding sources to finance the Embarcadero’s near-term upgrades, whose estimated total cost is much higher than what the port can pull from Proposition A, a $425 million bond intended to seismically reinforce it, according to the report.

It will try to tap into $4.7 billion of climate resilience grants that the state will distribute over the next three years, a part of its current fiscal year budget. And it will also try to obtain a piece of the $47 billion allocated toward so-called resilience investments in the federal infrastructure bill, assuming it passes in the House of Representatives.

That combination of funds could make most of the early projects happen and also help finance planning and design work for longer-term efforts, port officials said.

“Everyone understands we need to embrace this opportunity,” Michael Martin, the port’s assistant director, told the Chronicle.

[San Francisco Chronicle] — Matthew Niksa