Emergency Operations Center

San Francisco spent decades looking for somewhere to run an emergency from. A 1993 planning background report recalls that in 1974 the Emergency Operations Center sat at the Youth Guidance Center on Woodside Avenue and was considered inadequate, and describes the search for a site on which to build a new one; a full feasibility study had already been commissioned in 1978 by the Bureau of Architecture and the Mayor's Office of Emergency Services from Reid & Tarics Associates with Parsons Brinckerhoff. Meanwhile the city practised in the building it had — the after-action report on the 1980 Cal Medex earthquake medical exercise devotes a section to operations at the centre, down to meetings with the Department of Electricity about its radio equipment. The centre now stands at 1011 Turk Street. The city's guidebook for new department heads sets out how it works: the Office of Emergency Services maintains it, any department head with emergency responsibilities may request its activation, departments must pre-identify enough staff to run two twelve-hour shifts, and if the main centre is unavailable the alternate is Room 300 at the Moscone Center. Its limits are on the record too: a Civil Grand Jury report notes the first mass-scale activation came on 11 September 2001, and that because space there is limited, supervisors were advised to work through the Mayor's legislative liaison rather than report to it. The building keeps being rebuilt around its function — two storeys of office at $12 million in 1997, a $4 million remodel of the second-floor dispatch area in 2022, and a $3 million replacement of its electrical distribution filed with a sequencing plan to keep the facility operational throughout the work.