9/11 Raises Building-Safety Concerns; Prompts Day-Long Symposium

SEATTLE, WA-More than 75 local business executives and government officials spent Wednesday discussing the worst case scenario: their building’s falling down.

A joint effort of Colliers International and Fisher Communications, yesterday’s symposium at Fisher Plaza began with moderator and local television personality, Ken Schram, asking, “What do we do if the world starts falling down?” For the next few hours a high-level group of panelists did their best to answer that question.

Doug Barrett and Stephen Rothrock, brokers with Colliers/Seattle and leasing agents for Fisher Plaza (at 140 Fourth Ave. N.), tell GlobeSt the genesis of the executive forum was the number of real estate clients taking magnifying glasses to their disaster recovery plans and asking about the survivability of Seattle real estate.

In his portion of the presentation, Glen L. Woodbury, director of Washington’s Emergency Management Division, divided disaster recovery in three components: facilities, operations, personnel. Would your facility survive? Yes or no, could you continue to operate? And, finally, do you have a plan in place that would allow your personnel to run those operations—especially if they had to be managed remotely?

As to the question of facility, Ed Doyne, director of customer development for Fisher Properties Inc., provided an outline of elements adding up to a higher survival probability for structures. First on the list: dirt. “Take a look at the building’s geotechnical reports,” says Doyne, adding, “Avoid buildings on fill.”

This would, naturally, remove from contention hundreds of thousands of square feet of real estate in areas such as Pioneer Square, which was particularly hard hit by last February’s 7.0 Nisqually Earthquake—or the Kent Valley, which one real estate-industry attendee referred to as “Liquifaction Central.”

The site of the symposium, Fisher Plaza, is, of course, a model of the remaining items on Doyne’s list — many of which are particularly critical to companies dependent upon high-tech infrastructure, like Fisher’s media and telecom tenants. In fact, Barrett and Rothrock say they are billing Fisher Plaza as “a world-class communications, media and mission critical facility.” Independent power, independent water for HVAC, connectivity, redundancy–all of lifeline importance to the data-critical company — and the list goes on.

Even for the less-tech companies of Seattle, the Colliers’ brokers say there is an increasing tenant demand for beefier infrastructure and security—but a limited amount of supply. Rothrock comments that some folks are talking about converting now-vacant telco buildings to high-infrastructure offices. The problem he says is that since they were built to house equipment and not people—there’s no parking.

Bottom line, Rothrock concludes, “There’s not enough product to respond to the demand. We will see over time more construction orienting itself to what Fisher Plaza is providing today, but it’s going to take more than a few years.” In the meantime, many companies will need to focus their recovery plans on how to survive even if their buildings or infrastructure doesn’t.