If All Else Fails: The San Bernardino Valley Communications Center

By Liz Stinson

There’s a 99% chance that a major earthquake will assail the San Bernardino Valley in the next few decades. When that day comes, power lines will topple and buildings will collapse — but the San Bernardino Valley Communications Center will not.

“I sometimes call it a doomsday facility,” says Jeremy Hart, Principal and Director of the Civic + Cultural practice at LPA Design Studios. “If everything else in the county goes down, this facility keeps the world running.”

Hart and his team partnered with a collaborative team (see sidebar) to provide San Bernardino County with a logistical hub for dealing with any cataclysmic situation that may arise, from earthquakes to fires to manmade disasters. All told, more than 130 emergency communications operators will work out of the space at any given time, fielding calls from across the county.

The 75,000-square-foot building’s remit is necessarily broad, given that San Bernardino County is the largest by land in the United States. It stretches from the outskirts of the Los Angeles suburbs all the way to Nevada, and is divided by a mountain range. The new facility was designed to replace the valley’s aging, undersized emergency communications infrastructure and to work in concert with the county’s High Desert Public Safety Operations Center in Hesperia — ensuring total uninterrupted coverage for the entire population.

Griffin Structures, hired by the county, retained LPA to develop bridging documents in support of a design-build procurement process. The LPA team delivered programming, design and engineering services to help unite the county’s disparate emergency communications functions under one roof. The new building is thus now the headquarters for the Office of Emergency Services and Emergency Communication Services, and includes the San Bernardino County Sheriff, CONFIRE and Inland Counties Emergency Medical Agency.

Ultimately, “The goal of bringing all these agencies together that were dispersed in different buildings is so they can provide more coordinated services for the community,” Hart says.

And in a major emergency — like, say, “the big one” — that’s utterly critical.

Shifting and Gliding

The SBVCC is considered an essential services building, which means it’s held to a higher standard of resilience than most.

Bryan Seamer, Director of Structural Engineering at LPA, explains that buildings typically are designed with a baseline of public safety in mind. “The usual goal is for a building to stay standing long enough for everyone to get out alive,” he notes. The SBVCC goes far beyond basic safety codes. Because the county services that the building supports are the same ones that would be critical following a natural disaster, it was imperative that the SBVCC could withstand a major seismic shock, to the point that anyone inside the building would be able to continue seamlessly working afterward.

While most buildings are rigidly affixed to the ground, the SBVCC is built atop a base isolation system that effectively separates the building from the ground as a way to save the structure from damage during an earthquake. “Sometimes the most effective — and cost-effective — way to protect a building like this is to disconnect it from the earth,” explains Seamer.

In the case of the SBVCC, the foundation level houses a series of concrete footings that support the base isolators. The building itself sits atop giant curved bearings that have a sliding “puck” inside. When the ground moves violently during an earthquake, these bearings slide horizontally as the building remains largely unmoved above. With this system, a building will shift and glide during an earthquake — sometimes up to 72 inches before returning to its original position — but gently enough that the people and critical equipment inside aren’t jolted and jostled. “What we’re really shooting for is to minimize the acceleration the building experiences. Acceleration leads directly to damage and injury,” says John Wilson, a Senior Structural Engineering Project Manager at LPA.

To account for that movement, the building required a series of unusual design interventions. In the basement, any pipes that connect to the ground feature large loops so they can move independently of the building without breaking. A generator that’s big enough to power the building for three days also sits on its own isolation pad to prevent damage — as does a second generator, just in case the first one should fail. Hart adds that the elevator pit — typically a hole below the building — also required its own specialized design since it too needed to be isolated. “To solve for this, the elevator pit has to hang from the first-floor structure, floating above the ground,” he says. “This allows the elevator and the elevator pit to move at the same rate as the building.”

Outside, a “moat” wraps around the entire building to create buffer space for any movement that might occur during an earthquake. This gap allows the building to shift without butting up against firm land.

Collectively, the sum total of this design work is that critical employees and emergency response equipment can withstand the event itself — and then begin to help anyone impacted by it. “The people in this building are going to feel the shaking, basically wait for it to stop, and then immediately get back to work,” Seamer says.

A Gentle Fortress

From the outside, the SBVCC is meant to look just like any other office building, which belies the extraordinary resilience engineered within. Hart says the facade was dictated by the interior programming — where people spend the most time, where the building most needs light and where the sun naturally hits. A series of vertical fins break up the glass paneling and help control the way the sun filters into the space. “It also starts to give some rhythm and movement to the building as the fins march down the facade,” he says. “Then, the other sides of the building become relatively quiet.”

That too is by design. The building is set away from the street and encircled by an eight-foot-tall fence to prevent vehicles with potentially hazardous cargo from getting close. The building itself, meanwhile, is bolstered by a strong base layer, K-rated steel bollards and large boulders, which quietly turn the landscape into a barrier.

In the event of an emergency, the site is also designed to function as a newsroom of sorts for liaising with the public. Television news vans can plug directly into a system that allows for pooled coverage, so every station can access a shared feed of information to disseminate news far and wide.

Supporting Mission Support

At the SBVCC, employees have access to amenity spaces including a fitness center, locker rooms, and a lounge for decompressing. Hart and his team uniquely designed the building around the needs and wellness of the people within, many of whom are putting in long hours in an extremely stressful environment.

The Emergency Operations Center, which gets activated during disasters and crises, allows an influx of people from various agencies to gather and coordinate planning. Hart notes that typical buildings aren’t designed for a large volume of otherwise rare guests. Rather, they are built for the day to day, and then flex to accommodate overcrowding when it needs to happen. “With the SBVCC, it’s built for those moments, day in and day out,” he says. “As everybody turns to this building to respond, it has the capacity to support them, from being able to feed them to giving them all a place to work.”

Many of those people will be additional dispatchers who are fielding calls and coordinating with emergency responders. At the SBVCC, dispatchers have a dedicated space that effectively functions as the building’s command center. Within, Hart and his team made strategic design decisions to maximize sunlight in the space. This allows dispatchers to peer out of windows with a view of nature, contrasting the dim underground settings often synonymous with such emergency centers.

During interviews with stakeholders, the design team also learned that dispatchers have very little time between calls, which helped shape the layout of the space, with a particular focus on efficiency. “Every second you’re away from your console, people’s lives are at stake,” notes Hart.

That insight led the designers to rethink the position of the building’s kitchen in particular, which is now easily accessible to all. The kitchen was a non-negotiable feature for many of SBVCC’s workers, who requested a full range and oven since they often work long shifts and don’t make it home to cook meals.

It’s a practical — and symbolic — gesture that ensures the people who spend their lives protecting others get protected a little bit in return. “During an interview, a department head said she makes Thanksgiving dinner every year for employees who are working,” Hart says. “She told me, ‘I don’t get to spend Thanksgiving with my family. The people I work with are my family.’”

One of the guiding principles at LPA is “We don’t do this alone” — and the San Bernardino Valley Communications Center truly embodies the power of collaboration to drive innovative results with critical impact.

Griffin Structures served as the Owner’s Representative, leading procurement and delivery for this mission-critical 911 dispatch and Emergency Operations Center designed to remain operational during major disasters. LPA served as Design Architect and Engineer, with Paradigm Structural Engineers providing consultation on the base isolation design. The design-build team of Swinerton and CannonDesign built the project and served as the Architect of Record, along with Forell | Elsesser and Psomas as the Engineers of Record, and MIG as the Landscape Architect of Record.