The biggest addition to the list will be soft-story wood-frame buildings, a category that fared particularly poorly after the October 1989 earthquake in San Francisco and the 1994 tremor in ...

I learned about the risk of “soft story” buildings on the evening of Tuesday, Oct. 17, 1989. On that day, coastal Northern California was struck by the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake.

The focus of the new effort will likely fall on soft-story wood-frame buildings that were constructed before 1977, a type that the study deemed as particularly vulnerable. Palo Alto had about 294 ...