Multiple tall buildings in downtown San Francisco didn’t handle Tuesday’s storms very well.

Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, whose district includes one of the storm-lashed structures, said he’s prepared to “move heaven and earth” to make sure that every tall building in San Francisco is comprehensively inspected by a qualified engineer immediately. […] “The only miracle yesterday was that nobody was injured,” Peskin said, referring to the shards of glass that rained from the reflective citadels in South of Market as the winds hit 78 mph. Anyone walking along Mission Street could have easily been impaled, he said. …Salesforce East skyscraper at 350 Mission St. bore the most severe scars, with windows popping or splintering on every floor from 11 to 30, Department of Building Inspection spokesperson Patrick Hannan said.

In related news, organized crime teams continue to break hundreds of car windows every day.

Despite dealing with break-ins, customers said they are willing to accept it as a risk that comes with living in San Francisco. “It’s easy to hate on SF, but I love it here,” Rich said.

Some streets are covered in broken glass, where locals refer to it as “urban snow“.

Three suspected thieves casually smashed car windows, one after another on Wood Street in West Oakland Tuesday morning. As many as 20 cars were hit, according to one neighbor. In San Francisco’s Cow Hollow neighborhood in the Marina District, neighbors say someone smashed the windows of at least 17 cars. It happened on Sunday night on two blocks along Filbert Street.

That’s organized crime. It reminds me of pirates in Somalia, and how Arab investors started organizing gun-toting thugs into tactical operations with profit objectives as if crime pays. Those thieves working a street in SF are on assignment, maybe paid a base salary with bonus for special finds. It’s been so bad there’s a real-time broken car glass tracker run by the San Francisco Chronicle.

First of all, you have to assume with this rate of break-in, the city is being divided up with break-in teams allocated so they don’t overlap or compete. I can almost guarantee there are dead-drop spots to collect and then ship out neighborhood break-in hauls. Maybe there’s even one in a particular embassy.

I guess all I’m saying is that with the shift towards more extreme weather maybe it’s time to add broken glass from skyscrapers to such a tracker? That makes coordinated cleanup tracking easier at least.

Second, if the weather were nicer maybe there wouldn’t be a need for windows at all, like the awesome cable-car designs, but those days seem to be long gone. Kind of like the days of fighting organized crime by attacking its root. But seriously, if you have a car in SF you might as well leave the windows open and deal with a basic mess cleanup instead of replacing complicated unique glass.