That Jolt Was Just a Nudge : We’re Not Close to Preparedness for a Great Quake

Like a sharp word to a daydreaming honors’ student, Thursday’s quake was an abrupt reminder that having come so far in learning to live with damaging earth tremors, we still have a long way to go and much to learn.

We have indeed come a very long way, especially since the great quake (8.5 on the Richter scale) that shook Alaska in 1964. There have been exciting and invaluable advances in understanding how the earth’s crustal plates keep in constant motion and in learning how to build our cities and our capabilities to survive earthquakes with minimal damage and minimal loss of life. Seismology and the new field of paleoseismology, which looks for evidence of historic earthquakes in geologically recent layers of soil, have given us significant new information about the history and propensity of major earthquake faults. Seismic engineering research has given us the capability of building far safer structures, both public and private, and has increased our knowledge of where not to place them.

Equally important, we have begun to understand how very much can be accomplished by individuals and communities in facing up to the reality of what will (not “might”) occur in seismically vulnerable areas such as California. And we have begun to learn how to press our elected officials into making the hard decisions, whether funding expensive mitigation (damage-prevention) programs, or taking the responsibility to enact safer seismic building standards and realistic zoning codes.

There is no doubt that Los Angeles and some of the surrounding communities are among the nation’s best-prepared. In fact, it will not be surprising if the eventual analysis of Thursday’s quake reveals that the toll would have been vastly higher if hazard-mitigation efforts had not been alive and well in Southern California.

But the job has only begun. Even the best are not prepared for the future major quakes that we know will occur.

In the first 30 minutes of national news coverage Thursday, one network correspondent, who had just dodged falling studio lights and moving sets, commented on the air that “this might be the big one.” As he and the nation quickly discovered, it was not.

The “big one” is still out there to the north of Los Angeles, locked up in a segment of the San Andreas Fault that has not moved significantly since the great Ft. Tejon quake of 1857, and is under monstrous tectonic strain that quite literally increases day by day. Thanks to research that is only 10 years old, we now know that a Ft. Tejon-style great quake occurs on the average of every 140 years on that section of what is in fact the boundary line between the eastern Pacific plate and the North American plate. In other words, we know that a great quake will occur there, we just don’t know when.

But when is not all that important; where is. Surely, the knowledge that a great quake will occur in one’s backyard should spur one to protective action.

Preparing for a major earthquake involves steps that will take years--rebuilding or tearing down dangerous structures, upgrading schools and dams and public buildings, coordinating response systems, services and lifelines, funding basic research, and having enough courage to forbid or limit construction on hazardous sites-- for example, those that may turn to viscous liquid in heavy seismic shaking.

And all of this will take significant amounts of public money, commitment and understanding that a threat exists--and (this is the good news) that, for the most part, the threat can be handled.

There are some very serious questions that we have not adequately addressed yet as a people, some of which, admittedly, are frightening. For instance: Even with all the efforts that have been made in the Los Angeles area, when the day finally arrives that the San Andreas breaks along the Ft. Tejon segment (and depending on the time of day), reliable estimates foresee 10,000 people killed, tens of thousands injured and up to $60 billion in damage. Have we really considered how that is going to affect the economy of the United States (not just Los Angeles, not even just Southern California)? Have we faced up to what we will experience in the absence of a national earthquake or natural-hazards insurance program--what that will mean in terms of retarded ability to restore homes and businesses? Do our elected, corporate and community leaders nationwide understand sufficiently that thousands of lives and billions of dollars can be saved by communities that have the courage to act ahead of time? Have we, in other words, learned the lessons that nature and science are trying to teach us about the need for vigorous preparation for the inevitable?

These are societal questions, and they span the nation. No one should hold the insular and naive idea that a catastrophic earthquake--whether in Los Angeles or, say, Memphis, which is equally vulnerable--would not have an impact on the rest of the country.

These are, however, also questions that tend to get lost in the background noise of daily life, financial realities and our natural propensity to push a threat as far into the future as possible. The old line (and the attitude behind it) “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it” has kept funding of vital seismic research and mitigation programs suppressed and seriously limited, and it has enabled some communities to put the lure of development and expansion ahead of ethics and reality.

We Americans have a habit of hand-wringing and finger-pointing after every disaster, asking “why wasn’t something done to prevent this?” We cannot prevent earthquakes, but we had better ask what is being done now, when there is still time, to prevent catastrophe.

If, indeed, we do learn from our faults--literal and figurative-- then Thursday’s seismic message should jolt us into action. We have come to that proverbial bridge, and we must move quickly to cross it into a state of far better readiness for the “big one.”