Science / Medicine : ANALYSIS : Weak Resolve on Quake Studies Leaves State in the Lurch

Japan has set the standard for earthquake preparations with a comprehensive program that even includes an effort to predict a specific temblor in time to evacuate several crowded cities before a catastrophic quake hits.

Even in California, which will unquestionably be hit by a monster quake sometime within the next few decades, there is nothing else quite like it.

Why not?

One obvious reason is that Japan has many more earthquakes than California and thus is more frequently reminded of the threat, but the problem goes much deeper than that. What is lacking in California, according to scores of seismologists interviewed over many years, is a clear resolve on the part of the public, plus an acceptable level of commitment from government agencies that fund the research.

Despite the fact that California will be struck by many earthquakes in the years ahead, researchers have to fight for every nickel that goes into the earth sciences, perhaps because they seem less glamorous than some other fields of science.

One does not have to look far for an example. It took scientists at the California Institute of Technology years to muster the economic backing to create a modest network of seismographic stations that will study earthquakes in Southern California, although the program costs only one three-hundredth as much as the giant atom smasher that the federal government plans to build in Texas.

When a magnitude 7.1 quake devastated parts of the San Francisco Bay Area last October, a golden opportunity to learn more about the dynamics of temblors on the mighty San Andreas Fault slipped through the fingers of scientists, who felt frustrated by the lack of support for their research. That quake, which destroyed homes and collapsed a freeway more than 50 miles away from the epicenter, came as no surprise to scientists who have studied the San Andreas. In fact, it hit on the segment of the great fault that had been singled out as the most likely area in all of Northern California for a major quake on the San Andreas.

Yet there were relatively few instruments operating in the Santa Cruz Mountains around the fault when the quake struck. Had the area been as heavily instrumented as Japan’s Tokai area--where Japanese scientists hope to predict a coming quake--enough data would have been collected to rewrite the textbooks on seismology and the San Andreas, and it may have provided some warning. Instead, scientists had to admit with some embarrassment that they were unable to detect any sign that the approaching quake was imminent, despite the fact that they had every reason to believe it was coming.

“I find that very troubling,” one key scientist said as he reviewed the scant data collected from the October quake.

To that must be added the fact that relatively little is known about past quakes in California, partly because recorded history here is so brief compared to Japan’s.

There is only one place in California where earthquakes occur with such consistency that scientists can say with confidence that one is due there now. That is near the Central California community of Parkfield, northeast of Paso Robles, where the San Andreas breaks about every 22 years. The record of periodicity there is so clear that Parkfield today is one of the most heavily instrumented areas in the world, and scientists hope to learn much about precisely what happens before, during and after an earthquake on the San Andreas.

However, scientists have searched far and wide for another Parkfield, because what happens in one spot may be quite different from what happens someplace else. As of today, however, no one knows for sure where the next earthquake is most likely to strike, with the single exception of Parkfield.

And Parkfield is so isolated that even if scientists were able to predict the exact moment a quake is most likely to strike, there would be no more than a handful of people to evacuate. Meanwhile, a great quake could hit in downtown Los Angeles with no warning whatsoever.

So despite the fact that scientists agree that a catastrophic quake lurks in California’s future, there is very little effort to predict it because no one knows where it will hit.

The experts could get lucky, of course, and the quake could tip its hand in advance through such things as very convincing foreshocks or swarms of smaller quakes, but the understanding of earthquakes in California is so incomplete that it will take a bold soul indeed to say with conviction that a specific quake is about to strike.

So as it stands now, California will muddle on with very limited funding, hoping that bright men and women who struggle against profound odds to understand forces that could level great cities will somehow unravel the mysteries in time to save a few thousand lives. Maybe they will. But maybe they won’t.