QUAKE WATCH : Ready State

It’s not the fault of the faults if the flashlight batteries were dead Wednesday night when the Joshua Tree temblor rippled through Southern California. Or that there was no wrench handy to the gas meter.

One fault or another has been quite faithful about reminding us nearly every year recently that this is earthquake country. Not just earthquake country but, some inevitable day, big earthquake country. Big enough to make a 6.1-magnitude shock like the one north of Palm Springs seem like a snooze in a hammock. The one the seismologists generally think of as the Big One will be 10 times worse than the 1989 quake that killed 67 people in the San Francisco Bay Area, broke the Bay Bridge, flattened homes.

So it is time again to linger a moment with the neighbors and share the grim notion that a major earthquake need not be 100 times more severe than the Whittier shock of 1987 to cut off entire communities from ambulances or even fire trucks for hours or even days.

Time, then, to check the batteries, find the wrench, make certain that the first-aid kit is in a place not likely to be buried in rubble. Time to create--or revive--an earthquake package of water and food, matches, cash, spare eyeglasses, a camp stove for heat, prescription drugs, clothes and other essentials and make sure it is all stashed in the car trunk.

Time also to review what we know about earthquake weather--that there is no such thing and, therefore, no easy warning. Just as there was no way to know at 9:50 Wednesday night what was going to happen at 9:51.