On Shaky Ground : Yucaipa Residents May Be First to Know When the Big One Hits

When California is rearranged from below by the Big One, some scientists believe that the folks living here may well be the first to know.

This quiet city in the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains--with its chicken and turkey ranches and a City Council poised to debate fly abatement next month--sits atop the most complicated set of faults emanating from the most notorious of them all--the San Andreas.

Compounding the situation, the back-to-back Landers and Big Bear earthquakes in June shifted the earth in a subtle but critical fashion. Now, some scientists believe, the epicenter of a catastrophic earthquake may likely be somewhere near here, two-thirds of the way from the Los Angeles Civic Center to Palm Springs along Interstate 10.

So most of the city is bracing for the biggie.

The local emergency preparedness team is ready to transform the gazebo at the city park into an outdoor, MASH-type field hospital. The schools are equipped to house and feed their 7,000 students for up to three days and nights in case they are stranded. Neighborhood Watch captains have identified nurses, heavy equipment operators, ham radio enthusiasts and others who can be pressed into search-and-rescue and first-aid service.

But not everyone is following suit.

“This is all just a tremendous amount of hoopla,” said design engineer Jim Eshleman, who built a custom home for his wife and three young children on property that is bisected by one of the area’s faults. “The press has blown this way out of proportion. I’m not saying it’ll never happen. That’s not realistic either. But life is a risk.”

The Eshlemans learned about the fault beneath them before they built their $250,000 home at the base of the mountain. The fault showed up in the trench work. The couple had to reposition the angle of their home, thereby losing their hoped-for living room view of the Inland Empire sweeping out below them and, on the rarest of days, Catalina Island on the horizon.

His wife, Suzanne, draws an imaginary line with her hand, sweeping from right to left across the back yard, to show the fault’s location.

Sure earthquakes are a nuisance, she said. Look at the cracks on the ceramic floor tile. Probably should have laid carpeting instead. And nope, there is not much hanging from the walls.

But when it comes to other earthquake preparations, the Eshlemans just shrug. There are not even any water bottles stashed away in the garage.

“We haven’t taken it as seriously as most people have,” Suzanne Eshleman said. “People always tell you the same thing, that the Big One is coming, the Big One’s coming. But I guess we’re in denial that there will be a Big One. My mom keeps getting on me for that.”

Seismologist Tom Heaton of the U.S. Geological Survey might, too.

“We’re not trying to increase people’s anxiety, but we want to give them the opportunity to be prepared for the eventuality of such a large shaking,” he said.

“The recent Landers activity has put Yucaipa in a somewhat more vulnerable position in that it seems to have taken the San Andreas Fault closer to failure. We don’t know where that failure point is, but eventually there will be an earthquake through there. The question is, when?”

The Eshlemans’ cynicism notwithstanding, others in town are taking the threat seriously.

Some neighbors a couple of blocks away retreated to their motor home for more than a week after the June temblors--and have now put their home up for sale, wanting to leave the area. We get the hint, they say.

Jack and Diane Williams will not go that far, but they have done just about everything conceivable to get ready. They live just 70 feet from the fault that runs across the Eshlemans’ place, and they say they feel the earth move all the time.

“The house creaks, the dogs sit up and bark, and then it’s quiet,” said Jack Williams. “And you never read about those ones in the paper the next day.”

To hold their antique canisters and other collectibles--even candlesticks--securely atop the curio cabinets and display shelves, the Williamses went to a recreational vehicle supply house for rubberized place mats, cut into doily shapes.

After all, the Williamses reason, their home may shake and rattle just as much as a motor home, even on its foundation.

Display cabinets, desks and an antique clock on the fireplace hearth are attached to the walls with bolts and wires. To keep glassware and dishes from tumbling out of kitchen cabinets, the opposing doorknobs are fastened with rubber bands. Other cabinets in the house are closed with hook and eye fasteners. And in the front closet is the “earthquake satchel,” complete with food, water, flashlights, batteries and medicines.

“We didn’t use to think an earthquake would happen,” Diane Williams said. “But after the June quakes, now we’re saying that it will happen.”

Miracle Litchfield is a Neighborhood Watch captain, and standing beside the brick column--cracked from the June temblors--that supports her front porch portico, she talks of how the earthquakes first shake the bedroom side of the house before rolling through.

A trash can in the garage--she has been meaning to put it in the back yard--contains her earthquake supplies.

“It’s always on your mind,” she said. “It’s changed my life--how I arrange furniture, where I put the kids’ beds--on an interior wall, away from windows, how I hang my paintings.”

Across town at Nifty Gifts, store owners Penny Goolsby and Fran Wood look at the 1,000 limited-edition collector plates, the porcelain dolls, crystal figurines and other collectible statues--and all those glass shelves and windows.

Their biggest concern, they say, is injury caused by breaking glass. The single biggest item in their earthquake box: A first-aid kit chock-full of bandages.

A dozen items broke during the June quakes. “We probably have $100,000 in inventory, and there’s no way we could afford earthquake insurance,” Wood said.

Her partner said: “If you spend your life worrying about the Big One coming, you’d be a nervous wreck.”

Ontario fireman Don Culotta, who lives in Yucaipa, is trying to market a “4-in-1 emergency tool” that he thought of two days after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake. It is designed to turn off water and gas lines, pry open doors and dig through debris. Yucaipa city crews carry them in their trucks.

Various public agencies in Yucaipa--the water utility, schools, sheriff’s station and others--have banded together to plan for an earthquake, and they are reasonably satisfied that the city is ready.

But they warn that residents had better carry their weight, too.

“We’d like our residents to be prepared to be on their own for longer than the 72 hours everyone talks about,” said City Engineer John McCarty, “because if there is a Big One, it’ll also hit L.A. and all the resources will go there, not here to Yucaipa.”

Scientists, of course, cannot predict when a catastrophic earthquake will strike, but they assume it will be somewhere along the state’s longest fault, the southern segments of San Andreas--which run from the Salton Sea in Imperial County to Ft. Tejon north of Los Angeles. Presumably, it runs alongside Yucaipa, but because of the San Bernardino Mountains, scientists have not been able to map its subterranean path.

The Yucaipa region, said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones, is more prone to be an epicenter than other locations along the fault.

“Yucaipa is on the most complicated part of the San Andreas Fault, and is at the northern gateway into a mess of faults,” Jones said. And given what happened with the Landers and Big Bear earthquakes, “an earthquake along this section of the San Andreas is more likely.”

Because of how the earth slightly shifted in the magnitude 7.5. Landers quake and its 6.5 Big Bear aftershock, the tension that would otherwise hold the opposing sides of the San Andreas Fault in place near Yucaipa is believed to have lessened slightly, she said.

“By pulling the fault block away from the San Andreas during the Landers and Big Bear quakes, we’ve reduced the forces pushing the San Andreas together” in the Yucaipa region, she said. “By reducing the friction that keeps the fault from slipping, we’ve made an earthquake along that section of the fault more likely.”

Compounding the earthquake scenario is the fact that the Banning, other San Andreas strands and the new Big Bear faults converge near Yucaipa.

“This gets interesting for us because big earthquakes often start at complicated parts of their faults,” Jones said. Referring to the Geological Survey’s Nov. 30 pronouncement that revised upward the probability of a major earthquake hitting Southern California, Jones said: “Yucaipa is right in the middle of the red (high-probability) zone.”

Still, Jim Eshleman shrugs.

“If you run from every unknown, you might as well climb into a cave--and then you’ll have an earthquake and the cave will collapse.”

Living on the Edge

Two families interviewed for this story, the Eshlemans and the Williamses, live in a Yucaipa neighborhood that is virtually astride what scientists believe is the main strand of the San Andreas Fault. Seismologists have identified the region as more likely to be in the rupture zone of the feared “Big One”--a quake of 7.5 magnitude or larger--than any other spot in Southern California. The San Andreas strands converge at Yucaipa with an unnamed fault that caused the 6.6-magnitude Big Bear earthquake that followed the 7.5-magnitude Landers earthquake last June 28. Among a large number of Big Bear aftershocks has been a cluster of 3- and 4-magnitude temblors just north of the Eshlemans’ and Williamses’ neighborhood.