What Would Experts Do After the Big One? : Seismology: Employees at the Caltech lab would face a dilemma--whether to report to work or try to help those around them. The need for constant preparedness overshadows their lives.

It isn’t that Caltech earthquake geologist James Dolan ducks every time he drives under a freeway overpass.

But he does think twice before taking a window seat in a restaurant. He avoids old brick buildings in downtown Los Angeles. And he orients himself by fault lines--two blocks from the Hollywood fault, or maybe a couple of miles from the Newport-Inglewood fault.

When The Big One strikes, Dolan knows what he has to do next: head to Caltech in Pasadena or the San Andreas fault. That means he’s thinking in constant seismic-alert mode to maximize his chances of making it to work when a major temblor strikes. It also means wrestling with the question of what to do when a killer quake wipes out phone lines, collapses freeway overpasses, topples buildings and injures or kills thousands: Go to work? Look for loved ones? Help trapped or injured people nearby?

Other emergency workers will face the same question in a major earthquake. But the dilemma has taken on new urgency at Caltech and the U.S. Geological Survey following the recent rash of earthquakes and reports from scientists who have upped Southern California’s chances for a damaging temblor. The likelihood of a magnitude-7 quake or higher in the region has increased because of last June’s 7.5-magnitude Landers temblor and other recent seismic activity, a panel of California’s leading scientists reported this month.

Dolan and others at Caltech’s seismological laboratory know that the public expects them to pop up on TV as soon as the ground stops shaking, with emergency information in hand. That expectation overshadows their lives to some extent; it affects their decision on the type of house they buy, where they live, where they go.

“That is not paranoia; it’s caution,” said Dolan, 33. “It’s having seen what an earthquake can do. Whenever I’m in a building I’m not familiar with, it’s like going into an airplane. You find out where the emergency exits are. You have a sense of where you are.”

Some earthquake experts at Caltech bolt their houses to the foundation, tether refrigerators, putty down crystal, nail bookcases to the wall, strap in water heaters, latch cabinet doors, cover windows with a plastic wrap-type sheet and fasten televisions and computers with Velcro strips.

They never turn off their beepers, which go off for magnitude-3 quakes or greater during the day and 3.5-magnitude or greater quakes at night. After hours, seismologists and earthquake geologists check their beepers’ tiny display screen, which notes the magnitude and location of a quake, before deciding whether to roll out of bed and get dressed for work. Beepers have jarred them awake as often as several times a night.

Eight minutes after the Landers earthquake, which hit at 4:58 a.m., Dolan was rolling down the highway at 75 m.p.h., monitoring radio news reports and heading for the reported fault--only to be beaten by another Caltech geologist, Kerry Sieh, who had rented a helicopter in his eagerness to get there. Geologists go to the scene to phone in visual observations that help seismologists understand the quake.

Dolan and his girlfriend live in a one-story, wood-frame house built around 1920 in Pasadena. He has made the house as quake-proof as possible, but not because he’s scared. He just wants to make sure he can get out of the house and head to the fault. But when a major quake strikes closer to home, Dolan said he’s not sure he’ll be so quick to hit the road.

“I think, being a reasonably compassionate human being,” he said, “if you’re in a mall, and somebody has a beam fall on them, for example, you’re going to help them. . . . There’s no getting away from that. We are human beings, and we simply can’t ignore that inbred compassion.”

The decision is their own. Caltech’s seismological laboratory does not have a policy requiring its earthquake experts to show up after a catastrophic quake, but some believe that work is where they can do the most good in a crisis. They all say it’s a hard call to make until they actually are in the situation.

“In a very large earthquake, I might know that the building across the street is burning, but there isn’t the fire department there to put it out,” said Steve Bryant, a director of technical support in the seismological laboratory. “I personally don’t have anything that’s going to stop a major fire from spreading, and there’s nothing in the house worth dying for, so. . . . “

Bryant, 31, figures he can help people best by heading into work and gearing up the CUBE system, or the Caltech-U.S. Geological Survey Broadcast of Earthquakes, a developing program that transmits emergency information by computer.

He and his fiancee live half a mile from Caltech in a two-story condominium, close enough so he can walk to work if roads are unusable after a devastating quake. They’ve bolted everything down and taken precautions such as covering their windows with heavy shades and adding flexible gas lines and flexible water lines to their gas heater to minimize the chances of breakage when the ground shakes. And Bryant tries to be careful about not parking next to a big tree, walls or anything that can topple on to him or his car and prevent him from heading to work.

In an earthquake, he will go to work first, unless his fiancee is hurt.

“We’ve already prepared for the minor stuff, so it takes something really major to really keep me from work,” Bryant said.

After a crippling quake, seismologist Thomas H. Heaton said, he can’t see himself stepping over injured people in a rush to get to the U.S. Geological Survey or to search for family members.

“No matter where you are, if there’s a damaging earthquake, and people are injured . . . the first thing we need to do is take care of what we can next to us, the people next to us, and you hope the people around your loved ones do the same,” said Heaton, 41.

There are 15 or so other staff members, some of whom presumably will cover for him if he doesn’t make it into the office, Heaton said.

But, most likely, he’ll try to make it to work, although he would worry about his wife and two children, ages 16 and 17. If he doesn’t know where his family is, he will have to hope for the best.

“Probably the first concern would be to make sure the (Caltech) systems are working,” Heaton said, “and hope that people who are with my family are taking care of the situation there too. It could be very difficult for me to get across (town) to actually do something about it.”

Heaton rides a motorcycle to work, partly because it would get him around faster than a car if roads are blocked. He and his family live two miles from Caltech in a 1910 wood-frame house that has been bolted, braced and reinforced for earthquakes. But there’s only so much he can do, Heaton said. He is confident that his home and office will withstand a major earthquake but can’t say what he will do if he’s stuck on a freeway overpass.

“If you’re in the wrong place, it could be very bad,” Heaton said. “Beyond a certain point, you become a little fatalistic and say, ‘If you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, your time is up.’ ”

Seismologist James J. Mori said he spends most of his time at home, a couple of blocks from work, or at his geological survey office, both of which he thinks will hold up in a big quake. If he’s at work during a quake, he’ll count on his wife to find him there.

“She’s a fairly self-sufficient person, so I guess I’d have to trust her to do the best she could to get back home,” said Mori, 36, the scientist in charge of the geological survey’s Pasadena office. “Even if you’re out in Los Angeles when a big earthquake strikes, it’s not going to be like mass destruction everywhere, like you see in the movies.

“I think it’s misleading to see those disaster movies where whole cities are just leveled. Basically, there’s going to be pockets of destruction, and 99% of the people are going to be able to get around. They may be without power, they may be without water, there’s going to be massive traffic jams and the roads are going to be down, but you know if you just keep your head about things, you can sort of muddle through without too much problem.”

If Mori was with his wife and she got hurt, that probably would be a different story.

“That’s pretty hard to say at this point,” he said. “Well, obviously, if she was injured, I’d try to take care of her first. It’s sort of hard to say. If it really was that bad of an earthquake, where people were injured, it’d probably be very difficult to get to hospitals and things like that anyway. So, I don’t know. . . . I’d probably try to take care of her immediate needs and then sort of run in here and see what’s going on and then go back home.”

Seismological laboratory administrator Cheryl Contopulos said there’s no question what she’ll do after an earthquake: look for her 14-year-old daughter and try to contact her 20-year-old son.

“I know I would be more or less useless if I was worried about my daughter,” said Contopulos, 42. “Basically, you make sure that things are OK. Otherwise, I don’t know how people could function with that kind of distraction, anyway.”