Shattered Illusions : LOS ANGELES : Preparing for the Unknown

A few weeks after the Northridge quake, I spent three days on Amtrak from Los Angeles to New York. What I didn’t realize when I bought the ticket is that, on a train, your seat goes “ba-BUMP, ba-BUMP, ba-BUMP,” in a quiet, soothing rhythm--quiet and soothing, that is, if you haven’t been through a serious earthquake. From the first ba-BUMP, my nervous system started screaming “Northridge!” I told it to shut up, we’re only on a train. “Northridge!” it shouted with every ba-BUMP--having no intention of forgetting the most shocking, frightening moments of its life.

Then the train hit a coupling (a series of tracks criss-crossing each other): Ba-BA-BA-BUMP-BUMP-ba! “Big One! Big One! Move fast or you’re gonna die!” My nervous system did its best to supply plenty of fear for a frantic escape, but there was nowhere to go in my little compartment. This went on and on. I didn’t sleep till New York.

Tuesday, on the anniversary of Northridge, I opened the paper to see screaming headlines of Kobe’s disaster.

Ba-BA-BA-BUMP-BUMP-BUMP-ba!

Don’t mistake me, I’m not making light of their suffering--or of my fear on that train. (I really didn’t sleep till New York.) It’s just that I was feeling that sickening fear again, and again there was no place, at least in the immediate vicinity, to hide. For the Kobe earthquake has supplied absolute proof of what Northridge indicated: No preparation really prepares, and nobody knows what they’re talking about when they talk about earthquakes.

The consensus is that the Japanese not only build stronger structures than we do, they inspect them far more conscientiously. They have national drills, training their entire population how to behave when a quake hits. Japan is honeycombed with seismic equipment for early warning. Gas lines in residential, industrial and office structures are designed to shut off during seismic activity to prevent fires. Hospitals are better stocked for emergencies than ours. When Japanese quake experts viewed Northridge damage, they said, “This would never happen in Japan.”

But the city of Kobe has been swept by fires from gas lines that didn’t shut off. Freeways built much more solidly than ours have toppled. And one network reported, two days after the quake, that hospitals were running out of supplies and many “are under such pressure they’re handing out pain pills and telling people to seek help elsewhere.”

But there is no “elsewhere.” Roads are either ruined or jammed. Relief workers, according to one report, are “poorly equipped.” Communications, in the most electronically sophisticated country in the world, are in chaos. Food and water are scarce.

A technologically adept, wealthy country is reeling. For it’s clear now that their codes are as inadequate as ours, their buildings and roads as vulnerable--and their people are enduring far more pain, loss and fear than we, in Los Angeles, did, and which they are meeting with great courage and consideration for one another.

Even though the shops still standing in Kobe are easy to break into, there has been no looting. Instead, people stand on line for hours to get small rations of water and food at relief areas. And two days after their quake, Kobe teachers--who certainly had troubles of their own--searched their ruined city for the houses of their students, to make sure the children had someone to care for them. Can you imagine that sort of thing happening here?

The Kobe shock is all the worse because that area was considered by experts to be relatively earthquake-free. With us, nobody even knew about Northridge’s fault till it popped.

What we are all losing is faith in a system of knowledge, called science, that we thought would save us. And what we have all forgotten, or didn’t bother to learn, is that this has often been the case with science. Antibiotics were supposed to eradicate disease; but, after several decades of use, bacteria have developed that seem impervious to modern medicines. Physicists and astronomers thought they understood quasars--they wrote textbooks, made students memorize theories, issued authoritative pronouncements, the whole bit; but a couple of weeks ago they examined a lot of quasars through the Hubble telescope and admitted these things weren’t behaving at all as they had predicted, and they had to start their theories again from scratch.

I have a textbook on my shelf about rocks. Just plain old rocks. It begins with a preface saying this edition has been totally revised, because in the last 10 years the scientific consensus on rocks--just plain old rocks!--has undergone a “complete revolution.”

Ba-BUMP!

Quasars and rocks are not matters of life and death. Medicines and earthquakes are. We’ve depended on science to know what it’s talking about. And the scientific community, hyped by government and the media, have encouraged that dependence. But when it comes to earthquakes, they don’t know. What isn’t known can’t be adequately prepared for. And we’re just going to have to live with that.

Which may be a way of saying that, as a city and a culture, we’re going to have to grow up. The contemporary mind-set demands safety as its right. We want our safety guaranteed. Damnit, we’ll sue if it’s not safe! This is childish. Safety can only come from knowledge, and--especially when you’re speaking of quakes--that knowledge just doesn’t exist. You can’t have safer structures and better codes when you simply don’t know what you’re talking about.

Oh, we know a little. We know how buildings break, for example. We just don’t know how to stop them from breaking. We know that about every two or three days, somewhere in the world, there’s a Northridge-size quake of from 6 to 6.9 magnitude on the Richter scale (roughly 150 a year). And once or twice a month, depending on the year, there’s a 7 to 7.9 quake--somewhere. (Actually, there have been four in Japan alone since last October.) And there is, in the odd phrase of the New York Times, “about one” 8 to 8.9 earthquake a year. Plus thousands of smaller temblors. Because the planet behaves like a living thing--and living things move.

But we only know of each individual quake after it happens. And we seem to know less and less, each time, about how modern structures will behave.

Yes, we can be better prepared than we are. People who can afford it can buy generators for their homes, and stash extra food, water and medicines safely. We can know where the gas lines are, and have the tools to shut them down. Me, I keep a knapsack packed with water, food, a jacket, work gloves and a crowbar right by my apartment door, to grab on the way out. If, that is, I still have an apartment or a door. (And if I’m not in a movie theater or an office or a parking garage.) Which is the essential element that science cannot guarantee.

Kobe is teaching Los Angeles that no preparation can prepare you enough. Northridge taught Angelenos that we each live less than seven miles from one dangerous fault or another. It taught that virtually any of these faults can produce a major quake.

Some scientists think Los Angeles will get one Northridge-size quake a year . Others say, no, no, no, it’ll just happen once in a while. Still others expect a quake so big that they don’t think much of anything will be left standing. All they seem to agree on is that our codes aren’t good enough and our inspection record is worse.

All we know, for sure, is that it’s a dangerous life--and that a system of knowledge we’ve been taught will protect us probably won’t. As usual, we’re on our own.

Ba-BUMP.*

LOS ANGELES