A Frightening New Reality : Californians Try to Adjust to Fact That Quake Danger Is Far Greater Than Hitherto Believed

Every so often, an otherwise unremarkable event takes place in an otherwise unremarkable setting that pulls back a curtain and lets us see a shift in the way we live in Southern California. On a recent evening, one of those events took place in a banquet hall at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.

This particular room looks like all banquet halls. Glass chandeliers hover over a few dozen round tables. On this evening, about 300 people had settled at the tables to watch a new adventure film designed for home computers.

The lights had just dimmed when, out of nowhere, the room started to shake. Nothing big, but enough to cause the chandeliers to sway and jingle. As always with an earthquake, conversation and breathing momentarily stopped. People were waiting to see if it was going to build into something big.

It didn’t. A young woman at one table whipped out a cel phone, talked quietly for a few moments, then made a report to her table mates. “Three five, “ she said.

So it wasn’t much. But then the revealing thing happened. All over the room, people started walking out. Not in a panic. They simply decided to leave. In twos and threes, they packed up their briefcases and headed for the door. Within five minutes, the computer company had lost most of its audience and the presentation ground to a halt.

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Most of the walkers surely understood that the danger was small, almost nil. They were Southern Californians, after all, and well acquainted with aftershocks. But they left anyway. They appeared to act out of a deep wariness that had crept into their behavior. They were announcing they had had enough of the earth moving, and wanted no more.

Five years ago, surely, the evening would have proceeded differently. The jingling chandeliers would have produced that combination of mock horror and nervous guffaws that once characterized the response of the veteran Californian to a small shake. The podium speaker would have offered a bad joke about floating away to Hawaii and the evening would have proceeded.

No more. Californians may not run screaming from a 3.5, but they do walk. And they have stopped the joking almost altogether. They seem to have absorbed some new and more profound understanding about life in earthquake country, and that understanding has produced a low-level, perpetual state of unease.

It would be easy to conclude that this change into high anxiety represents the emotional hangover from the Northridge earthquake a year ago. But its true origins appear to be wider and deeper than Northridge alone. In short, the past several years have produced a parade of seismic events in California and a stream of new scientific discoveries, all of them bringing the same message: The danger from earthquakes is far larger than hitherto believed, and our ability to withstand the onslaught is significantly less than hitherto believed.

Here, for example, is an interesting number: Throughout the 1960s, not a single significant earthquake struck California, assuming “significant” to be anything of magnitude 5.0 or larger. You could have lived in California from the last years of the Eisenhower Administration through the assassination of John F. Kennedy and then through the Vietnam years and the flowering of the counterculture, and never experienced such an earthquake.

And, of course, millions of Californians had their impressions of earthquake danger shaped by that experience in the ‘60s. The experience suggested that life in earthquake country meant nothing more than a gentle, rocking reminder every few years. The Big One, though much discussed, seemed as distant as the Second Coming, and just about as real. It is interesting to note that the great comic treatment of California earthquakes, Curt Gentry’s “Last Days of the Great State of California,” was written in the late 1960s, when people could still afford to laugh at the danger.

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And now a more recent number: In the last nine years California has been struck by 15 earthquakes of magnitude 5.0 or greater. That’s one earthquake every seven months on the average. It includes large earthquakes in both San Francisco and Los Angeles and two others in outlying regions with magnitudes greater than 7.

The difference in these two epochs suggests the meaning of the much-discussed geologic change in California. A long period of seismic quiescence has departed and been replaced by a period of high activity. No one knows why, no one knows how long the recent swarm of quakes will last, no one knows where the next quake will hit. We only know that in some important way, the rules have been switched and we are now playing a more dangerous game.

The other developments have come in bits and pieces and their impact on our psyche has accumulated slowly. They can be summarized thus:

* Earthquake engineering has been forced to face major failures in its attempts to design structures that will resist earthquakes. Northridge demonstrated that even a moderate shake could seriously damage steel-framed buildings, once regarded as virtually earthquake-proof. Subsequent simulations suggested that a quake of truly large size could cause the collapse of large, steel-frame office buildings. In 1989, Loma Prieta showed that freeway overpasses could, and would, collapse. Northridge proved it again. Kobe proved it a third time. Kobe also revealed that the particular form of earthquake-induced soil failure known as liquefaction can bring down office buildings in spite of anchoring attempts. Some of the newest designs for freeways and buildings have shown greater resistance to shaking but less-than-brand-new structures outnumber the newest ones by huge margins on both sides of the Pacific.

* Kobe also demonstrated the enormous destruction that can be produced by a relatively small fault if it breaks directly underneath a dense city. In the past, most attention in California was directed toward very large faults, such as the San Andreas. Kobe showed that an unknown, smaller fault rupturing fairly near the surface can produce almost as much damage as a huge fault breaking 30 or 40 miles from a city. Thus far, California has been spared a Kobe-like event, but only because of good fortune. The Northridge fault broke underneath Los Angeles but its major pulse got directed north into the relatively undeveloped Santa Susana Mountains. The Loma Prieta quake originated about 60 miles from San Francisco. Nonetheless, geologists say, both Los Angeles and San Francisco sit over a number of faults that could produce a direct hit a la Kobe.

* Finally, recent studies have uniformly raised the estimates of the number and severity of earthquakes that can be expected in Southern California. In the aftermath of Northridge, a team of scientists from Caltech and other research centers studied the latticework of faults underneath the region and found the network to be under considerable strain. The strain has accumulated, they found, because the region has experienced an earthquake “deficit” over the last 200 years. In one way or another, the deficit must be worked off, and the most likely method will be a series of Northridge-size quakes or a smaller number of very large quakes in the range of 7.2 to 7.5. One scientist described a 7.5 quake as “10 Northridges, side by side.”

In truth, the above list is only partial but it suggests the main idea: Southern California has made the passage into a new era. Earthquakes probably will loom over us as never before in recent history, much as hurricanes loom over the Gulf Coast. And people who live here are finding themselves forced to absorb this new condition of life.

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Interestingly enough, this accumulation of events has made its impact even on earthquake scientists. Kerry Sieh, a geology professor at Caltech, was being questioned recently about earthquake risk in Southern California when he stopped the conversation and said to a reporter, “You haven’t asked me how my own attitude has changed over the past year.”

So he was asked, and Sieh went on, “Until the last year I was never truly scared. Now, I am. This past year has changed me. I have begun to worry about the survivability of the infrastructure if some of the possible scenarios take place. And I get scared about the very ability of people to continue living in L.A. under these conditions. The whole specter (of earthquakes) has grown so large that I don’t know how we will deal with it.

“In the past I always preached that we couldn’t afford to stick our heads in the sand when it came to earthquake danger. Now sometimes I think the danger is so big that we will be forced to stick our heads in the sand. That may be the only way to deal with it, to pretend that it’s not as bad as it is. Because we are not prepared to handle the losses, we are not even close to being able to handle it.”

Or, as David Wald, a U.S. Geological Survey seismologist, put it: “The word risk used to have this distant quality when it came to earthquakes. Far removed. Now I feel the risk all the time. It’s become personal.”

Other earthquake scientists have sensed a need by people to be comforted. Thomas L. Tobin, executive director of the California Seismic Safety Commission, said people call him often. “They’re scared about what they’ve seen and heard,” he said. “Recently they’ve been scared by the ground failure they saw in Kobe. They understood that those images had a message for them and they want some reassurance about their situation.”

At Caltech, Sieh has also gotten responses of the uglier kind. “They’ll say, ‘Stop shooting off your mouth. You don’t know what you’re talking about, and you’re ruining the economy.’ Sometimes they suggest that I leave town and not come back.

“I also get similar comments from some political people,” he said. “I don’t want to name them but some of them are people that I know and otherwise respect. They say things like, ‘You scientists don’t know anything and no one should listen to you.’ ”

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Actually, given the stakes involved, that kind of reaction has remained remarkably low-level. In many ways, Southern California seems more willing to confront its earthquake goblins than in the past. In the early years of the 20th Century, for example, civic leaders actively discouraged earthquake talk on the grounds it would slow the region’s growth. In Santa Barbara, a 1919 pamphlet promoting the city’s charms wrote that no “real” earthquakes had hit Santa Barbara for more than 100 years, “so the danger from seismic disturbances need cause little worry.” On June 29, 1929, Santa Barbara was plundered by a 6.3 quake that killed 13 people.

And the day after the disastrous Long Beach earthquake in 1933 that leveled countless buildings, the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page cartoon of a heroic female figure, labeled “Southern California,” who stared steadfastly toward the future. The caption read, “Unshaken!” The next day the paper published an editorial denouncing the Eastern press for exaggerating the destruction and urging readers to send postcards to distant relatives assuring them that the city stood proud and ready to receive tourists.

In those days, earthquakes were connected to the moon’s pull, to excessive oil drilling, or a curse placed over the region by Chinese medicine men. Defrocked ministers claiming connections between earthquakes and carnal sin got equal play in the newspapers with the few seismologists of the day. Earthquakes were said to free women of “female complaints,” chickens supposedly stopped laying eggs for three days before a temblor, and hot, muggy weather, the infamous “earthquake weather,” gave the sign of big trouble ahead.

Today, of course, we know a great deal about earthquakes. We know about tectonic plates and the inexorable movement of the Earth’s crust. We know about liquefaction and we have maps showing where the greatest shaking will take place.

It would be cynical to say this knowledge has done us no good. But it has not given us the central thing that we need: a way to avoid the danger and the undercurrent of perpetual fear it causes.

In the 1980s, some of the country’s best geologists made a run at predicting earthquakes in California. An elaborate system of monitoring devices fed all sorts of stress data back to the scientists and they started making their predictions. Uniformly, they failed.

So, until they turn their failure into success, we are left to our own devices. Most likely we will continue our spooked behavior, walking out of large buildings when a 3.5 hits. Looking strangely at people who still want to joke about the danger.

In some ways, our behavior probably will come to resemble that of people who live in the hurricane belt of the Gulf Coast. For many years they have lived with the near certainty that a 10-year stretch on the gulf will lead to some kind of brush with a major hurricane. They cannot tell themselves--as once we could with earthquakes--that they may live and die without ever having to face it. Personal experience has taught them differently. We may adopt, as they have, an acceptance of the rebuilding and re-destruction cycle, and we may acquire the odd pride that often goes along with it.

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But there’s a big difference with our situation. We are encountering an Age of Earthquakes for the first time because this kind of cycle has never occurred before in modern civilization. And the fact is, no one knows what such an age looks like. We don’t know how frequently the shaking will come, how much destruction it will cause. And science cannot tell us.

We are pioneers of sorts, the kind no one wants to be. So most likely we will wait and see, like all pioneers, hoping the worst does not happen. Hoping that the recent trend turns out to be a bluff. And fearing that it won’t. In any case, the next few years will reveal much. They will show whether the current frequency and pattern of earthquakes continues, gets worse, or better. They may also give a measure of the damage and our ability to recover from it. We will live through it, see what happens, and count the cost of our new age. And then we will know.