A Disaster Guide Just for Kids

A new book by Bonnie S. Mark, a therapist in Los Angeles specializing in child and adolescent treatment, and Aviva Layton, a college literature instructor, aims to help children cope with natural disasters.

“If there’s a traumatic experience, kids, like other people, are looking to regain control,” says Mark. “We’re trying to provide tools to help them do so.”

The 58-page book, “I’ll Know What to Do: A Kid’s Guide to Natural Disasters,” includes guides to survival and positive thinking, directed at children 8 to 13.

Unfortunately, Mark and Layton exhibit shortcomings when it comes to their brief technical discussion of earthquakes.

Egill Hauksson, a seismologist at Caltech who looked at the section on earthquakes, found some misstatements. The authors write that tectonic plates “float around on the liquid mantle underneath.” But the mantle, just below the Earth’s crust, is not liquid. Also, the Richter scale no longer is used in the scientific community as a measurement of earthquake strength, and the magnitude scale does not go from 1.0 to 10.0, as the authors say, but is open-ended. Furthermore, quakes measuring less than 3.1 are not “too weak to be felt by humans.”

Still, the book is useful. It lets readers know about securing heavy objects that may fall on them and it urges them, if they are outside when a quake strikes, to “try to get into a clear space, like the center of a field or playground. . . . Always kneel down, wherever you are, and cover your neck and head with your arms to protect yourself in case anything does fall down around you.”

There also are sections on floods and mudslides, hurricanes, tornadoes and fires.