Los Angeles Times Interview : Lucile Jones : A Source of Reassurance When the Earth Trembles

She’s our “earthquake mom,” the comforting face on TV who reassures us every time the ground shakes beneath our feet. Seismologist Lucile M. Jones often appeared on camera with a small child in her arms, less for reassurance, she recalls, than because reporters are faster than baby-sitters at getting to Caltech.

Jones says her sons, now ages 9 and 13, often resented their mom’s celebrity status when they were growing up. Once, when Jones was approached in a grocery store by someone with an earthquake question, then-5-year-old Sven interrupted: “This is my mommy! She’s with me now. Go away!”

Jones’ office is across the street from Caltech, in a charming two-story house where she serves as scientist-in-charge for the U.S. Geological Survey’s earthquake activities in Southern California.

Jones, 44, may have been fated to be a seismologist. A fourth-generation Californian born in Santa Monica, her first childhood memory is from the age of 2, when a moderate temblor roused her mother into gathering up the kids into the hallway and covering their heads as the family’s Siamese cat screamed in the background.

While at Brown University, Jones studied physics, Chinese language and literature. But she began to look for another specialty when she realized most jobs for physics majors during the Cold War involved building bombs. When she discovered that geophysicists got paid to “play in the mountains,” she signed up for her first geology course and was hooked. Her PhD in geophysics comes from MIT in 1981. Her Chinese proved invaluable when she became the first U.S. scientist to work in modern China.

Even Jones’ personal life is tied up with quakes. She met her Iceland-born seismologist husband, Egill Hauksson, a professor at Caltech, at a quake conference. Jones says they often lie in bed together during an earthquake, counting how long the shaking lasts, trying to calculate its intensity.

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Question: What similarities are there between the Turkish quake and California quakes?

Answer: The Turkish earthquake, geologically, is an almost exact analogy for the San Andreas fault in Los Angeles. The Anatolian fault is much like the San Andreas, the distance from Istanbul to the fault is like Los Angeles to the San Andreas fault. The biggest difference is that our earthquake will probably be bigger. We probably really will be a 7.8. And when we have our “great” earthquake on the San Andreas fault, it’s going to be about two minutes.

The Anatolian fault appears to be a simpler system. There has been this sequence of earthquakes. And it’s not uniform, only in one direction. It’s sort of filling out the fault.

We haven’t had an earthquake on the San Andreas for 150 years. Northern California had it in 1906. So it’s been 93 years there. Whereas down here, the most recent one was 1857. We could easily go another 100 years without the earthquake. And we could have it tomorrow.

Q: But it’s coming . . .

A: Oh, yeah. If you ask a geologist . . . it’s not “if,” it’s “when.” But then if you ask them for details, “Oh, yeah, well, I might not live to see it.” To most human beings, if you don’t live to see it, it’s really not an issue for you. And we may not live to see it.

Q: Why does it always seem that quakes are so devastating in other parts of the world? Have we just been lucky here?

A: We’ve done better. And we’ve been lucky. We are clearly, at some point, going to have a bigger earthquake than we’ve had. And it’s not just how big it is. It’s how close it is to people. Because the shaking dies off very rapidly with distance. And we haven’t put a big earthquake in the city. Even Northridge, some people started talking about as a direct urban hit. Well, no, it’s a direct suburban hit. We didn’t put it under downtown. We didn’t put it under the old buildings. So we’re going to have worse ones. On the other hand, we do have good building codes, and we’ve done a better job than many parts of the world in enforcing the building codes.

We, at least, think about retrofitting. The good news here in California is when all those 6’s damage buildings, they get torn down and then they’re not there to fall down in the 8. If we have enough smaller ones along the way, we won’t have anything left to fall down.

It appears that Turkey suffered more from having the earthquake during the night. We would probably do better when it’s during the night, because we’re home in our single-family homes instead of out on the freeways and in the malls. The best estimates are, that if Northridge had happened at 4 in the afternoon on the Sunday before Christmas, it would have killed a lot more people.

I would also say that if you look at Turkey, one of the big issues--and it was true of [the 1995 earthquake in] Kobe, too--was the response. Especially when you have a hierarchical decision-making system. People trying to make decisions. You can’t comprehend the scale of the disaster right away. All the communications are out. You’re not getting information. You can’t believe it’s that bad. And so you put off calling in reinforcements, because you wouldn’t want to do that if you didn’t need them. And by the time you figure out that it really is as bad as it is, people are dying.

Now, Northridge was a much smaller earthquake than Turkey’s. So it’s not fair to make too direct a comparison. But everybody who had been trapped in a fallen building was rescued within seven hours after the earthquake.

Partly, we have devolved our decision-making to a local level. Local fire departments feel empowered to go out and do whatever’s necessary. The independence of the American people, which can be quite difficult sometimes, is useful here.

Q: Is there a way seismologists can help emergency workers do their job better?

A: I’m stationed in Southern California to work with Caltech, running the seismic network for Southern California. We haven’t done a great job getting information after some big earthquakes in the past. Computers get overwhelmed; the system itself is damaged. We actually have gotten a grant, money from the U.S. Geological Survey, a big grant from [the Federal Emergency Management Agency], trying to build a new system. And one goal of this is to get better information to emergency responders so that they can be making decisions more quickly. That’s the only place where seismologists are really going to save lives. . . .

One reason earthquake [damage] appears random to people, but isn’t really, is that earthquakes do not happen at epicenters. In spite of 50 years of Caltech telling you that. They start at epicenters and they happen over a surface. Every point on the surface gives off energy. The bigger the surface is, the more energy that’s given off. So the longer the fault, the bigger the earthquake.

Back to [the 1971 earthquake in] San Fernando. We knew it was above a 6. We had an epicenter. The epicenter was up in the San Gabriel Mountains. People were up there flying around, trying to find the damage up and down Newhall. It turns out the fault started there at depth, but it didn’t go straight up. It tilted at an angle. And where it came out to the surface was 15 miles away in Sylmar, rupturing through people’s houses. And right at the Olive View Hospital, which collapsed. And when they did the first flyover on the Olive View Hospital, since the whole first floor collapsed, it didn’t look that bad from the air. And people were trapped in there for hours. And probably some people wouldn’t have died if we had gotten there quicker. If we had the information we have now, what we would be showing is instead of just the epicenter, we’d have the distribution of ground shaking. And from that we would be able to see that the maximum shaking was near Sylmar and concentrate the efforts there.

Same thing in Northridge. You know the big fires up there on Rinaldi? That was the maximum shaking area. But it’s 10 miles away from the epicenter. And with Northridge, the majority of the faults dip up toward the south. We presumed that must have been it, and, actually, we thought the damage would be in Santa Monica. We thought the fault was going to be coming up to Santa Monica. When we first got an aftershock showing up in Chatsworth, we thought, “Oh, no, there must be a mistake.” And we weren’t getting our aftershock information because the computer was bogged down in the process. We’re a small-budget operation, and we had these old computers and they couldn’t keep up.

So we did a poor job of distributing information even with Northridge. But we got it out quicker than we did in ’71. And our hope now is that it’ll be a matter of five minutes after the earthquake that we should have the map up.

Imagine if the fire department, five minutes after the earthquake, knew the worst possible shaking was around Rinaldi. It’s the type of information that could let them plan where they want to distribute their resources.

Q: The scariest moment in my life was at Caltech, after the first Landers quake in 1992. Right after your press conference, there was a second quake. And you guys looked scared. And then everyone immediately disappeared into their offices and shut the doors. What happened?

A: Soon after that, I came out with the director of the Governor’s Office for Emergency Services, and we asked people to stay at home and stay off the freeways for the rest of the day. And the reason was that . . . we were afraid of the possibility that the Landers earthquake would turn out to be a foreshock to the San Andreas earthquake.

My research specialty is earthquake statistics. My thesis is on foreshocks. And in all those studies, about 5% of all earthquakes turn out to be a foreshock to something bigger. Another way of saying that is about 5% of earthquakes have an aftershock that’s bigger than themselves. Then we change the name to foreshock Well, if Landers has a 5% chance of being a foreshock, a foreshock to what? How do you get bigger than Landers (7.3)? The only fault around bigger than Landers is the San Andreas. And the faults are touching. And it’s triggering earthquakes on other faults. So we thought there was something like a 5% chance that we were going to have the San Andreas earthquake that day. That’s a 95% chance that we wouldn’t.

And we didn’t. But it’s a lot higher than your average day. For several days there, we were really concerned: What do we do? What do we do if we have a 6 right by the San Andreas? What do we consider the chance? Because we were having aftershocks down by the fault. How do we respond to those? We actually came up with some criteria that we agreed had a high enough probability: If we had had a 6 on a certain part of the San Andreas during a certain time frame, the governor would have called out the National Guard to be ready for recovery. So they were willing to spend a million dollars, which is what a deployment would have cost, because we told them it had about a one in four chance of being the precursor to “the big one.” We’re no longer in that situation. We stayed above the long-term average for about a year.

Q: Why don’t we know more about predicting earthquakes?

A: There’s three things that keep us from knowing when the next earthquake is going to be. One is the lack of a historic record. Only a seismologist would think we don’t have enough earthquakes, but for the data that we need, we’re going to need a thousand years before we can actually say what the pattern is.

A second reason is that the field is quite young. And I think the biggest advances are going to come when we really understand the physics of earthquakes. We don’t know how they start and we don’t know how they stop. Those are fundamental questions.

The third thing may be that they’re fundamentally random. It may be that no matter what we learn, we’ll never know it.

Q: Have you consciously thought about your role as earthquake mom?

A: In July 1986, we had the North Palm Springs earthquake. I came into work at 2:30 in the morning. I was eight months pregnant. And I was just floored. There were these swarms of reporters, just clamoring for information about the fault, and I couldn’t understand why. My first thought was, “Isn’t this cool! People like the geology just as much as I do.” Wrong. It’s taken a lot of earthquakes for me to finally understand why people are there. And it’s psychological. It’s comfort.

If we give the faults a name, if we give the earthquake a number, we put it back in control. We can find it and define it and make it something manageable. They’re not there because of scientific curiosity. They’re there for psychology. And for security. And reassurances. And it’s changed the way I deal with reporters in terms of what’s the important information to give out at that point. You feel better when mommy tells you it’s OK. And to the degree that I seemed like everybody’s mommy, made it more comforting.*