We Live to Tell the Tale

Live here long enough, and you’ll hear the stories unfold--compulsively, reflexively--as part of the local lore, as part of the way we wrap earthquakes into the culture of California. The trip wires are everywhere, 10 seconds after a quake when neighbors circle each others’ driveways, or 10 years later, as was the case on a May weekend in the Mojave Desert.

Under a broiling sun, on a daylong field trip, 60-year-old Paul Smith and other locals listened to the science of what happened in the 7.3-magnitude Landers earthquake--and then layered the information with their memories of that morning in June 1992: “My wife ran outside in front of the yard, stark naked, her 10-year-old son wrapped in her arms like this ... “ began Smith, an attorney.

The way we think about earthquakes, sociologists say, is shaped by influences such as science and popular culture, and by the stories that are passed on to help make sense of the literal and figurative shifting of the world beneath our feet. Now, the stories that people tell about earthquakes, in centuries-old villages and in wired California cities, are taking on new significance. In a wide-ranging field of study, from seismology to sociology, earth scientists and other researchers, who once ignored or overlooked local lore and myths, now are using the stories in their work.

In one project, stories told by Native Americans from far Northern California to British Columbia played a part in leading scientists to a blockbuster finding--evidence of a devastating earthquake in 1700. Scientists had not previously known about the quake, one of the world’s largest at an estimated magnitude of 9, in the Pacific Coast region.

In another project, university researchers are reviewing narratives filed online by California residents in the past 10 years, some of whom provide striking accounts of big earthquakes. The stories are giving researchers an idea of how people think and react when the shaking begins--potentially valuable information in retooling disaster information campaigns.

Whether told by Northridge residents or by Hoh tribal storytellers, the stories can sound strikingly similar. Some rely on enduring literary devices such as simple words, vivid images and cultural metaphor:

* Three hundred years ago or so, a battle between the mighty thunderbird and an evil whale shook the land, a Hoh tribal tale begins, said University of Washington research scientist Ruth Ludwin. Her research suggests that the medicine man who told the story to an ethnographer in the early 1900s added an oral history account: “There was ... great and crashing thunder-noise everywhere ... there was also a great shaking, jumping up and trembling of the earth beneath, and a rolling up of the great waters.”

* In a written observation, a Hollywood resident compared the 6.7-magnitude Northridge quake in 1994 to “having your house drop-kicked like a football with the most violent and deep force you can think of, then imagine how you clean salad in a colander; after rinsing it, you shake it back and forth, up and down to get rid of the water. Add to that almost instant total darkness, the most bizarre and frightening, screeching, groaning, cracking and exploding sounds ... “

Emergency managers in Washington and Oregon are thinking about how to use the thunderbird stories--featuring a supernatural figure who fires off thunder and lightning--in public education campaigns on the area’s susceptibility to another deadly, tsunami-causing quake, said Ludwin, a seismologist who has published a paper on using the Native American oral traditions in scientific applications. In the past six months, she has spoken to more than a dozen groups of the topic.

“Eyewitness testimony helps people believe that these events are real,” Ludwin said. “I think stories are innately appealing to the human imagination.... We love a good story.”

The drumbeat sounds throughout California: The Big One is coming. (According to U.S. Geological Survey scientists, there’s a 60% probability that a major quake will strike Southern California in the next 30 years). In the town of Parkfield, which sits on the San Andreas fault in Central California, a faux water tower is painted with the slogan: “Earthquake Capitol of the World ... Be Here When It Happens.” In downtown Los Angeles, Epicentre restaurant, which promotes a “playful earthquake motif,” offers a “San Andreas Soup,” or two kinds of bean puree separated by a jagged line of sour cream.

And throughout California, you hear the lore: hot and dry days known as “shake-and-bake time,” or “earthquake weather”; or barking dogs who tip off their owners to impending ground motion.

Worldwide, communities that live through a major disaster typically produce some kind of cultural representation of the event, through means including the exchange of myths and urban legends, said Gary R. Webb, an assistant professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University. Since the late 1990s, a small group of sociologists has been focusing on “the popular culture of disaster,” in areas including black humor and stories that are passed down through the generations.

Their work is part of an emerging field of study focusing on how, for instance, the public and politicians absorb the threat of potential disaster. If the threat is not taken seriously, Webb said, “then we won’t feel compelled to get ready for them,” and the need to strengthen building codes or take other preparedness measures will not top the public agenda. “Scientific and technological innovation alone will not prevent future disasters from occurring,” he said. “We have to understand the worldviews of people who live in disaster-prone areas in order to understand how they perceive the problem and what they believe should be done about it.” Part of the reason that myths endure is that people still can think of earthquakes as a mysterious force and look around them to fill in the blanks, said Kimberley Shoaf, director of research at the UCLA Center for Public Health and Disasters. “If you see something happening, you make that association in your brain: ‘My dog barked [as a tip-off] before the last earthquake’ ... and some of that might be that science isn’t in the control of human beings. ‘I can’t stop the Earth from moving. I can’t look inside the Earth. I can hear dogs barking.... There’s the science, and my brain can get around that, but there has got to be something more.’”

Before--and, sometimes, after--science stepped in to explain the bewildering force of colliding tectonic plates, people told stories to make sense of their world.

“The great thunderbird finally carried the [whale] to its nest in the lofty mountains, and there was the final and terrible contest fought. Here in this death struggle, they uprooted all the trees for many miles around the nest and also pulled the rocks down the great Hoh valley ... “

--Hoh and Quileute story cited in Ludwin’s seismology research ; the story was recorded by an ethnographer in 1934

Caltech’s Thomas Heaton had not planned to cull from Native American legends when he began investigating the seismic history of the Pacific Northwest. “The story of discovering the giant earthquake of the winter of 1700 ... is pretty amazing,” Heaton said.

Evidence of the discovery, which entailed a massive collaborative effort, first was announced in 1995. Scientists pointed out that such a “megathrust subduction quake”--in which a tectonic plate slides under the continent--tends to recur every few hundred years. Since then, under the threat of a comparable disaster along the undersea Cascadia thrust fault, officials in the Pacific Northwest have posted new tsunami warning signs, upgraded building codes and taken other preparedness measures.

Ludwin still is perusing the Native American stories for possible leads on earthquakes, catastrophic landslides or tsunamis that scientists have not yet documented. Some of the stories indicate a time frame by mentioning a season, moon phase or tide level and give specific locations that can be searched for paleoseismic evidence, she said.

Heaton, a professor of engineering seismology, took on the original research in 1982 as part of a license application review for a nuclear power plant. The applicants argued that the Pacific Northwest was not prone to such a massive quake. But though Heaton’s initial research on geologic features of the land suggested that the Pacific coast, from British Columbia to far Northern California, could be at risk, traditional research sources, he found, had not recorded such a disaster. So he turned to another possible source, referred to him by a colleague--in a 1868 book by James Swan, a schoolteacher who wrote about his life with the Makah tribe at Neah Bay on Washington’s northwestern peninsula. Swan wrote that the Makahs had spoken of a big flood, not as a mythological event involving the thunderbird or other familiar figures, but as an event that was part of their oral history. Before the flood, the Makahs told Swan that Cape Flattery, which is on the tip of the peninsula, had been an island. “The implication,” Heaton said, “was that the ground had been uplifted as a result of this flood event.”

With the Makah story in mind, U.S. Geological Survey scientist Brian Atwater headed to Neah Bay to analyze geologic deposits for evidence of seismic activity. For the next 10 years, Atwater and a team of researchers studied the deposits and eventually determined that the area’s sea level changes had been caused by earthquakes, the most recent of which had struck in 1700. Meanwhile, another researcher in Japan had discovered that a mysterious tsunami had hit Japan in the same year; scientists later linked the tsunami to the earthquake cited by the Makahs.

In another piece of the puzzle, researcher Deborah Carver and her husband, Gary, a professor emeritus of geology at Humboldt State, investigated stories told by the Yurok people and others in far Northern California and unearthed descriptions of an earthquake and tsunami that wiped out a village. With the permission of Yurok elders, the Carvers explored a site on sacred Indian land in Redwood National Park. Tsunami sand deposits there dated back to the 1700 earthquake, Gary Carver said.

In Washington, for the past three months, officials have been meeting with Makah representatives about how to wrap their oral histories into preparedness campaigns, said George Crawford, earthquake program manager for the state’s Division of Emergency Management. The Makahs suggested that their tribal storytellers could help, perhaps by relating the lessons of their ancestors at public events.

Crawford, who loves the idea, said the Makah elders would be able to tell the story of the historic disaster in a way that, perhaps, science cannot. “You can tell me that we had an earthquake in 1700 and a big tsunami,” he said. “It’s a different story when you get someone to say, ‘My forebears were there, and this is what happened, and this is what we tell our children.’”

“I heard a loud boom and then my bed was thrown into the air, almost to the ceiling...Then the sound of a million chains or trains followed by shaking, which became more and more intense. At first it felt like it was south-north, then west-east, then almost like a giant had the building and shook it.... “

--Mission Hills resident’s take on the Northridge quake, which left 57 dead, more than 11,000 injured and damage exceeding $40 billion

U.S. Geological Survey scientists weren’t sure what to do with the 100,000-plus unofficial observations on earthquakes--from conspiracy theorists, who insisted that Caltech was lowballing magnitude estimates, and from the ultra-precise, written four years after the Northridge quake: “The baby grand piano, which was sitting on a padded, carpeted concrete slab floor, rotated on one leg, by about 41/2 degrees, in a counter-clockwise direction (i.e., from east toward north). This was determined by observing and measuring the final position of the piano legs from the previous indentations which they had left in the carpet.”

The firsthand reports have been filed since 1998 through a USGS Web site, earthquake.usgs.gov, under “Report an Earthquake,” as part of a system that gives scientists and emergency response officials another tool to help pinpoint where a quake was felt and how strongly it shook. Based on voluntary questionnaires filed by residents after significant quakes, the online system produces color-coded maps every few minutes, depicting the areas hardest hit. The system, titled “Did You Feel It,” also invites brief submissions about past earthquakes. (The responses are not posted publicly.)

Most submissions appear to be from earnest residents who are eager to “be part of the process,” said USGS seismologist David Wald. “It offers the opportunity to write down and share your [stories] .... I find it amazing. I didn’t expect that to be a part of it. People want to give you more than [the questionnaire data].”

Scientists, who suspected that the stories had research potential, turned the submissions over last year to a team at Cal State Long Beach that had been interviewing people for a study on how the public factors the threat of an earthquake into their lives. (Earthquake preparedness information sources include the Southern California Earthquake Center, www.scec.org.

Professor Richard Celsi and a colleague now are reviewing more than 7,000 first-person accounts of the quakes in Northridge, Landers, Big Bear in 1992 and Napa Valley’s Yountville in 2000.

Their analysis could help emergency planners figure out what kind of public education is needed and look for patterns of behavior that might need to be addressed, Celsi said. “Maybe give them ideas on how to bridge these questions everyone has: to scare or not to scare. How much do you say?” (The same question is being weighed by public officials, such as Gov. Gray Davis, in the face of heightened sensitivity to terrorist threats; last fall, Davis was criticized for issuing vague alerts about potential threats to four major bridges, Celsi pointed out.)

In preliminary observations of the earthquake filings, Celsi has noted that people tend to overestimate the intensity of the shaking, compared with scientific data and maps that indicate what the ground motion was in the ZIP codes that the volunteers provide. Part of the reason has to do with a “kind of California coolness” that longtime residents adopt after living through a series of quakes without harm, he said. “We anchor from our own experiences; we anchor to what we felt before.” The ennui is fed by calls from friends and relatives back East who check in after an earthquake makes news. “[Residents] experienced this, and other people haven’t, and that puts them as part of a community and gives them a sense of hubris or esprit in describing these things,” Celsi said. “You don’t want to sound like a tourist--you start to take in these experiences that make you a Californian.”

But the complacency can turn into terror when a person rides out a quake near the epicenter. “People are surprised sometimes by the sheer force when they’re close to [even] a small earthquake,” Celsi said. “Their narratives and stories will tell you, their perspectives of earthquakes have changed forever. The coolness has left.”

The stories are told, passed on, weighed in with a groaning mental file of earthquake information. In the Mojave Desert, scientist Bob Reynolds gave a sobering talk on the Landers quake on a Saturday in May during the $50 tour offered through the Desert Institute at Joshua Tree National Park. Then the 11 participants took the lead:

“I was thinking that all the buildings are just going to be leveled...” “When you looked at the San Bernardino Mountains, it looked like they were on fire, with all that dust that came up....”