@donlbe Congrats on the new job. Very cool project over there. #
@longshotmag Ever see It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World? This could end in hilarity. About 9 people are now ransacking the foliage, I'm told. in reply to longshotmag#
@alexismadrigal Did anyone mention The obvious Matrix yet? Or is that too far out of style? Gods Must Be Crazy is an inspired suggestion. in reply to alexismadrigal#
Got my @popupmag tickets, and hoping I can actually go this time. #
@erinbiba Each time I vanquish an archnemesis, someone comes along and says they can get me a new one online. When will the web die? in reply to erinbiba#
Why @Slate's article on toilet squatting reminds me of the imprisoned Shane Bauer. Really. http://bit.ly/9tFy6u#
Both Shane Bauer’s and today’s piece by Daniel Lametti in Slate share many of the same ideas: the Sikirov research, the first-world/third-world toilet divide, the physiological contortions spurred by modern toiletry, and of course the perching experiment. To be fair, I don’t think you could write about this stuff without mentioning these very things, so the overlap is unsurprising. If anything, Bauer advances a decidedly post-colonial argument: the appeal of anti-natural toilet design as civilizing agent. Meanwhile, Lametti reminds us of the capitalists and their toilet entrepreneurship.
When Bauer and his friends were captured by Iran, I searched for some of his work out of curiosity, and discovered this essay.* (I knew of a few of Bauer’s projects, having met him once or twice at Berkeley, where our interest in photojournalism overlapped.) I found it strangely resonant at the time, as many people on Twitter are finding Lametti’s piece today. Maybe it revived, for me, the suppressed, culturally jarring memory of a Chinese railway bathroom lined with doorless squat stalls. Or maybe it’s just because everyone poops and is secretly fascinated by it.
*N.B. for F.C.: I’m assuming it’s the same Shane Bauer due to the mention of spending time in the Middle East; his living in California; the fact that his fellow prisoner, Josh Fattal, is listed on the About page; and the site affiliating itself with the Aprovecho Research Center in Oregon, where Fattal was once a staffer. Please let me know if it’s a different Shane Bauer.
@danebaker Yeah, editors at many places make big claims in headlines (often ignored). This one definitely struck a nerve when it dropped. in reply to danebaker#
If you could only see my graveyard of unsent tweets. Id = rock; super-ego = paper. More than you'd think. #
Free Rod Blagojevi–what the fuck? Deadlocked? Come on. Um, Long Live the Internet! #
I'm waiting on a giant-donut cake for my wife's and my birthday. #
My shared birthday with V.S. Naipaul reminds me that I need to keep reading (and re-reading) his work. Biswas is one of the best. #
@ccmarshall We're trying to figure out how to give it a filling of some sort. But our birthday's almost up, so time is of the essence. in reply to ccmarshall#
My shared birthday with Robert DeNiro reminds that I keep meaning to see Raging Bull. #
Shared birthday with Marlene Dietrich reminds that I used to kind of sprechen Deutsch. Wirklich! #
Shared birthday with Jonathan Franzen reminds me that I should be kind of a jerk. #
Shared birthday with Ted Hughes reminds me to be more of a jerk. Really just an incredible jerk. #
Shared birthday with Marcus Garvey…just weird to think I share a birthday with Marcus Garvey. #
@ccmarshall Ah, great point. But the graveyard is littered with rent garments and sour grapes. No fun for anyone, really. in reply to ccmarshall#
I like it! RT @ccmarshall: @telesle In honor of Elvis Week, fill donut with peach Sealtest ice cream and Seconal. #
Search for "peach sealtest and seconal" & you'll find a) birthday reflections and b) an Elvis encomium both from @ccmarshall. Only connect. #
Earlier Alisa put some heavy cream into the new mixer and accidentally whipped it into butter. Can't wait to see how this cake turns out. #
@ccmarshall Or crushing those sour grapes into an intoxicating wine. How many parallel conversations can we have on twitter I wonder in reply to ccmarshall#
By the way, I look forward to republishing all these tweets in the morning for my friends on the East Coast. #
@dougmcgray Can you get work done there? I'm always displaced by violinists and their violin-playing friends. tho I love the violin. #
@ccmarshall She is putting a layer of fluffy cream-filling like frosting into the middle of the cake. Positively bismarckian. in reply to ccmarshall#
Lynn Hirschberg’s final celebrity profile for the NYT Magazine knocks the musician M.I.A. down a notch or two on the credibility scale. M.I.A., aka Maya Arulpragasam, comes across as possibly well-meaning, but also self-righteous and misguided. (And reminds us of how much we love the term “radical chic.”) Hirschberg includes little observations that, if left out of the story, would have given it a much different tone. Perhaps most-cited is the following:
“I kind of want to be an outsider,” [M.I.A.] said, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.
Ah, the perilous fry. So tasty, yet, as NY Mag’s Vulture blog and others have realized, shot through with the risk of unflattering revelation if eaten in the presence of Ms. Hirschberg.
How might the french-fry phrasing sound if combined with other quotes set down for posterity? Would it be so bad?
________________________________
“I’m as devastated as you are by what I’ve seen here today,” said BP’s Tony Haywood, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.
“I feel your pain,” said Bill Clinton, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.
“All we are saying is give peace a chance,” said John Lennon, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.
“We tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco,” said Sarah Palin, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.
“The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die,” said Ted Kennedy, eating a truffle-flavored French Fry.
“Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” said George W. Bush, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.
“Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the,”’ said Mary McCarthy, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.
“My failures have made me look at myself in a way I never wanted to before,” said Tiger Woods, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.
“I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum which is what I am,” said Terry Malloy, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.
“To have served in this office is to have felt a very personal sense of kinship with each and every American,” said Richard Nixon, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.
“As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again,” said Scarlett O’Hara, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.
“Please, sir, I want some more,” said Oliver Twist, eating a truffle-flavored French fry.
Remember that song from the ’80s by Yes? “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” When I heard that as a kid, I misheard the lyrics. I was convinced they were singing about the “owner of the lonely horse.” (I also thought Starship “milked this city.” I was wrong.) It was not until I was nearly out of high school, while standing in a grocery store in Fairbanks, Alaska, that I realized this was not, in fact, the case.
When trains cross certain borders—entering China from Mongolia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, for example—they have to stop and change wheels. The wheel assemblies, called trucks or bogies, used on trains in Mongolia (and Belarus and Kazakhstan and pretty much all of the old Russian Empire) won’t work in China. These two countries have different rail gauges: the distance between the metal tracks that the train rolls on is 1.52m in Mongolia (called Russian or broad gauge), while China uses the so-called standard gauge of 1.435m. A difference of eight-and-a-half centimeters. You could drop a Chinese train on American or Peruvian or Norwegian tracks and it should roll fine. But try going next door to Mongolia or Russia and you’ve got problems.
So if you’re going to stick with the same train, there’s nothing to be done but hoist up the cars, roll out the old wheels, and install a new set that fits the tracks.
I’ve been thinking about that lately as the media froths in frenzied anticipation of an Apple tablet. The tablet, for which we all have high hopes, is being heralded as the latest thing to save (print) media. Surely it will change how we interact with media online, and it will no doubt provide many opportunities for innovation. But it’s all left me with a nagging question. How are we going to do it?
If these media outlets are serious about going through with this, then creating a feature-rich publication full of interactive graphics and video on a regular basis means fundamentally altering the process from story conception through reporting and into design, editing, and production. (Even more so if they want to maintain editorial standards using the same, probably reduced, staff.) It means people who’ve spent a career working in print have to figure out which combination of media work best to tell a specific story and how producing that works, shepherding the print story through the process along with, say, a video or an interactive Flash application.
For the last few years, I’ve helped teach dozens of journalists how to plan for, use, edit, and integrate multiple media (video, audio, photo, Flash, etc) at the Knight Digital Media Center at Berkeley’s journalism school. They come from news organizations wrestling with their online presence and product. Yes, participants pick up concrete skills, and some actually develop and use them when they return to their newsrooms. But what I consider the key benefit of the experience is the understanding they gain of of the relative strengths and weaknesses of specific forms and when best to use them, a kind of literacy of multimedia journalism. They learn that some things that look easy to make are actually quite hard, sometimes things that seem hard to do can be done relatively easily, and most of it takes more time than they thought. All of it useful whether they are producing it themselves, or commissioning and overseeing these kinds of projects.
When I was a geology student, the more I learned about rocks and earth systems and what goes into making the planet work, the more my perspective on the landscape changed. There was the view as I used to see it, and the view as a geologist sees it. Happens all the time, as someone develops a relationship with a set of knowledge or a craft. After the KDMC workshop, people who arrived with little or no experience could begin to figure out how a video story was shot or a radio piece was put together because they had come to understand the tools and the process.
Anyway, back to gauge breaks and bogey replacements. The media organization is the train. There’s a fixed destination (millions of adoring readers and viability, if not profit). They can see a route that will lead them there. But there’s a border where the track is interrupted. On one side, the tracks are the traditional methods that they’ve employed for years, and on the other the tracks are a different size, a larger set of responsibilities and new methods of production. Hesitate too long at the border and risk being left behind; push forward without planning and risk jumping the tracks entirely. I’m curious to see how they do it, whether they re-tool their organizations, and what it might mean for me as a freelancer. How are they going to change the wheels?
NOTA BENE
I’m not saying everyone needs to take the KDMC workshop. But I do believe that editors are going to have to expand their sensibilities and come to a better understanding of timing. It’s one thing to rewrite a section at the last minute, another to re-edit an audio story or re-cut narration at the same time. It doesn’t happen all the time, but it can happen. In individual fields—a radio station, a design firm, a news broadcast—they might be able to do handle that element easily. But here it’s a question of timing the tides so that all boats rise together.
The general manager of FOLIO magazine, Tony Silber, has a 2010 prediction: “Staff sizes will rebound as managers realize that staffs designed for print can’t do print and a whole host of new initiatives on top of that, at least not effectively.” I agree about the second part, but we’ll see about the first, whether media organizations will invest in more people for regular production. (Incidentally, in that same feature, Bob Cohn, at the Atlantic, makes a hesitant case for collaboration, an issue that desperately needs addressing at another time.)
If all this tablet stuff works out, expect a resurgence in Flash. Some people are very anti-Flash. If you have the option of using Flash or not, often people will advise against it. It’s long been a kind of black box for metrics and contents aren’t picked up by search engines. But we can hope for innovations on that front, because it sounds like these tablet apps will be built in Adobe AIR, which a contact at Adobe says ought to be known simply as Flash for the desktop. (Tweetdeck, if you use that, is an AIR app.)
Why hasn’t more of this type of stuff been done already? While the physical engagement of a tablet and the user experience will be new, especially in terms of getting around some HTML design constraints, many of the component features won’t: video, Flash, etc. I guess the tablet has finally spurred media outlets to seriously think about enriching their online arms. Please send me examples of outlets that currently make good use of multimedia, if you have them (other than the New York Times).
And as tablet anticipation goes up, Jack Shafer at Slate inevitably bats it down.
Disclosure: I have a freelance relationship with Wired Magazine, another of the expected tablet publications. My views in no way represent those of Wired or Condé Nast, and are not informed by any special insight as a result of that relationship. I have no knowledge of what any publishing groups with tablet plans are doing beyond what they have publicly announced.
I still believe text and informational graphics are the most efficient mode of communication for media producers and consumers. Just thought I’d throw that in. That’s like the number one thing for people jumping into multimedia to remember. But that doesn’t mean it’s always the best way to tell a story. Otherwise we’d never see photo essays.
BONUS: For some mind-numbing fun, see the CIA’s thorough list of how much rail each country has and what size gauges they use.
Some time back in the summer of 2008, I joined my friend Mark Sung for a short trip to the Mendocino coast. We meant to go camping, but the tent spots were full and we ended up fishing until about 4 a.m., anyway. Actually, we weren’t fishing for fish, but crabbing for crab.
Mendocino’s a pretty spot. Here, for example, are some nicely situated homes.
But there isn’t any shortage of pretty spots north of San Francisco. Less than a quarter mile from those houses, we ran into the Pacific Ocean.
Those are brown pelicans flying past. They plunge bill-first into the water at 40 miles an hour.
Mark is a great cook, and like some cooks, he’s happy to procure the ingredients himself. The fisherman’s lament (one lament, anyway), is that he never gets out as much as he wants. And the same goes for crabbing.
Mark used a regular fishing rod, and he lent me an extra one. He tied wire cages to the lines, and we crammed pieces of half-frozen squid into the cages, which we secured with thick rubber bands. Along the perimeter of each cage were about a half dozen loops of blue line. With a quick flick of the fishing rod and some luck, the loops close around a crab claw or leg as it pulls the squid from the wire cage. Then reel in.
Mark caught two crabs worth keeping. I caught one. Here’s one of them, which Mark cooked later that morning in its shell with nothing but boiling water and served unadorned. Good eating.
A great talent whom I’d meant to write more about sooner. He died today. I knew his work through the New York Review of Books, for which he’d been drawing for nearly 50 years. Some of my favorites of his include:
Grace Paley
Jiang Zemin
Kenneth Maxwell
He drew with an appealing wit and detail. The circumstances of the job meant that it was not only the literary or political or scientific superstars who got the Levine treatment, but lesser known academics, writers and philosophers. The obituaries take note of his cutting commentary on politics, notably Lyndon Johnson, Henry Kissinger, and Vietnam. And they’re right on, as was Levine. But I always just liked how his drawings looked.
A lot of text, lately, on this blog, so I’ll keep this brief. This is a picture I took after some rain in downtown San Francisco. This is Maiden Lane, near Union Square, a stretch of high-end boutiques and shops. A pair of opera singers used to set up at one end and sing, but I haven’t seen them for some time.
Once called Morton Lane, the street housed brothels back when San Francisco was wilder. They were destroyed in 1906, but the pursuit of lucre remains.
It’s fun to take pictures from high up. A few years ago, a friend working as a wedding planner let me roam around the top floor of the Bank of America building as she set up someone’s wedding ceremony. These were the best sustained views of San Francisco I’ve ever had.
In the picture above, you can see hundreds of boats clustered on the Bay. They were out watching the annual Blue Angels airshow. Whenever the jets buzzed past the tower, the wedding party, killing time until the ceremony, would rush to the windows.
It was around this time, I think, that I stumbled across the work of Cris Benton on Flickr. I didn’t know who he was or how, exactly, he did it, but he was taking great aerial photos. Over the years, I discovered that he is a professor of architecture at Berkeley. (Even later on, I’d find out that one of my closest friends actually worked for him at the school.) But I kept coming back to Benton’s photography, and his multidisciplinary Hidden Ecologies project.
Benton makes his own radio-controlled camera rigs and then hoists them into the air with kite-power. I wrote about Benton’s work in the latest issue of California magazine, in a story titled “A View from Above.” That’s him in action in the photo at the top of his post.
That picture was taken at Crissy Field last Easter Sunday, a popular spot for windsurfers (and kite-flyers) because the wind blows so powerfully through the Golden Gate. The kite at this moment is still relatively low, compared to the altitude he’d reach a few minutes later. But it gives a good sense of what he’s doing. I drew this up to help illustrate:
Over the next 40 minutes or so, dozens of people stopped to watch. Eventually, so many came by to ask questions that I was answering on his behalf as he worked to keep the kite under control. (He later told me that when someone stops to ask what he’s doing, he’ll explain and then ask them to stick around and act as a docent, handling all the gawkers who inevitably follow).
Benton’s been doing this for about 15 years, but kite photography has been around for a lot longer. One of the most compelling historical images of San Francisco was taken soon after the 1906 earthquake, and it was taken using kites. The photographer George Lawrence fashioned his Lawrence Captive Airship from a train of kites and a huge camera (I’ve heard something like 50 pounds, with a negative suitable for 18×48-inch prints). He took what I think of as the iconic picture of San Francisco in ruins — from 2,000 feet up.
The 1868 Earthquake Alliance held its April 2008 meeting in an Oakland building undergoing a seismic retrofit. In the lobby, plywood and plastic sheeting was scattered along the walls. Inside of a conference room, thirty people had gathered to talk about the Hayward Fault. There were several geologists in attendance, including Tom Brocher, Jim Lienkaemper, and Phil Stoffer. Some people were from local businesses, others from local governments. One was a newspaper reporter. Mary Lou Zoback, from Risk Management Solutions, talked about the property loss figures from a hypothetical quake. She added that the worst damages were likely to occur in the among the poorest populations, and that disaster planning needs to account for the numerous languages spoken by the people who live in these areas.
Brocher, as chair of the alliance, discussed plans for the October 2008 commemoration of the 1868 earthquake. The event would take place at the Mission San Jose in Fremont, at the southern end of the fault. Exactly 140 years earlier, the morning earthquake destroyed the mission’s church. The anniversary would be marked at the precise day, hour, and minute that the quake struck. “And of course,” Brocher said with a grin, “we expect every member of the alliance to show up at 7:50.”
“Ouch,” said one of the attendees. “It’s better than 5:12,” countered Zoback, to laughter. She was referring to the annual 1906 commemoration in downtown San Francisco—timed to coincide with the early morning moment of the 1906 quake. In 2006, Zoback, then at the USGS, held the same regional coordinator position that Brocher has now, and was a leader of the 1906 Earthquake Centennial Alliance, established for the same reason as the 1868 Alliance.
Brocher declared that he wanted to try educating the public about preparation in new ways. He wanted awareness events to be more fun. He floated the possibility of hiring an airplane to fly above the fault, pulling a banner that said, “Drop, Cover, and Hold.” These are the instructions for what someone should do during an earthquake: drop to the floor, take cover under something like a table, and hold on until the shaking stops.
One of the businessmen said that Brocher would have to make it clear this was an educational message, not a warning. Otherwise, he worried, people would expect something to drop out of the plane.
Brocher grinned again. “Obviously we haven’t thought this all through yet.”
According to a 2007 Bay Area Red Cross survey, 83 percent of the region’s population is not prepared for an emergency. While government and large institutions like the University of California have been working to upgrade facilities and infrastructure to ride out a big quake, Zoback and others point out that while this may sound reassuring, the projects aren’t complete. The most visible example is the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, which is scheduled to open in 2013—24 years after the Loma Prieta quake exposed its vulnerability.
Meanwhile, Ronald Hamburger, the structural engineer who wrote about which buildings might fall in the 1996 scenario, cautions that the situation among privately owned buildings is far from ideal. He admitted that his own home, two thousand yards from the San Andreas Fault, hadn’t been upgraded for a large earthquake. When he bought the house, he decided at the time that the risk of having an earthquake while he owned it, and with the amount of money he had at the time, didn’t warrant the expenditure.
It was a sentiment that Zoback had discussed with me. Preparation means thinking through a kind of cost-benefit analysis. “There’s a lot of upper middle class folks who have put in granite countertops and say, ‘Yeah, I’ll invest in retrofitting. Oftentimes what it costs to upgrade your structure is the same as what it costs to put in granite countertops.”
Two decades after buying his home, Ronald Hamburger changed his mind and decided to install seismic upgrades in his home. Hamburger was remodeling his kitchen and in the process would install shear walls to strengthen his house against shaking. I asked him if he might also be installing granite countertops.
“We are,” he answered. “A couple hundred bucks a foot.” I mentioned Zoback’s analogy. “Could be done for about the price of granite countertops,” he repeated, thinking it over. “Probably true. I am planning to do both.”
But even basic preparations are out of reach for some. Said Zoback: “There are a lot of people who have trouble putting food on the table, so when you talk about making kits that include food and water, some people may say, ‘We need that food now.’”
So one size does not necessarily fit all in terms of disaster preparation. (When I asked Zoback what the ultimate preparation would be, she thought for a moment, then wryly responded, “A second home in the Sierras.”) To someone like Ana-Marie Jones, that is the elephant in the room. She keeps a little pink plastic elephant stuck to the window of her office as a reminder.
She helps educate what she refers to as vulnerable populations. Her long list of the vulnerable includes people with physical and mental disabilities, immigrants, single parents, the elderly, the homeless, pregnant women, even tourists. Jones believes most advice is tailored for stable families who own their own homes. It doesn’t take the full range of populations into account.
Jones credited Brocher and Zoback, in particular, with trying to make the alliance’s education campaign appeal to more people. But one problem, she said, is that the message is coming from people who are expert in the threat. “It comes off as a high fear-based campaign,” she said. “Here we are after 1868, the time span is 140 years between great big earthquakes, this year is 140. It’s that kind of thing.”
Fear, to Jones, is bad strategy. It shuts people down. She keeps extra copies of a study by the American Red Cross published 16 years ago that concludes that using photos of destruction increases avoidance and denial behavior, keeping people from preparing for future disasters.
“I don’t believe you could come here, invest in a home, buy a car, fall in love, and have a happy, happy life, if, every moment of that life, you had to be sitting here thinking, ‘Any minute now, the earth could open up. I could lose my home. My friends could die.’ I just don’t believe we can sustain that,” Jones said. She started working full-time in preparedness education after the 1989 earthquake. Before that, she spent a decade in advertising and market research. That’s the approach she believes will work.
“How would you sell this sucker? You would never try to sell fear,” she told me. “You would never try to scare people into doing something that they have the right to say no to.” She cited a fear-based campaign that works—the push to get people to wear safety belts in order to avoid injury in a car crash. It works, she said, because if you aren’t wearing one, you can get a ticket. You’re punished. “What can I do to you if you don’t take on preparedness? Nothing.”
She is convinced that awareness campaigns should separate preparation from the threat of disaster. In the process, it should make preparation appealing. She compares this to advertisements designed to get you to brush and floss your teeth. “They don’t show you rotting teeth. They show beautiful people with beautiful teeth.” Her message is “prepare to prosper.”
She encourages people to start small and build on decisions that leave them feeling more confident right away. She distributes tiny flashlights and whistles that can be attached to key chains or backpacks. She wore a necklace with a whorled green and white globe hanging from it. When I asked her about it, she took it off and opened the globe. It was a locket made from silver and glass. Inside was a $100 bill.
Still, it is difficult to divorce the preparation from the disaster. Pam Grossman is a compact grandmother who lives in the Berkeley hills. One afternoon, she unlatched a couple of padlocks on the gray plastic shed near her garage. Her husband, Elmer, sat on a porch nearby, eating a sandwich and reading a copy of the New York Review of Books. She opened the doors and began to shuffle through its contents. “You can’t have enough masks, goggles, and gloves,” she said. Grossman picked up a nozzle that, attached to a garden hose, would create a high-pressure flow to fight the fires that flare up after a quake. “But the problem in Berkeley,” she said, “is the pipes are more than 100 years old. So they’ll probably disintegrate.” Mylar blankets, hard hats, and a medical kit sat on the shelves. On the ground, there was a 10-horsepower generator as well as some water containers. Grossman hefted a tool called a “come along,” which she expects will be used to lift large objects like tree branches or fallen beams. She put that down and picked up a Reliance brand “luggable loo”—a plastic toilet seat that can be fixed to a five-gallon bucket.
Grossman received most of these supplies from the city of Berkeley because she manages her neighborhood’s emergency response team. It includes 45 households and has been active for 20 years. They are organized under the premise that emergency crews will be too overwhelmed after a quake, and so the neighbors will have to step in. Grossman and her husband, a retired pediatrician, make up the medical team.
While Grossman has made it her mission to visit other neighborhoods and help them organize, she isn’t sure that’s enough. I asked her what she thought would motivate people to take preparation seriously.
“I think it’s gonna take a serious earthquake,” she said. Then she acknowledged that this would be too late.
Nearly every person I talked with echoed that sentiment. It would take a good-sized shaker up here to wake people up. Or a really strong one that, one expert hoped, would be far away in Southern California. And consistent, the way they were in the 1800s. Otherwise? “What I’ve experienced over thirty-odd years of practicing in this area,” said Ronald Hamburger, “is that people tend to become very concerned and focused for a period of 12 to 18 months after a significant event. Then their interest falls away exponentially with time. It’s now been 20 years since the last earthquake in the Bay Area and peoples’ interest is pretty low.”
But Jones bristles at the fatalism built into this perspective. “They say that all the time,” said Jones. “We said that after Loma Prieta, too. That’s a reason why a lot of people don’t want to hang around with the disaster folks. Because they say, ‘Oh, what we need is a really good earthquake to shake things up. What we really need is a little earthquake that happens every eight months or so to keep people moving around.’ Do you know how creepy that sounds to many people? And that’s what they say, all the time.”
As for neighborhood emergency response teams, Jones acknowledged that they can be useful, but difficult to sustain. “It’s hard to get people wanting to think about disasters,” she said.
Grossman seemed to acknowledge as much as she stood in her doorway, seeing me off. “If I weren’t around,” Grossman said, “people would slack off. I’ve got to keep lighting fires under them. Every neighborhood needs one of us. Or preferably two.”
Cal Stadium
Phil Stoffer entered the Berkeley campus with a trick up his sleeve. He pulled his car up to the lot attendant just outside of the university’s Memorial Stadium. “I’m a geologist,” he told the attendant, who shrugged and waved him in.
Stoffer walked into the northern end of the stadium, pausing to admire (and photograph) a vicious crack that cascaded down an interior wall. He continued onto the field, where he took a photo behind the goalpost, then walked to the southern end of the stadium. At section KK, he began to climb the bleachers.
Stoffer stopped on the very top, at a long yellow bench. Row 74, section KK. Behind the bench was a five-foot cement wall, the outer rim of the stadium. It was split vertically into two pieces. This wasn’t a crack, though there were cracks running alongside. It was an expansion joint built into the stadium structure. The Hayward Fault, above which the stadium is built, had taken full advantage. Since the stadium opened in 1923, the fault had slowly pulled it apart and opened a gap wide enough for a fist. The top was capped by a piece of rusty metal attached with rusty bolts to the concrete. A spectator could look through the wall, past the concrete and a naked piece of rebar, and see Oakland to the south. Stoffer paused to catch his breath after the climb up. He was excited, and seemed genuinely happy.
“That,” Stoffer said, “is probably the most famous spot on the Hayward fault.” He chuckled. “It’s just a ragged, broken gash.”
At 7:53 in the morning on October 21, 1868, a major earthquake struck the Bay Area. It had a magnitude of about 7, scientists believe. It occurred on the Hayward Fault. The shaking lasted for more than 40 seconds and damaged property throughout the Bay Area. Thirty people died. It was known as the “great quake” until the 1906 earthquake supplanted it. Most of the buildings in Hayward suffered severe damage or were destroyed. As one USGS publication notes, “few places have paid so dearly to have an earthquake fault named after them.” This is the earthquake that Tom Brocher and his 1868 Hayward Earthquake Alliance want people to know about.
On a bookshelf in Brocher’s office at the USGS campus in Menlo Park sits an empty box of novelty earthquake cake (“My wife gave it to me. But I ate it,” he admitted). Next to it is a small toy globe with a little string dangling from it. Brocher pulled the string and the planet trembled in his hand. He considered an Arnold Schwarzenegger bobble-head doll on another shelf. “I haven’t taken it out of the box,” he said, “but it would be a good earthquake detector.”
The alliance is a coalition of public and private bodies dedicated to raising awareness of, and promoting preparation for, the threat posed by the Hayward Fault. (Stoffer told me that it was Brocher who asked him to put together the Hayward Fault guide.) The Bay Area has a 63 percent chance of a major earthquake in the next three decades, and the Hayward Fault is the likeliest to rupture. “We tell people there’s a two-thirds chance,” Brocher said. “Somehow it’s not as compelling as telling the 140-year story.”
Brocher does not look forward to another earthquake. He remembered the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the last major quake to hit the area.
“Generally when you feel an earthquake, you feel it at its maximum and it kind of decays,” he said. “That earthquake, every new wave was bigger than the one before. They just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and I wondered, ‘When is it going to stop getting bigger?’”
But he cautioned against using the Loma Prieta as an indication of what to expect from a Hayward earthquake. For one thing, that quake was too far away. “The Hayward Fault—when it ruptures, it’s going to be in people’s back yards. That’s the reality we need to prepare for. It’s no good preparing for Loma Prieta.”
It’s an 1868-style earthquake that worries Brocher and the alliance. The Bay Area was far less developed in 1868. Hayward was a town of about 500 people; San Francisco had 150,000 residents. More than five million people would feel a Hayward quake today. A trillion-and-a-half dollars worth of property would be at risk.
Those figures come from a company called Risk Management Solutions, headquartered in a corporate office park in Newark, south of Hayward, along the edge of the bay. Its specialty is modeling catastrophes and quantifying their risks for insurance companies—whether earthquakes, hurricanes, terrorism, or plagues. A portrait of Tetsuya Fujita, whose name puts the “F” in the F-scale of tornado strength, hangs in one hallway. In the lobby, display cases hold free reports on China’s 1976 Tangshan earthquake and the threat of a flu pandemic.
RMS predicts losses of about $165 billion worth of property. Of that, $75 billion would be commercial; the remaining $90 billion would be residential property. “They’re staggering numbers,” said Mary Lou Zoback, vice president of earthquake risk applications at the company and a geophysicist. Only a fraction of that is covered by insurance, and, after deductibles and limits to coverage, insurance companies are only on the hook to pay about $4.5 billion to homeowners affected by a quake.
“In insurance terms, we call it a super catastrophe, or super cat,” she said. The effects ripple beyond the immediate losses, as people have difficulty getting to work and utilities—water, power, gas—take time to come back on line, resulting in lost business and wages. “People come from other countries and say, ‘We’re in America, the most advanced country in the world. Surely it’s better prepared than, say, Guatemala.’ Well, it may not be.”
The 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, helps put the potential damage from a Hayward quake in perspective. Kobe is sited along the Osaka Bay, and its Nojima Fault is the same kind and roughly the same length as the Hayward Fault. It is a major population center bound by mountains on one side, water on the other, and heavily populated flat land in between. In Kobe, a phenomenon called liquefaction was a major source of damage. When liquefaction occurs, the ground loses stability because it is saturated with water. As a result, buildings, sidewalks, roads, and other structures can sink or tip over. Geologists expect similar damage along the margins of San Francisco Bay, as well as strong shaking throughout the flatlands. The Oakland and San Francisco airports, as well as all port facilities, may be severely affected.
Much of the major infrastructure of the region has been, or is in the process of being, retrofitted to improve its ability to withstand earthquake. But homes and businesses are another thing. In 1996, the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute released a report on the possible effects of a Hayward quake. One chapter is entitled “Commercial and Residential Buildings Affected by Ground Motions.” It was written by a structural engineer who traveled along the fault, highlighting buildings that he expected would be damaged or destroyed. Twelve years later, he doesn’t think much has changed.
“Since 1906, the Bay Area’s only experienced one big earthquake: Loma Prieta in 1989,” said Brocher. “So in the last hundred years, we’ve only had 15, 20 seconds of strong shaking. That’s not much over a hundred years.”
During that century, much of the infrastructure of the Bay Area was built: the freeways, the bridges, the skyscrapers in San Francisco, the continuous band of homes and businesses along the Hayward Fault. Brocher contrasted this with the half-century before 1906, when earthquakes measuring in the magnitude five to six range occurred every two or three years. Brocher thought that if these kinds of earthquakes happened more often, it would spur greater preparedness.
Brocher opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a booklet called “Putting Down Roots in Earthquake Country,” a guide describing the region’s seismic situation and how residents can strengthen their homes. He flipped to a chart showing the number of known earthquakes higher than magnitude 5.5 since 1836. Each earthquake was represented by a rectangle that indicated its size. The largest rectangle was in 1906. The 1868 and 1989 earthquakes also figured prominently. From 1928 to 1968, there were no notable earthquakes at all. The timeline stretched into the future, showing a 62 percent probability of at least one earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or higher by 2032.
“We call this the tombstone diagram,” Brocher said.
The Claremont “Any reason I can’t park here?” Stoffer asked as he stopped his car in what was clearly not a parking spot. The Claremont Resort and Spa nudges against the fault for about a fifth of a mile and he wanted some pictures of the building. He had navigated through a couple of small lots on the Claremont property, but all were full. He ended up on a triangular wedge of asphalt on one of the hillside lots overlooking the building.
Stoffer stepped out of his car to a commanding view of the shimmering white hotel: white walls, white roof, white tower. He set up his tripod with the dual cameras and leaned back, squinting at each of the cameras. He snapped a pair of photos for his field guide. I asked him if he had made the camera rig himself. “Oh, yeah,” he answered. Then joked, “Boredom.” Stoffer has been shooting 3-D photographs for years. One of his biggest projects is a web site highlighting the geology of the Southwest’s national parks. His office is like a museum of fossils and crystals he’s collected over the years. On one wall, over his desk, is a mounted jackalope head. It wears a pair of red and blue 3D glasses.
Stoffer headed down the hill to the entrance. Valets scurried under a green awning, helping new arrivals with their luggage and their cars. A stylish young woman hurried out of the building, talking into her cell phone about a spa appointment. Stoffer walked past the valet station to what looked to be a small maintenance passage. According to his map, a known trace of the fault was less than a hundred feet away. He noticed some cracks in the wall, then leaned close and looked along the plane of the wall. It was slightly warped. A nearby cement planter appeared to be pulled apart. And, in the valet parking lot, between a pair of late-model Mercedes sedans, Stoffer spotted what he called a pull-apart offset, creating a tiny rift in the fresh blue-black asphalt. None of this was definitive, but all of it, as far as Stoffer was concerned, was highly suspect.
“It’s a tough game to find creep movement,” a geologist named Jim Lienkaemper said one afternoon in his office at the USGS. The evidence around the Claremont, for example, has always been “kind of iffy stuff.” Lienkaemper has been studying the Hayward Fault for 20 years. A fresh printout was taped to his door. It was a graph covered with little hieroglyphics, the product of his latest Hayward Fault survey. Each fall he maps it again, surveying the infinitesimal distances that different sections of the fault crept during the previous year.
Over the last few millennia, the earth along the fault has moved an average of about nine millimeters every year, almost four inches. That number is the combined movement from both the gradual creep and the abrupt slip along the fault from a quake. Measuring the amount of creep at a given segment of the fault gives an idea of how much movement might occur in an earthquake. In other words, if Lienkaemper measured nine millimeters of creep each year along some segment of the fault, he wouldn’t expect major slip there during an earthquake because all of the tectonic energy was being released. But the average creep rate along the Hayward is about 4.5 millimeters each year, not far enough to release all that stress. In a big earthquake, he speculated that sudden ground movement of a meter or more might be seen on the surface.
The crack Stoffer found at the Claremont could be another, unmapped trace of the fault. Lienkaemper acknowledged that he can only map the traces he knows about. There are always undiscovered traces. “We’ll know when the Big One comes,” he said. “We’ll have a lot of new stuff to map.”
Back in the Claremont parking lot, Stoffer approached the valet station. An attendant asked if he could be of assistance.
“Do you know where the Hayward Fault is?” he asked the valet.
The valet looked puzzled and thought for a moment. He scratched his head. “Doesn’t it run through Cal Stadium?” he asked.
Stoffer grinned and swung his arm toward a spot beyond the Mercedes sedans. “It’s right there!” he said. The valet smiled politely, but didn’t say anything else.
“It’s classic,” Stoffer told me soon after. “He works there and he doesn’t even know.”
A lot of text, lately, on this blog, so I’ll keep this brief. This is a picture I took after some rain in downtown San Francisco. This is Maiden Lane, near Union Square, a stretch of high-end boutiques and shops. A pair of opera singers used to set up at one end and sing, but [...]
RT @californiamag: As students move in, President Yudof's housing woes make news. http://nyti.ms/dbVv3u # @joemfbrown I wonder if that commercial makes Salman Rushdie hate Hardee's and its thickburger. in reply to joemfbrown # @donlbe Congrats on the new job. Very cool project over there. # @longshotmag Ever see It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World? [...]
Remember that song from the ’80s by Yes? “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” When I heard that as a kid, I misheard the lyrics. I was convinced they were singing about the “owner of the lonely horse.” (I also thought Starship “milked this city.” I was wrong.) It was not until I was nearly out [...]
2008 Knight Award for Best Piece of Narrative Journalism on A Science or Environmental Subject awarded to "China: Green Dreams." Watch the story at Frontline/World. Click here.
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No problem. Let me know if you have any questions. Speaking Spoke at the Greenbuild International Forum in Boston. 18 November 2008.
Stoffer stopped on the very top, at a long yellow bench. Row 74, section KK. Behind the bench was a five-foot cement wall, the outer rim of the stadium. It was split vertically into two pieces. This wasn’t a crack, though there were cracks running alongside. It was an expansion joint built into the stadium structure. The Hayward Fault, above which the stadium is built, had taken full advantage. Since the stadium opened in 1923, the fault had slowly pulled it apart and opened a gap wide enough for a fist. The top was capped by a piece of rusty metal attached with rusty bolts to the concrete. A spectator could look through the wall, past the concrete and a naked piece of rebar, and see Oakland to the south. Stoffer paused to catch his breath after the climb up. He was excited, and seemed genuinely happy.
On a bookshelf in Brocher’s office at the USGS campus in Menlo Park sits an empty box of novelty earthquake cake (“My wife gave it to me. But I ate it,” he admitted). Next to it is a small toy globe with a little string dangling from it. Brocher pulled the string and the planet trembled in his hand. He considered an Arnold Schwarzenegger bobble-head doll on another shelf. “I haven’t taken it out of the box,” he said, “but it would be a good earthquake detector.”
