Timothy Lesle

Read Part I and Part II of Devoted to a Fault. You can download the entire text (without images) as one file here. The following was reported in late 2007 and early 2008.

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.

Jones is the director of an Oakland organization called Collaborating Agencies Responding to Disasters. Despite the name, she has chosen not to participate in the 1868 Alliance.

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.”

And he took a picture.

By Tim | 12th June 2009 at 8:03 am
Filed under: earth
Tags: 1868, 1868 Earthquake Alliance, Ana Marie Jones, Bay Area, Berkeley, california, earthquake, Hayward, Mary Lou Zoback, Memorial Stadium, Oakland, Pamela Grossman, Phil Stoffer, preparation, Ronald Hamburger, UC Berkeley