CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--The publication of The Big Ones by Dr. Lucy Jones provides a chance for Californians to consider where we are in terms of preparedness against a really big and violent act of nature such as a flood or an earthquake.
It turns out that the danger of flooding on a massive scale is about as likely as having a massive earthquake, something that most of us haven't really given a lot of thought to.
But Jones also has a broader goal. She wants us to understand how some regions survive and thrive after almost unimaginable disasters (Lisbon, Portugal after the 1755 quake) and others (Pompeii, AD 79) essentially cease to exist. There is much to be considered.
It turns out that California has had a couple of fairly large disasters, and at least in one case things were seriously out of whack for decades. The enormous flooding in 1861-62 turned the central valley into a lake, basically destroyed the capitol city of Sacramento, and wiped out the ranching industry of southern California. There was a substantial loss of population and the conversion of our local base to agriculture.
How will we function in the aftermath of another gigantic flood or the earthquake we refer to as The Big One? By looking at the long history of disasters from all over the world, Jones reviewed what other civilizations did or did not do. I'll leave it to you to read the book if you like, but the overall message involves the ability of both government and the people to react and to rebuild. Jones details the activities of one government leader in post-quake Portugal who brought civilization back to life. One lesson is that central governments need to become involved, a lesson the U.S. was slow to learn when the Mississippi River flooded vast regions of the south in the early twentieth century.
Jones also analyzes errors both in preparedness and in post-disaster action, with the situation in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina another bad example. Out of these historical accounts, there comes some hope and some concern. The vast majority of us will live through the quake or the flood, but the economy may be damaged badly and take decades to return. It depends on whether the essential functions of civilization (water, electricity, transportation) get repaired fast enough. If not, local businesses won't be able to function. In the absence of either water or jobs, a lot of people will simply pick up and go somewhere else.
There is a buzz word that has become bound up in the governmental world: resilience. As I've mentioned here previously, the city of Los Angeles has joined a group of other cities in creating an office dedicated to resilience. In government jargon, however, the concept of resilience has been stretched to include not only unpredictable earthquakes and barely predictable floods (what the bureaucrats call "shocks"), but also the unavoidable stresses of everyday life and business. For example, the effects of an economic recession due to a trade war will exacerbate all the economic, social, and racial stratifications that currently exist. How will Los Angeles deal with such an event, and what will be the length of time we take to recover?
More on Dr. Jones' book below, but what about resilience here in Los Angeles?
The city government is proud of the fact that it thought about earthquake preparedness and is starting to do something about it. One of the products of this effort is the report titled Resilience by Design which describes in brief what the city's weaknesses are, and then suggests in broad terms how we might begin to engage them.
By now, many of us have come to understand what those problems are -- the water pipes will break, the electric lines and cell phone towers will be inoperative, and the roads will be blocked by fallen electric and telephone poles.
The problem (as I see it) with the overall concept behind Resilience by Design is the time scale. We all understand that our water pipes are old. They are so old that they break routinely. The Department of Water and Power is barely able to patch the everyday breaks and is not in a position to replace the entire system with earthquake-resistant replacements. And even if it were, the thousands of miles of streets that would have to be replaced would create an additional problem.
We might therefore imagine a 30-50 year plan to replace our municipal water system, but that would depend on an engineering solution to the dangers that an earthquake will present to any particular section of pipe. The Resilience by Design document I downloaded doesn't talk about these sobering realities. It does have the following to say: "Developing a more resilient water system is imperative for the future of Los Angeles."
That goal and a magic wand will get us to resilience. In the meanwhile, a major earthquake will break a lot of old pipes.
There are some problems which may be amenable to quicker fixes. For example, creating an earthquake-proof set of pipes going across the San Andreas Fault to ensure the availability of water supplies is a much smaller objective. Likewise, figuring out ways to rapidly repair roads across the fault is probably an attainable goal, something like fixing Highway 1 in Big Sur each time it is damaged by a landslide.
To repeat earlier comments I've made, the major problem I see in our city's plan is the near total lack of public awareness. The city's resilience plan calls for a few neighborhood council representatives to be appointed to the resilience effort, but the idea of a citywide effort of sufficient scope is absent.
Most of all, the concept of resilience is really two separate problems. The resilience document created by the city refers to Shocks and Stresses, indicating the obvious differences between long term, everyday stress and truly momentous shocks. But there isn't a lot of detail as to how to prepare in advance for the major shocks, as opposed to the realistic work of trying to ameliorate the stresses. These are really different things. Creating a stockpile of emergency water is not the same as dealing with the threat of gang violence. We should take emergency preparedness more seriously, and make it a distinct activity.
There is one other problem with the concept of resilience, which is the word itself. As one of my colleagues pointed out, "It's not a good word. Mommies don't sit down with their kids and tell them, 'now we're going to teach you about resilience."
Since the word itself is fairly unintelligible to most people, it won't help to yell at them that they have to learn about resilience and join in civic efforts to attain it. In a long-lost era, the word could have referred to the ability of people on the frontier to survive on their own -- about people living in log cabins and plowing the land by hand.
It is a more complicated sort of concept for our modern city.
Dr. Jones' book is a fascinating read, taking us through the geology of events such as volcanic eruptions and the different ways that earthquake faults are built. We are somewhat lucky because the San Andreas fault consists of two tectonic plates that interrupt each other vertically. When they move against each other, there is less combined area in contact then happens when one plate is pushing underneath the other. It turns out that a larger area in contact makes for a bigger earthquake. Fukushima was hit with a magnitude 9 quake, an order of magnitude higher than we are likely to experience from the San Andreas Fault.
The book also tells the stories of several people who were involved in recovery and reconstruction or, in the case of one Icelandic minister, the mere survival of himself and his neighbors. Overall, the message is that hope exists, but we have to be able to work and sacrifice in the aftermath of the Big One.
One tiny quibble: European history includes not only earthquakes. It also includes the Bubonic Plague and the Hundred Years War. These are certainly disasters of the first magnitude. This is the tiniest quibble because we already have Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous 14th Century. We might want to remember that we are vulnerable to viral disease. We are less than a century past the Spanish Flu epidemic. We may someday become more vulnerable to resistant strains of bacteria. Resilience needs to exist for epidemic illness just as much as for the ground shaking.
But when you think about it, the U.S. is way ahead of earthquake preparedness when it comes to bacterial and viral illnesses because we have the public health authorities and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. When we start thinking about emergency preparedness the way we think about disease prevention, we will be making real progress.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
