California prepares for the Big One
encourage collegial relationships between the State’s earthquake mitigation programs and other State offices such as Southern California’s Caltech’s seismology laboratory, which serves as a global focal point for earthquake information, as well as the California Emergency Management Agency (Cal EMA), and a few others.”
All groups involved with the cooperative agreements are required to provide a quarterly report of their activities to demonstrate progress toward accomplishing their pecuniary goals. “The 2010 FY funds,” Laatsch says, “are now being distributed.”
The San Andreas Fault zone resides between two tectonic plates that traverse the western part of the state from the Colorado basin in the southeast, all the way up to the Bay Area in the north. According to the California Emergency Management Agency (Cal. EMA), “More than 70 percent of California’s population resides within 30 miles of a fault where high ground shaking could occur in the next 50 years. Statewide, approximately 22 million people live in the 40 percent or higher seismic hazard zone.”
Despite being unable to sanction any dependable method of predicting quakes, the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council, a collaboration among several institutions, as well as the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council, uses kinetic frictional heating graphs and seismic hazard assessment maps to provide a picture of an earthquake of a given size affecting a given location. Seismology has its own equation for estimating the probability of earthquakes. The Gutenberg-Richter law expresses the relationship between magnitude and the total number of quakes in any given region and time period of at leastthat magnitude.
The USGS constantly monitors all earthquake activity on their Web site by triangulating the data from separate seismographic entities measuring P-waves (initial earthquake signatures) and the subsequent S-waves (which produce the devastating effects seen in larger intensity earthquakes).
Among some of the collective goals of earthquake preparedness agencies: improving the understanding of earthquake process and impacts, developing cost-effective measures to reduce the impact on the individual, environment, and society, improving the earthquake resilience of communities worldwide, and updating seismic provisions of building codes and retrofitting existing structures.
In 2008 southern California held the Great Southern California ShakeOut exercise to promote public preparedness in which over 5,000,000 of the general public took part in. This exercise has become an annual, statewide event. This past October, nearly 7,000,000 people participated, with a strong focus on school districts, involving drop, cover, and hold drills, as well as information seminars on what to do during a quake. Nonstructural mitigation measures were encouraged along with having family disaster plans. The overall mantra was “what you do to prepare before a disaster will determine your quality of life afterward.”
These events reach a larger crowd than similar efforts in Japan aptly named “Earthquake Day,” after which California modeled the Shakeout. In an interview with Homeland Security NewsWire, David Applegate, senior science advisor for Earthquake and Geologic Hazards at USGS, shared the realization that “the key to getting people to take action is for them to discuss among themselves, hence the importance of engaging not only schools but also businesses and organizations so that both parents and children can share the experience.”
Three years ago Japan established an Earthquake Early Warning system in which an announcement is provided through television and radio broadcasts. The message announces: “This is an Earthquake Early Warning. Please be careful of strong shaking.” Depending on the proximity to an earthquake’s epicenter, a person may have a few tens of seconds at most to take defensive action, which could mean the difference between life and death.
