Thread: Signs of things to come in California

Major Quake Could Be Worse Than Katrina

September 14, 2005
By ERICA WERNER, ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

WASHINGTON -- As many as 18,000 people dead. More than $250 billion in damages. Hundreds of thousands of people left homeless. That's not the latest estimate of Hurricane Katrina's toll on the Gulf Coast. That's a worst-case scenario if a major earthquake were to hit Los Angeles.

The figures are hypothetical, from a model published in May by government researchers studying the Puente Hills fault under the city. Scientists warn that there's little doubt a major quake will hit California in coming years or decades, though many scenarios are not as disastrous as Puente Hills.

As was the case with Katrina, experts say the federal government hasn't done enough to prepare.

"There's not enough money to carry out the research and implementation programs that need to be put into place," said Susan Tubbesing, executive director of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute in Oakland, Calif. "If funds were available, if these were higher priorities, these kinds of things could be addressed now - before an earthquake."

California has been hit by significant quakes about every 15 years over the past century. Experts say there's a better-than 60 percent chance that a quake with a magnitude around 6.7 will hit Southern California or the Bay Area within decades.

"The reality is when you have a disaster of that proportion, you need the federal government," Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Wednesday in Washington, where he was meeting with federal officials. "I think the question is, is the federal government prepared to provide the resources that we need? I think that, clearly, by what we've seen in Louisiana, the jury's out."

Just as Katrina exposed a failure to sufficiently strengthen the levees around New Orleans, experts say a big quake in California, Washington state or the Mississippi Valley could reveal that too little was done to make buildings, bridges and roads earthquake-proof.

"There's very little mitigation going on, and it's because it's so expensive to do, just like it was so expensive to fix the levees," said Chris Poland, head of Degenkolb Engineers in San Francisco. "So I think we would have the same reaction: Why didn't we fix those buildings? Why didn't we fix the infrastructure?"

Congress created the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program in 1977 after a series of major quakes in Alaska, California and China. The goal was to reduce the loss of life and property by funding research on how buildings and structures respond to earthquakes, improving building codes, and conducting earthquake models along different fault lines.

But funding for the program has been essentially flat for more than a decade.

About $125 million was allocated in 2005 - a decline of more than 30 percent in real dollars from its first 1978 budget of $67 million, according to House Science Committee budget figures.

In California, where earthquake risk is highest, the U.S. Geological Survey has about 140 employees working on earthquake issues under the joint federal program, down from more than 300 a decade ago, said William Ellsworth, chief scientist with the earthquake hazards team at USGS in Menlo Park, Calif.

"We have greatly reduced the number of people we have doing research, we have had to cut way back on field investigation programs, we've had to work smarter with less," Ellsworth said.

According to some experts, earthquake readiness has been hurt by the same shift of focus from natural disasters to terrorism that's being partly blamed for the bungled response to Katrina.

In 2003, when Congress moved FEMA to the Department of Homeland Security, lawmakers also moved the lead agency role for the earthquake program from FEMA to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. But they never gave NIST any money to perform its new leadership role.

"Right now you have a program that probably has appropriated somewhere around $130 million per year, and we don't have a lead agency to supervise or manage it," said Tom O'Rourke, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University.

Michael Buckley, deputy director of FEMA's mitigation division, denied there had been a decreased focus on disaster preparedness or mitigation, and said FEMA's work on earthquake preparedness has led to successes such as improved building code recommendations.

"From my perspective, we're holding our own pretty well, certainly are very busy, and I expect that that would be the trend here in the future," Buckley said.

California has instituted new building codes and spent billions to shore up old structures in the wake of the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 and the Northridge earthquake of 1994, which, before Katrina, was the nation's costliest natural disaster with $40 billion in losses.

But many older buildings still need upgrades, including some 900 hospital buildings in California, and scientists would like to do more research to learn more about how to build structures that can withstand earthquakes.

A key network of seismographs USGS is installing around the country is lagging - only 563 of a planned 7,050 machines have been put in place, mainly because funding has stuck far behind planned levels. For example, Congress authorized $35 million for the network in 2005, but appropriated only $8 million.

Experts contend that spending on mitigation reaps huge dividends. They point out that retrofitted roads and buildings survived the Northridge earthquake, while others that hadn't been retrofitted did not.

Some experts fear Americans have become complacent about earthquake risks because it's been more than 10 years since the Northridge quake.

"What happens is people forget and people lose interest in the seismic networks," said Jeroen Tromp, director of the Caltech Seismological Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "And then how do you stay alive? How do you generate enough funding to do more than just keep your head above water?"

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/ ... ke%20Risks

The Day California Cracks
Budget crises have left the state ill prepared for a big quake

It's power lunch time in Los Angeles. Media moguls are picking through their Cobb salads at Spago in Beverly Hills. Then the floor begins to move, first in undulating waves, then in increasingly violent jolts. The airy restaurant rumbles. Diners scream as the walls of the popular indoor garden room begin to shake, sending debris everywhere. Outside, along nearby Rodeo Drive, car alarms start to wail as upscale storefronts explode in a shower of glass and mannequins. A lonely poodle yaps in search of its master, who lies beneath an ornate streetlight.
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Five miles to the east, downtown L.A.'s high-rises are swaying. As the 54-story Wells Fargo (WFC) Tower buckles, a torrent of glass showers office workers along South Grand Avenue. More debris cascades down from the 72-story U.S. Bank (USB ) Tower nearby, just as the elevated 10 Freeway buckles, sending delivery trucks over its sides and sports cars into each other. In the distance, fireballs ignite where natural-gas pipelines have surrendered to the violent shaking.

It sounds like a Hollywood disaster movie, all right. But sooner or later, when the Big One hits, it will be all too real. As certain as California's sunny days, palm trees, and celebrity politicians, a massive earthquake is coming. With more than 300 faults beneath Southern California, and the giant San Andreas fault running through the state, California is a seismic time bomb. A magnitude 7 quake has a 62% chance of hitting San Francisco in the next 30 years, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS); the risk for L.A. is only slightly less. Such a powerful quake would cause far more damage than the temblors that shook San Francisco in 1989 or L.A.'s Northridge neighborhood in 1994. A magnitude 7 quake that struck during a workday on a recently discovered fault under L.A. would kill 7,000 to 18,000 people, says the USGS. In San Francisco, 5,800 people would die if a temblor the size of the 1906 quake again savaged the city.

NO WARNING
A shaker of that size, especially in the densely packed areas of L.A. or San Francisco, could make the horrific sights from Katrina look almost tame. Because there would be no warning -- no CNN satellite shots like the ones that plotted Katrina's swirling path toward New Orleans -- there would be no evacuation. Virtually every one of L.A.'s freeways would be destroyed, says Lucille M. Jones, USGS chief scientist for Southern California. That could cut off supplies and needed help. Railways would be destroyed. Natural-gas lines would rupture. The giant Port of Los Angeles, which itself sits on a fault, would likely be out of commission, stalling shipments of autos, electronics, and other cargo that it handles along with adjoining Long Beach. The estimated hit to the local economy from the port closure: $36 billion. All told, if the quake hit directly below L.A., the damage could top $250 billion, a USGS study predicted.

Catastrophic damage would also occur if a giant quake were centered below the San Francisco Bay area, or farther down the coast under Silicon Valley. The region's network of bridges could tumble down and the port in Oakland would likely grind to a halt. And, just as L.A.'s entertainment industry would be laid low by a big quake, Silicon Valley would be dealt a terrible blow as its surviving creative minds and venture capitalists would be forced to relocate, creating nothing less than a tech diaspora.

How prepared is the state in the face of such potential destruction? Since the 1989 Bay Area quake, a 6.9 temblor that left 63 people dead, California has improved building codes for its schools and hospitals and has beefed up its Office of Emergency Services response capabilities. But political wrangling, a state budget crisis, and the federal government's fixation on putting most of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's money into anti-terrorism efforts has left California short of where it had hoped to be. "We're better than we were five or ten years ago," says state Senator Elaine Alquist, chairman of the Public Safety Committee. "But we're certainly not prepared."

No doubt, California has learned from the rubble of its past disasters. The state has spent billions to upgrade most of its overpasses, and has retrofitted many of its schools. But there hasn't been enough money for everything. A 2002 inventory by the state architect's office found 2,100 of the 9,600 schools surveyed are "not guaranteed" to hold up in future earthquakes. Many hospitals are in financial distress and don't have the funds to complete needed retrofits, says the California Seismic Safety Commission. Ballot measures have since been passed to upgrade both schools and hospitals.

GRASS-ROOTS EFFORTS
Still, precious time has been lost. Plans to make the San Francisco Bay Bridge, which was partially destroyed in 1989, more earthquake-resistant have been delayed for eight years over design and funding controversies. Final plans were agreed to only this past July. The federal government's policies haven't helped much either. In the most recent Bush Administration budget, FEMA intends to spend three of every four dollars of its $3.4 billion in grant funds on anti-terrorism efforts, leaving little for earthquake preparedness. Fearing a New Orleans-like break in California levees, Senator Dianne Feinstein on Sept. 6 urged Congress to appropriate the $90 million it authorized to shore up levees along the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. "A major breach in these levees could imperil hundreds of thousands of people and endanger most of the state's water supply," Feinstein wrote.

The good news is, with the feds scaling back, communities are finding ways to fend for themselves. The city of Palo Alto is recruiting more volunteers for its emergency response team. And the state's Office of Emergency Services has increased from 8 to 13 the number of 60-person emergency teams, made up largely of local police, fire, and medical personnel. California companies are also taking the threat seriously. Intel Corp. (INTC ) has built its $2 billion chip-fabrication plant in Santa Clara on giant rollers to withstand a large quake.

Of course, all Californians know that no one is ever completely safe in a big quake. But they're waking up to the fact that they need to do more. Sacramento is spending an estimated $10 billion in hospital retrofits and voters have approved $25 billion in new bonds, partially to help make schools more quake-resistant. Still, the question remains: Will that sum, or any amount, be enough to truly cushion against the Big One when it finally hits?

Please note BOLD!

California Earthquake Could Be the Next Katrina

By Jia-Rui Chong and Hector Becerra Times Staff Writers Thu Sep 8, 7:55 AM ET

U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Lucy Jones remembers attending an emergency training session in August 2001 with the
Federal Emergency Management Agency that discussed the three most likely catastrophes to strike the United States.

First on the list was a terrorist attack in New York. Second was a super-strength hurricane hitting New Orleans. Third was a major earthquake on the San Andreas fault.

Now that the first two have come to pass, she and other earthquake experts are using the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina as an opportunity to reassess how California would handle a major temblor.

Jones, scientist-in-charge for the geological survey's Southern California Earthquake Hazards Team, and other experts generally agree that California has come a long way in the last two decades in seismic safety.

In Los Angeles, all but one of 8,700 unreinforced masonry buildings â€â€

those BILLIONS and BILLIONS of dollars that California spends every year on "illegal aliens" would make a nice disaster fund ...

Glad you're back, Mamie. Hope everything is alright, we were worried about you, AGAIN !

Originally Posted by LegalUSCitizen

Glad you're back, Mamie. Hope everything is alright, we were worried about you, AGAIN !

thanks, I've had all kinds of computer problems and couldn't login on the board ... now I'm so far behind on the posts I'll never catch up!

Ive heard that if a big earthquake does happen , there could be many hundreds of thousands of raving, looting mobs entering into to other states.


Maybe the governors should have the highway patrol to blow the bridges and highways from California., in order to protect themselves.



pa

"The reality is when you have a disaster of that proportion, you need the federal government," Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said

Gee, Mayor Vivalaraza, could you be possibly talking about the illegal immigration situation in Los Angeles County? This "pilgrim" thinks so.

I say that we give Cali back to Mexico about a week before it slides into the ocean. We'll just make sure our ALIPAC friends are out first.

did anyone see Primetime talking about three big ones and how to prepare yourself

1) California Earthquake

2) The bird flu

3) Nuke attack on NEw York or other city

?

They are putting scare into the sheeple as they are talking about it ie the Bird flu and Earthquake

I don't care anymore. I grew up in the 80's. I've already been calloused by "Mutually Assured Destruction".

I've killed Iraqi terrorists, so a nuke threat doesn't scare me because these people, in reality, couldn't find their way out of a wet paper bag.

The thought of the bird flu is pretty scary, but you know what? It's all coming to a head anyway. You could get leprosy from an illegal alien. You could get killed driving home from work by a drunken illegal on the road. You could get carved up by an undocumented criminal that "is doing the work Americans won't do".

Hey, life itself will kill ya. So just go with it.

The Patriots are losing, so I'm a little mad anyway. Just keep that in mind.