by A M Homes
How long since the last one? Are we overdue? There is always the inevitability of it—an earthquake will happen, it is just a question of where and when.
How do the people live with the constant threat?
“I’ve always wished I was at the Chateau when the earthquake happened,” Griffin Dunne says. “The last one, ninety-whatever it was. Four or five. I was staying at the Four Seasons. It was about four in the morning … we all gathered in the lobby and I remember thinking, I’m in the wrong hotel. I wish I was in the Chateau. That lobby would be pretty interesting. You know, people are confronting their own mortality.”
I study up on the subject of earthquake preparedness. Practice earthquake drills; get under a sturdy table or desk and grab onto it. Teach yourself to duck, cover, and hold. Make a game of it, called “earthquake,” like playing hide-and-seek, to find safe places. Explain to children that an earthquake is a natural event and not anyone’s fault. Encourage children to express feelings of fear. Include kids in clean-up activities. Make your evacuation plan, make a list of items you’ll carry out. Make a first-aid kit—bandages, antibiotic ointments, things to clean wounds, eye drops, aspirin, gloves, candles, knife, garden hose, portable radio, water, toilet tissue, cash. And another one for the car: fire extinguisher, rope, signal device, whistle, water, snacks.
Protect your property—make sure your foundations are reinforced, tabletop objects are secured. TVs, stereos, chinaware can be held with buckles and safety straps. I picture a family eating breakfast with the plates Velcroed to the table, as though they’re on the space shuttle, zero gravity. I imagine everything in a china cabinet glued in place. Beware of toppling bookcases; anchor your furniture to a stud—Brad Pitt and your armoire? Do not use an elevator. In a crowded public place, do not rush for doorways. Stay away from windows (stay away from everything). If you are on a highway, pull over. If you are in a wheelchair, try to get under a doorway, lock the wheels, remove items not securely attached to the chair and cover your head. If you are bedridden, cover up with blankets and pillows—essentially play dead. After the quake try to help others if you can.
Symptoms of anxiety may not appear for weeks or months after a quake and can affect people of any age. Symptoms can include disorientation, confusion, loss of sex drive, gastrointestinal distress, irritability, fatigue, and decreased pleasure in life activities.
Online I find that you can actually go on a tour of earthquake-riddled California, working your way from Cajon Pass in San Bernardino up to Pinnacles National Monument and Hollister in San Benito, and onto Crystal Springs Reservoir up in San Mateo, down through the Devil’s Punchbowl in Los Angeles, and San Juan Capistrano in Orange County, to the Salton Sea in Imperial.
Confession: I wouldn’t mind a small one, a little rattle, rumble, rock and roll; try it out the way you try out a scary ride, a new sport. I think of it as land surfing.
I need professional help. I call the earthquake man, Thomas Henyey, professor of Geological Sciences and director of the Southern California Earthquake Center. Explaining that I am working on a book on Los Angeles, wanting a better understanding of the land and the people and I’m curious to know more, I ask if I might come see him. “I don’t know what your schedule is like,” he says, “but I’m free this afternoon. You could come right over and we could talk about things.”
“I’ll be right there.”
On my way out, I’m alone in the elevator with a movie star. I don’t realize who he is until ten minutes later and then remember that when we made eye contact he looked disappointed—upset that he hadn’t been recognized.
In the garage waiting for my car, I ask a woman if she has an earthquake kit.
“Of course I do.”
“What’s in it?”
“Two hundred single dollar bills, a roll of quarters, four bars of chocolate, make-up in case I have to sleep in a shelter, toothpaste, and a couple of joints—there’s no way I can get through an earthquake without being stoned.”
The garage guy pulls up in my white Ford Focus. I feel like I’m working as some sort of undercover government agent. There is no car more generic, less distinctive. Later in the afternoon, I have to trade it in because the radio doesn’t work—in fact, almost nothing works. It’s entirely plastic and so cheaply made that it doesn’t have a light over your head when you open the door. It’s a car designed to be driven only to and from an airport rent-a-car counter.
I follow my instructions and head toward USC. It’s disconcerting how all the street names sound familiar, Figueroa, Wilshire, Beverly. I know them all from television, from Dragnet and Adam-12.
Tom Henyey’s office is in Science Hall. A cross between an academician and a hard-core scientist, Henyey is rugged and outgoing—the kind of person who spends his time off hiking through wilderness. His walls are covered with maps; there’s a large computer monitor, a telephone with numerous lines, and paper everywhere. The report I’d been trying to read, on seismic hazards in southern California, was written by the folks in this office.
MR. HENYEY: Okay, well, let me start from the beginning. First of all, I’m a geophysicist. Historically, my research interests have been on the active geological processes that are going on in southern California. Southern California’s just a good natural laboratory.
MS. HOMES: Who were the first people who really studied earthquakes?
MR. HENYEY: The first really serious study of earthquakes in California began at U.C. Berkeley and at Cal Tech, at about the same time, in the 1930s. There was a very famous scientist at Berkeley by the name of Byerly. And his counterpart here at Cal Tech in the south was a fellow by the name of Beno Gutenberg. And the two of them pretty much started earthquake studies, Byerly in the north and Gutenberg in the south. We speak today of a Gutenberg-Byerly line, it’s kind of like the Mason-Dixon Line. They put in some seismographs and began looking at earthquakes. And before that, of course, was the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. I guess you could argue that really, that was the starting point for earthquake studies.
MS. HOMES: When you want to study an earthquake, or when you want to forecast an earthquake, what do you do? And every time there is an earthquake, I’m sure people come to you and say, well, when’s the next one?
MR. HENYEY: Earthquakes are our experiments. We can’t, unfortunately go into the laboratory and start an experiment. We have to wait for the earthquakes to come along. So of course we’re very excited when an earthquake happens. That’s when we acquire data on several things. Exactly what the rupture looked like—if it ruptures the ground’s surface, we can actually observe it and detail it and so forth. We look at aftershocks because they tend to form a cloud around the rupture and they give us additional information about the earthquake rupture process itself. Then we like to study the waves as they propagate across the region, because it’s the waves that create the ground motions. And in an area like southern California, where the geology’s very complex, both at the surface and the subsurface, these waves do all sorts of crazy things.
MS. HOMES: And how does that help you forecast what will happen?
MR. HENYEY: To a large extent, that helps with understanding the ground motions, but it doesn’t tell us when and where earthquakes will actually occur. So we have to study the faults too. We have to study the general geological framework, how the plates are moving about, and how the faults are moving over time. And so we have, for example, geologists who go out into the field and actually exhume faults.
MS. HOMES: How deep would you dig?
MR. HENYEY: Most of the major earthquakes break the surface. And when they break the surface they disrupt the near-surface materials. So you can go back, you can find those fault traces. We can cut trenches across them. If we had an earthquake that occurred ten thousand years ago, there’s a lot of soil that’s developed between now and then. We’ll see various different soil horizons that have developed over a multi-thousand year timeframe. And the way we date these things is by and large through ca
rbon-14 dating.
MS. HOMES: So what about the present and the future?
MR. HENYEY: In geology, we say that the present is the key to the past. What we’re saying really is that natural processes tend to be pretty much the same through geologic time. And so we’re presuming things will happen at about the same rate in the future. Now, of course, these earthquakes don’t come like clockwork, so obviously there are uncertainties that have to be accounted for. So when we say “predict” or “forecast,” we have to do the same thing as the weather forecasters—you give a probability.
MS. HOMES: Do you have times when in your bones and in just your intuition, you think, oh, something’s going to happen soon?
MR. HENYEY: Well, to some extent there are things that we’re beginning to learn about earthquakes that are giving us some of these clues. Just to give an example, prior to the 1906 earthquake, between about 1850 and 1906, the number of moderate-sized earthquakes accelerated dramatically in northern California. These were the earthquakes in the magnitude range, let’s say, of five and a half to six and a half. And then in 1906 we had almost an eight, it wasn’t quite an eight but it was close. And then this intermediate size basically shut off. And it’s now just beginning to pick up again. We have a very good sense now that really big earthquakes are preceded by intermediate-size earthquakes.
MS. HOMES: And how many of those? Is it ten of those or is it two of them?
MR. HENYEY: No, no. Maybe fifteen, twenty earthquakes. The idea in California is that the biggest earthquake we can have on a given fault is probably around a magnitude eight. Sort of like the 1906 earthquake. That’s about the biggest one you’ve had in northern California. And in 1857 we had a pretty big one. It might not have been as big as we could have, but it approached the maximum size we think we could have in southern California. We don’t think we can rupture the whole San Andreas because there are some strange things in the middle of it.
MS. HOMES: So how many of the mid-range earthquakes have we had?
MR. HENYEY: Well, we’re starting to pick up on mid-range. 1857 was the last big one we had here in southern. Since 1952 moderate-size earthquakes have come more frequently in southern California than prior to 1952. So it may be that we’re in this sort of accelerating phase now. The San Andreas is the guy that does this ultimate release of the stress. And we know that earthquakes on that fault take place on average about every hundred and fifty years, although the range is between maybe a hundred years and three or four hundred years, something like that.
MS. HOMES: Which is …?
MR. HENYEY: … 2007 would be the average time. So we’re already past kind of the lower bound, and we’re reaching the midpoint now, or the average. But we still may have another fifty or a hundred years to go. So the fact that earthquakes maybe are picking up somewhat is not unusual.
MS. HOMES: How do we protect ourselves?
MR. HENYEY: Well, you build structures that are earthquake resilient. I mean a building like this one is sitting on a fault, it could be built to ride the thing out without it collapsing. There’d be total damage to the building if the fault cut through it, but what you want is, you want to build structures that aren’t going to collapse, and that are going to suffer a minimum amount of damage, particularly those that aren’t right on the fault.
MS. HOMES: I guess there’s no such thing as an earthquake warning system.
MR. HENYEY: Well, in principle, we can give a few seconds of warning.
MS. HOMES: But what good is that?
MR. HENYEY: Well let’s say we could give twenty seconds of warning, which we might be able to do. For example, if a major earthquake gets started on the San Andreas down near the Mexican border, and we have sensors down there and we can see it get started, we can send a radio signal or electronic telemetry signal from there to Los Angeles … and you’d probably have twenty seconds, before the wave started arriving here.
MS. HOMES: Right.
MR. HENYEY: What you could do is you could stop elevators at the next floor and open the door and then cut off the elevators. You could stop trains. You could, in principle, put signals on bridges, and some of these big overpasses. A red light would go on and you’d have to stop, you couldn’t get on one of these big overpasses. You could shut off gas lines. You could have automatic valves which immediately shut down gas lines or water lines, some of the key lines that feed into town. So there’s a lot you could do. You couldn’t protect the average person; in general, they’d still go about their business. But a lot of things you could do, which could save lives and save property.
MS. HOMES: Do you have any earthquake fears?
MR. HENYEY: Well, I guess I do, to some extent, in the sense that you always wonder about the building you’re in.
MS. HOMES: [laughing] Exactly! Do you live your life any differently for what you know about earthquakes?
MR. HENYEY: No, not really. The only thing I guess I did when I bought my house was I tried to get as far away from the San Andreas Fault as I possibly could and still be able to get to town, to USC, to work. But then I discovered I was on a fault, a very active fault. … I didn’t discover that until about twenty years after I bought my house.
MS. HOMES: Do you think people become progressively more afraid as they have more earthquakes?
MR. HENYEY: Well my feeling would be as people ride through earthquakes they become less concerned about them. You have to live here for a fairly long time, though, to ride out more than one major shake. And that’s part of the problem, because people are continually moving about within the Los Angeles region. But I think if you’ve gone through several earthquakes, then you become more in tune with it, and begin to understand what they’re all about. I mean, it certainly doesn’t help to have an earthquake right under you. When that happens, I don’t think people ever really learn to live with earthquakes comfortably.
MS. HOMES: Are there people who enjoy them? Like some great amusement park ride?
MR. HENYEY: Well, I must say I sort of enjoy them! [laughs] But I’m sure I wouldn’t enjoy it if …
MS. HOMES: If it was under your house!
MR. HENYEY: I think riding out an earthquake in California, if you’re not in a very serious shaking zone, it’s probably kind of a neat experience to a lot of people. Scientists will actually, if you start feeling the shaking, they’ll start counting, thousand-one, thousand-two, thousand-three, because the first shaking is not as extreme as a little bit later. What happens is you have two major waves that start out at the same place, but one takes a little longer to get to you. One is called the P wave or Primary wave. And the other is called the S wave or Secondary wave. The Primary wave generally shakes you up and down, for the most part, whereas the Secondary wave is the one that shakes you back and forth. And that’s the one that creates more damage. And so, it’s just like two cars starting off at a stop light. One going twenty miles an hour, one going fifteen miles an hour. And when they’ve gone one block, one car’s just a little ahead of the other. By the time they’ve gone a mile, the separation gets greater and greater. These two waves are just like those two cars, so you can tell how far away the earthquake is by what that separation is. And we know, roughly, from our experience, what ten seconds between those waves corresponds to in terms of distance, and so you can judge the distance of the earthquake. Once you judge the distance of the earthquake you can guess the magnitude. Let’s say it takes twenty seconds between the two waves, you know it’s probably something like a hundred kilometers away, and if it’s shaking very strong, it’s gotta be a pretty big earthquake.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Anthropology of the Every Day
I drive back from USC on the surface roads. I want to get a feel for the city, to pace it out block by block. And then all of a sudden, on my right, at the intersection of Wilshire and Curson, are the La Brea Tar Pits.
Before I’m even out of the car I smell the earthy brew of asphalt, thick tar, a stench like gasoline, like heating
oil—heavy crude.
Despite the fact that everyone in L.A. has a car, or perhaps because of it, it is incredibly easy to park just about everywhere. There are meters on the streets, lots of parking lots and in the absolute worst case—like in the middle of Beverly Hills—you have to walk a couple of blocks.
I park right next to the tar pits. “There’s really nothing to see,” a friend who lives in Los Angeles had said when I’d asked her about them.
Rancho La Brea is one of the reasons I’m interested in Los Angeles. Right in the middle of the city are these active, bubbling pits, an inescapable reminder of not only the natural world, but the prehistoric, pre-Hollywood.
From New York when I thought of the words “tar pit,” I imagined huge pits, like stone quarries, deep, bottomless. These pits, right by the side of the road, are more like pools. They’re gleaming black oil slicks on L.A.’s Miracle Mile surrounded by palm trees and succulents. Fake Colombian mammoths in asphalt up to their ankles rise up out of the tar. The opposite of a zoo where the animals are real and the setting is fake, here the geography is real and the animals are a plastic fiction. And of course, there’s a fence all around it. Admittedly it’s a little disappointing if you’re expecting huge frothing pits, but if you stand there for a couple of minutes, breathing the intoxicating fumes, watching, it becomes mesmerizing. Randomly, all around the pit, tiny geysers go off, eruptions like bursting blisters of bubbling crude break the surface, concentric circles of the stuff radiate out. “Oil, that is, black gold,” to borrow a phrase from the opening song of the hit television series, The Beverly Hillbillies. The smell is strong, thick, black, sticky gasoline. One can almost imagine the vicious battles thousands of years ago, as saber-toothed tigers feasted upon horses trapped in the tar, while dire wolves looked on, and teratorn birds scavenged nearby. Just as I’m forcing my eyes to squint closed and bringing the faux mammoths to life, the sprinkler system kicks on—the sudden confusion between nature’s eruptions and man’s timed intrusions nearly gives me a heart attack.
